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.
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.
I am gradually but happily making my way through Ginzburg’s wonderful array of novels and novellas with much more to look forward to; on this blog, I have reviewed Family Lexicon, The Dry Heart, and All Our Yesterdays so far – three books varied in terms of length but top-notch in terms of quality. To this trio, I am glad to now add Valentino and Sagittarius, a collection of two novellas and a superb one at that.
In both Valentino and Sagittarius, we see Natalia Ginzburg in full form; she’s just brilliant at writing about families laced with her trademark dry wit, effectively capturing the simmering tension between an assortment of flawed characters.
VALENTINO
We first begin with Valentino, a compact novella of failed relationships, overbearing generosity, extravagance, unrealistic expectations, favouritism, and dashed hopes.
Our narrator, Caterina, is a young woman, training to be a teacher and living with her parents and brother in a small rented apartment in the middle of town. This brother is none other than Valentino, an utterly spoiled man and the cynosure of their parents’ eyes on whom they have pinned all their hopes for the future (“My father believed that he was destined to become a man of consequence”). The family’s circumstances are poor – the father is a retired school teacher, the mother gives piano lessons, and Caterina’s elder sister Clara is married to a man who is barely making ends meet. What with their reduced income and an army of three children, Clara has turned into a bitter, resentful woman uninterested in aiding her parents and siblings.
Valentino, meanwhile, is studying medicine but burdens the family with seemingly never-ending expenses. He has a penchant for luxury and idle pursuits, marked by expensive tastes and a hunger for the finer things in life. This level of extravagance lies outside the ambit of the parents’ meager income, but they oblige him at the cost of neglecting Clara and Caterina, truly believing that he is destined to become a great man. Clara and Caterina have no such illusions though; they see him for what he is, an unremarkable man and a spendthrift.
My father spent his days in the kitchen, dreaming and muttering to himself, fantasizing about the future when Valentino would be a famous doctor attend medical congresses in the great capitals and discover new drugs and new diseases. Valentino himself seemed devoid of any ambition to become a man of consequence; in the house, he usually spent his time playing with a kitten or making toys for the caretaker’s children out of scraps of old material stuffed with sawdust…
If Valentino is ambivalent about his career, he adopts a similar attitude in his romantic liaisons. His string of affairs with pretty, young women turns out to be transitory failing to transform into something meaningful. And then, one day, he introduces his family to Maddalena, a woman he has decided to marry. The family is shocked; Maddalena, older than him and quite ugly, is a sharp contrast to the slew of women Valentino dated previously.
But Maddalena is a hardworking, enterprising woman with a set of farms that she owns and runs. She is also wealthy, and soon she undertakes to support the family financially despite the family’s resistance, although Valentino is more than happy to splurge and live off his wife’s wealth. As soon as they marry, Valentino’s habits barely change and he remains as flippant as ever. He neglects his studies, lounges about in their spacious home, devotes himself to dressing up lavishly, and aimlessly whiles away his time often in the company of his friend Kit, a well-meaning but thoroughly untidy bachelor. Soon, Maddalena compels Caterina to stay with them in their big house, and the stage is set for conflict, maybe a flicker of hope, and heartaches.
Valentino also explores the themes of loneliness and unhappiness and effectively captures the double-edged sword of wealth and comfort and its impact on independence and autonomy. This is particularly epitomized in the character of Maddalena, whose oppressive generosity lifts the family out of their strained circumstances, but in some sense makes them uncomfortably beholden to her. Then, Clara despite being contemptuous of Maddalena’s affluence, has no qualms about turning to her for financial support when one of her children falls ill. Caterina’s independence is also clipped in a way when she starts living in Maddalena’s house despite the abundance of comforts.
The women in Valentino are a disillusioned lot paving the way for bitterness and alienation. Clara and her family struggle to keep heads above water, while Maddalena begins to get increasingly frustrated with Valentino’s waywardness and disinclination towards a serious career. Even Caterina is mostly a lonely woman – the lone bright moment in her sad life is that one day when she and Kit go on an errand to a village to look for a suitable maid, reveling in the languor and splendour of their surroundings, an oasis of calm and a respite from her otherwise clamorous life largely filled with the din of Valentino and Maddalena’s quarrels.
The girl was out working in the fields and we had to wait for her to return. We sat in a small, dark kitchen and the girl’s mother gave us a glass of wine and some little wrinkled pears. Kit chatted away rapidly in dialect to the woman, praising the wine and asking a hundred and one detailed questions about the work on the farm. I sat sipping my wine in silence, my thoughts gradually becoming blurred: the wine was very strong and all at once I felt happy to be in that little kitchen with the open fields beyond the windows and the taste of wine on my tongue…
Things begin to get darker as this sharp, emotion-packed novella hurtles towards its conclusion, but Caterina is forced to make peace with the fact that despite its myriad challenges and imperfections, family ultimately trumps everything.
SAGITTARIUS
In Sagittarius, a dark tale of deceit and trickery, the narrator’s mother is a brash, opinionated, overbearing, and chronically dissatisfied woman, who craves a vibrant intellectual and artistic life but is overtly critical of her family. A widow initially settled in the village of Dronero, the mother has a sufficient income to support herself and her elder daughter, Giulia, a beautiful, dreamy woman whom the mother constantly berates for being dull and listless. Fed up with the boredom and drabness of village life, the mother decides to move to the city and buys a house on a loan from her sisters while keeping them in the dark about the money already in her possession. By moving to the city, the mother is hopeful of being at the centre of a rich cultural and intellectual milieu conversing on a range of topics on art, literature, and poetry. She harbours ambitions of opening her own art gallery, a dynamic space that will attract the who’s who from the city’s artistic and literary circles.
But the mother is not the only one who has to grapple with this transition and begin life anew. Along with her comes an entourage – her maid Carmela, a sullen girl homesick for Dronero, her niece Teresa’s 11-year-old daughter Costanza, and Giulia newly married to an older man Dr Chaim Wesser, a marriage that deeply disappoints the mother. On the strength of Giulia’s beauty, the mother has high hopes of her elder daughter making a rich match and Giulia almost comes close but is left heartbroken, and those hopes quickly fritter away. Sickly in health, her marriage to the doctor seems convenient, a man who woos Giulia by reading literature and poetry to her, although Giulia does not care much about either, so the mother says. Dr Wesser, a generous doctor but with barely any income, readily agrees to accompany them and live under his mother-in-law’s new roof.
Newly establishing herself in the city also allows the mother to drop in on her younger daughter (our narrator), hitherto completely ignored. Our narrator shares a flat with an older female friend and is more studious and intellectually inclined than Giulia, but the mother leaves no stone unturned in criticizing aspects of her life too.
Despite this fresh start, the mother remains deeply dissatisfied. The creative and artistic people that she wishes to meet are strangely nowhere to be seen, and the days just stretch before her, endless and empty. Until one day, at the parlour, she strikes up a conversation with the vague but charismatic Priscilla Fontana, also known as Scilla. Displaying the gift of the gab, Scilla encourages the mother’s plans of an art gallery (to be called Sagittarius) and proposes a partnership. As she effortlessly boasts of having important connections, Scilla promises to introduce the mother to all the right creative people. But these meetings mysteriously and perhaps ominously never materialise.
It’s not that the mother doesn’t realise that something is amiss. For a woman who is allegedly well-connected, Scilla lives in a drab apartment block situated amid endless stretches of bleak fields and filled with unsettling canvas paintings (“We looked at livid, elongated heads of indeterminate sex with little crosses for eyes and metal grills for mouth”).
Ah yes, said my mother, this was modern art. So many people failed to understand it, but she understood it; her only criticism was that these paintings seemed rather sad, they reminded her of a prison; but the bar motif was probably due to the influence of this area, which was maybe a little gloomy and reminiscent of a prison with all those high buildings that suggested prisons and barracks and was surrounded by such a desolate tract of open land. But Signora Fontana disagreed with my mother about the area which, she said, was really not gloomy at all; we should see it in the spring when the grass was covered with wild anemones; she would wake up in the morning to the tinkle of sheep-bells, and would take her palette and brushes and paint outside sitting on the grass.
It looks like Scilla hasn’t much money herself, but so effective are her persuasive skills and so lonely is the mother in an unfamiliar city that the mother just accepts Scilla’s on-the-spur explanations ignoring those ominous warning signals. Meanwhile, we are also introduced to a slew of people that form part of Scilla’s life – her financially struggling ex-husband Gilberto, her young daughter Barbara who becomes close friends with Giulia, Barbara’s wealthy, jealously over-protective, and misogynistic fiancée Pinuccio whose strange, conservative family disapprove Barbara, and last but not the least is the enigmatic and seemingly phantom Valeria expected to help kick start their venture.
Sagittarius, then, is an absorbing, unflinching novella of questionable friendships, misplaced confidence, tumultuous families, and tattered dreams once again displaying Ginzburg’s flair for astute observations. It is a marvellous character study of a woman, whose outward persona of supreme overconfidence belies the stark reality of her actual ignorance. So sure she is of her lofty ambitions and her sense of entitlement that the mother is unable to accept that her daughters might want to wish for a different kind of existence, one that doesn’t necessarily align with her unrealistic expectations. Forever judging people based on their appearance, the mother is naively unaware of the dark undercurrents that lace their personalities, setting her down the path of doom and failure. As this absorbing novella races towards its finale peppered with fascinating but anxiety-inducing moments, the denouement when it comes is unforgiving and deeply sad and it is Ginzburg’s mastery at characterization that elicits a faint trace of sympathy from the reader for a character who has been nothing short of unlikeable.
Everywhere the little fawn coat had flitted, the yellow shock of hair blown in the wind; it seemed an age to my mother since the yellow bob had fluttered beside her shoulder, as distant in time as the years of happiness seem to one who has fallen on evil times, as the games of childhood seem when we are on the point of dying. It had been a happy time, but now she had to cancel it from her memory: it had brought nothing but dust and ashes, and dust and ashes leave no regrets behind.
OVERALL VIEWS: THEMES, VOICE, CHARACTERIZATION, AND WRITING STYLE
Ginsburg excels in casting her gimlet eye on the intricacies of family relations with her touch of acerbic, mordant humour bringing out the conflicts and complications of familial bonds with a masterful economy of language. A common thread running through both Valentino and Sagittarius is the depiction of working-class families, as well as the presence of domineering, ambitious women whose dreams are ground to dust. Then there are the varied men in their lives (whether husbands, friends, sons, or sons-in-law) who consistently disappoint them in love and money. There is something hilarious and tragic about her characters as they try to navigate the restricted contours of their daily lives while also dreaming and hoping for either fame and money and the glamour of the limelight, or a tranquil and calm existence and the solace of the shadows.
In terms of narrative voice, both novellas are interestingly told by the youngest daughters in an impassioned, detached style as if they are observing the events unravel from a distance, although they are often embroiled in the ensuing mayhem and can’t completely extricate themselves. We also see the characters grapple with a drastic change in their circumstances – poverty versus wealth in Valentino, rural versus urban in Sagittarius – a sort of fissure that adds meat to the storytelling. Another wonderful pair of novellas from Natalia Ginzburg then, she’s quickly becoming one of my favourite authors.
2023 turned out to be another excellent year of reading, where quality trumped quantity, and I’m so glad I chose my books well.
I read more translated literature this year as planned of which 9 translated works made the cut covering 6 languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Icelandic, and Japanese). Again, I’ve read more women authors this year, and this is reflected in the list as well (women to men ratio is 17:3). Publishers in the spotlight include McNally Editions, NYRB Classics, Daunt Books Publishing, Virago, Vintage, Pushkin Press, Charco Press, Boiler House Press (Recovered Books imprint), Faber Editions, and Counterpoint.
One of the highlights of 2023 was the year-long reading project – #NYRBWomen23 – hosted by the lovely Kim McNeill on Twitter and other social media platforms. I intend to write more about this in an upcoming piece (given the gems I’ve discovered thanks to this readalong, it deserves a blog post of its own!).
Other readalongs I participated in were as follows – Novellas in November; WIT Month in August; Reading Ireland Month in March; #ReadIndies in February; January in Japan, #NordicFINDS23, and A Year with William Trevor, all in January.
Coming back to this list of 20 books; it is a mix of 20th century literature, contemporary fiction, translated literature, novellas, short stories, diaries, and an imagined memoir. I simply loved them all and would heartily recommend each one.
So without further ado, here are My Best Books of 2023 in the order in which they appear in the picture below (from top to bottom and then to the right). For detailed reviews on each, click on the title links…
TWO SHERPAS by Sebastián Martínez Daniell (Translated from Spanish by Jennifer Croft)
In the beginning, two Sherpas peer over the edge of a precipice staring at the depths below where a British climber lies sprawled among the rocks. Almost near the top of Mount Everest, the silence around them is intense, punctuated by the noise of the gushing wind (“If the deafening noise of the wind raveling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence”). Wishing to emulate the feat of many others before him, the Englishman had aimed to ascend the summit but that ambition now is clearly in disarray. Assisting him in the climb are two Sherpas, one a young man, the other much older, but with this sudden accident, the Sherpas are in a quandary on how to best respond.
Thus, in a span of barely ten to fifteen minutes and using this particular moment as a central story arc, the novel brilliantly spins in different directions in a vortex of themes and ideas that encompass the mystery of the majestic Mount Everest, its significance in the history of imperialist Britain, the ambition of explorers to ascend its summit, attitudes of foreigners towards the Sherpa community to Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Rome. This is a brilliant, vividly imagined, richly layered novel that gives the reader much to ponder and think about.
Two Thousand Million Man-Power is a brilliant, psychologically astute tale of a marriage with its trials and tribulations, the indignity of unemployment, and the wretchedness of poverty…in a seamless blend of the personal with the global.
The book centres on the relationship and subsequent marriage of Robert Thomas, a scientist at a cosmetics firm, and Katherine Bott, a teacher at a council school; both idealists who believe in progress and prosperity. As they marry, they enjoy a brief period of comfortable suburban living only to be followed by crippling poverty when Robert loses his job. Interwoven with Robert and Katherine’s lives and peppered throughout the novel are snippets of headlines depicting both national and international events. Encompassing a period from the early 1920s to a couple of years before the advent of the Second World War, Robert and Katherine’s relationship is placed in a wider context of astonishing technological advancements but also disturbing political developments. It’s this placing of the personal against a broader economic and political landscape that makes the novel unique and remarkable.
Jean Stafford’s The Mountain Lion is a wonderfully strange and unsettling novel about the trials of adolescence, tumultuous sibling relationships, isolation, alienation, and the alluring enigma of nature.
Ralph and Molly Fawcett, the novel’s pre-adolescent protagonists, reside in Covina, Los Angeles with their mother and their two elder sisters Leah and Rachel. That they are unlike the rest of the family is evident from the striking first chapter itself where we learn of Ralph and Molly’s tendency to get unexpected nosebleeds, the result of having suffered from scarlet fever. These nosebleeds often make them objects of ridicule, and they withdraw into their private interior world, but this shared affliction also forges a special bond between brother and sister. Once their beloved grandfather, Grandpa Kenyon, dies while on his annual visit to the Fawcetts, Ralph and Molly begin to spend the summers at his son Uncle Claude’s ranch in Colorado. For a few years, Ralph and Molly lead a double life flitting between Covina and Colorado, until a decision made by Mrs Fawcett to first travel the world with Leah and Rachel and then relocate with all her children to Connecticut, sets the stage for events to follow complete with the novel’s devastating conclusion.
Stafford’s writing pulsates with a dreamlike, cinematic quality evident in the way she depicts the interiority of her characters, particularly children when pitted against grown-ups, the intensity of emotions playing out against a mesmeric, unsettling, and sinister landscape; potent ingredients that make for an immersive reading experience.
GRAND HOTEL by Vicki Baum (Translated from German by Basil Creighton)
Grand Hotel is a resounding triumph, in which by focusing the spotlight on five core characters from varied walks of life brought together by fate, Baum dwells on their internal dramas as well as their interactions; these are tragic, haunting characters grappling with their inner demons and insecurities while also wrestling with some of the bigger existential questions. The novel sizzles with a vivid sense of place (1920s Berlin) and the language is wonderfully tonal and visual. Also, Baum has a striking way with words that capture the essence of her characters in a few sentences.
The Mirador is no ordinary biography. The byline below the title reads “Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter” which is to say Gille has breathed life into her mother by giving her a voice and thus positioned this as a memoir. What we read, therefore, is a first-person narrative giving the impression that it is Irène herself who is speaking directly to us.
The Mirador comprises two sections – the first is Némirovsky’s imagined memoir penned in 1929 covering her childhood in Russia and Paris amid sweeping changes and a rapidly evolving political landscape; while the somber and hauntingly sad second section fast forwards to 1942, days before her arrest at a time when she was living in precarious circumstances with her husband and two young daughters in a small French village, isolated with a deep sense of foreboding with regards the future.
Élisabeth Gille traverses the zenith and nadir of her mother’s glittering but cruelly short life; The Mirador is not only a brilliant, immersive, and deeply humane account of Irène Némirovsky’s life lived in tumultuous Russia and France, but also a window into her legacy and fame as a writer par excellence.
If you thought a story centred on a 92-year-old protagonist was bound to be dull and depressing, think again. Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet is a delicious romp, a stunning feat of the imagination, and an iconoclastic book if you will that refuses to be pigeonholed into convenient definitions and genres; and in Marian Leatherby, the nonagenarian in this superbly off-kilter tale, Carrington has created an unconventional heroine who is charming, feisty and memorable.
The book begins in a quiet, residential neighbourhood on the outskirts of an unnamed Mexican city where Marian Leatherby, our narrator, resides with her son Galahad, his wife Muriel, and their 25-year-old unmarried son Robert. Marian is not welcome in the house and with the aid of a hearing trumpet gifted to her by her charming loquacious friend Carmella who has a penchant for conjuring up unrealistic and improbable schemes and ideas, Marian learns of her family’s plot to park her in an old age home.
The old-age home is unlike anything she had imagined, and Marian soon begins to settle in, gets introduced to her fellow residents, finds herself entangled in various adventures, and is caught up in the fascinating life of an abbess. The Hearing Trumpet could be considered an extension of Carrington’s identity as a Surrealist artist; the novel is a unique montage of styles and genres that resist the laws of conventional narration to brilliant effect. Just superb!
THE TWILIGHT ZONE by Nona Fernández (Translated from Spanish by Natasha Wimmer)
Using the motif of the 1950s popular science fiction/fantasy show The Twilight Zone, Fernández delves into the unimaginable spaces of horror, violence, and murkiness of the cruel Pinochet regime where beatings, torture, and unexplained disappearances disturbingly became a part of the fabric of everyday life.
In March 1984, Andres Morales, a government security services agent, labeled by our narrator as “the man who tortured people” walks into the offices of the “Cauce” magazine and offers his testimony in exchange for safe passage outside the country. After years of imposing torture tactics on Pinochet’s detractors – members of the Communist party, resistance movements, and left-leaning individuals -something inside Morales snaps (“That night I started to dream of rats. Of dark rooms and rats”). Possibly aghast at the monstrosity of the crimes committed, Morales wishes to confess and in the process hopes to be absolved of those horrific acts.
Much of the book highlights crucial moral questions at play, and the fate of the man who tortured people is central to it – Should he be absolved of his crimes because he had a change of heart and now wants to do right? It’s a powerful, unforgettable book about loss, repression, and rebellion where the premise of the TV show is used to brilliant effect – an exploration of that dark dimension where strangeness and terror rule the roost, and is often unfathomable.
Comprising a series of crystal clear, pristine vignettes with eye-catching titles and nuggets of distilled information, Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch is such a joy to read – a book that brilliantly captures the panorama of a woman’s life on the Midwest racetracks where her sheer grit, fierce determination and unconditional love for horses enables her to make a mark in a tough field largely dominated by men.
Scanlan’s narrative is dexterously crafted, preserving Sonia’s distinctive style of speech (“there’s a particular language you pick up on the track”), a brilliant feat of ventriloquism if you will where Sonia’s engrossing storytelling skills artfully blend with Scanlan’s own style giving the impression of Sonia speaking through Scanlan. Lean and lyrical, the prose in Kick the Latch is stripped down to its bare essentials but it speaks multitudes, a whole way of life conveyed in as little space as possible but with remarkable tenderness and acuity.
THE WAITING YEARS by Fumiko Enchi (Translated from Japanese by John Bester)
Set at the beginning of the Meiji era, The Waiting Years is a beautifully written, poignant tale of womanhood and forced subservience; a nuanced portrayal of a dysfunctional family dictated by the whims of a wayward man.
Tomo, our protagonist, is married to Yukitomo Shirakawa, a publicly respected man holding a position very high up in the government ranks. In the very first chapter, she is sent to Tokyo to find a respectable young girl who will become her husband’s mistress, a terrible and heartbreaking task she is compelled to carry out. As far as themes go, The Waiting Years, then, is an acutely observed portrait of a marriage and a dysfunctional family, the heartrending sense of entrapment felt by its women who don’t have much agency, which is probably representative of Japanese society at that time. Enchi beautifully captures the internal turmoil that rages not just within Tomo but also within Suga, Yukitomo’s mistress. The subject matter might be bleak, but it’s a powerful book with unforgettable characters whose fates will forever be impinged on my mind.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a wonderfully strange, surreal novel of entrapment and survival set in a place that may or may not be planet Earth. It’s a bleak but powerful book in the way it explores the concepts of humanity and community when placed against a dystopian backdrop.
The plot of this novel is fairly simple. A group of forty women of all ages lives imprisoned in an underground cage outside which armed guards keep an eye on them continuously. These women have no idea of the catastrophic event that led to their capture and have a vague recollection of the lives they led before imprisonment. The youngest prisoner in this motley group is a young girl, our unnamed narrator, referred to as “child” by the other women. But then one day, an ear-shattering siren goes off. All of a sudden, the guards disappear, vanishing into thin air. Our narrator quickly takes charge, frees the other women, and the group in sheer trepidation climbs up the stairs out into the open, welcoming and embracing their newfound freedom.
But are they really free? This is a beautiful novel, equally devastating and hopeful, and one that sizzles with compassion and humanity as the characters grapple with dwindling hopes and mounting fear, frustrated by the illusion of freedom that gives them a window of optimism but fails to completely transform their lives.
SALKA VALKA by Haldór Laxness (Translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton)
Salka Valka is a wondrous, 552-paged, ambitious novel; an immersive, brilliant, often harrowing tale of a beleaguered fishing community and the indomitable spirit of a woman who prides on her independence and strives to improve their lot.
In the opening pages of Salka Valka, a coastal steamer stops at the port of a small, remote fishing village called Oseyri. Nobody can envisage a life here, but on that cold, bleak winter’s night, two figures emerge from the steamer – a woman called Sigurlina and her 11-year-old daughter Salvor (Salka Valka). Sigurlina and Salka Valka have made this journey from the North, certain circumstances having driven them away, and while Reykjavik seems to be their final destination, Sigurlina reduced to a state of penury, cannot afford the cost of the trip further. Oseyri, then, becomes her destination for the time being, she hopes to find a job that will help her make enough money to embark on the journey south. However, fate as we shall see has other plans…
Salka Valka is divided into four sections, each section comprising two parts – the first section focuses on Salka’s time in Oseyri as a teenager, and the second section fast forwards to several years when she is a young woman, independent with her own house and a share in a fishing boat. One of the core themes that the novel addresses is the ugly side of abject poverty and the struggles of the working class, and the second half particularly becomes more political as the debate between capitalism and Bolshevism reaches a fever pitch. Epic in scope and ahead of its times, Salka Valka, then, is a simmering cauldron of various delectable ingredients – a coming-of-age tale, a statement on world politics, a strange beguiling love story, and an unforgettable female lead.
Barbara Comyns’ The Skin Chairs is a marvellous tale of family, abject poverty, and the bewildering, ghoulish world of adults seen through the eyes of a beguiling 10-year-old girl, a story that has all the elements of Comyns’ trademark offbeat worldview.
When the book opens, ten-year-old Frances is sent to stay for a few days with her ‘horsey’ relations, the Lawrences. Growing up in a family of five siblings (Frances has three sisters and two brothers), we learn that the mother often packs them off to various relatives so that she can have some respite and time for herself. However, Frances’ father dies unexpectedly and with this sudden development, the family is plunged into poverty after having led a life of comfort. Despite the subsequent horrors of their existence, Frances’ life is not without incident; she is an inquisitive, affectionate child and makes some unusual friends, and things do take a turn for the better led by a new arrival at the village which sees the fortunes of the family transform, while the holier-than-thou Lawrences finally get their comeuppance.
The Skin Chairs, then, has all the hallmarks of a characteristic Comynsian world – a child or child-like narrator whose unique, distinct voice manages to belie the hopelessness of the circumstances and take some edge off its horrors making the story not just easier to bear but also incredibly compelling. I was lucky to finally find a copy of this novel, it was so incredibly hard to find.
The Devastating Boys is a gorgeous collection of stories showcasing Elizabeth Taylor’s unmatched talent and remarkable range both in terms of the worlds she creates and her piercing gaze into the hearts and minds of her characters.
The title story in the collection – “The Devastating Boys” – is a subtle and beautifully written story of a marriage, of how doing things out of the ordinary holds the promise of joy and renewal, while “An Excursion to the Source” is a story about a diffident young woman Polly and her overbearing guardian Gwenda and the unexpected circumstances that confront them on a holiday. One of my favourites, “In and Out the Houses”, is a cleverly constructed tale focusing on the petty jealousies of village life complete with the unspoken disappointments and the secret tinge of envy that mark the lives of its inhabitants, while “Flesh” is another superbly crafted story of loneliness and the tragicomedy of middle-aged romance. It’s a collection that shows Taylor at the top of her game where each story is a joy to savour and treasure.
Edith Wharton’s Ghost Stories is a brilliant collection of eerie, chilling tales where she uses the medium of spectral visions to explore the familiar terrain of her themes that are so central to her New York novels and stories.
The first story “The Lady Maid’s Bell” is a masterclass in narrative tension, a tale of isolation and loneliness, an unhappy marriage, and devotion. One of my favourites in the collection, “Afterward”, is a superb tale of guilt, moral failings, the repercussions of ill-gotten wealth, and women suffering because of the terrible wrongs of their men. “Bewitched” is a suspenseful story of religion and old, primitive folklore set in the icy wastes and the claustrophobic boundaries of a desolate village; while “Mr Jones”, set in an isolated country manor, dwells on the themes of patriarchal control and dominance both real and ghostly.
Besides the ghosts lurking on these pages, the richness and allure of these stories are further accentuated by the complexity of themes lacing them such as moral corruption, greed, domestic strife, control, entrapment, and abuse; themes that typically form the core of her New York stories but also explored in these ghost stories in a singularly innovative way.
Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin is a superb collection filled with stunningly crafted stories of unhappy marriages and slices of Dublin life. The book is divided into three sections, and the first section is possibly more cheery of the lot, mostly comprising autobiographical sketches of Brennan’s childhood in Dublin on Ranelagh Road.
The next two sections focus on the Derdon and Bagot families respectively and are some of the finest stories she has written. The Derdon stories are savage and heartbreaking in their depiction of an unhappy marriage; these are six exquisitely crafted stories of loneliness, bitterness, and misunderstandings, encompassing more than forty years of Hubert and Rose Derdon’s married life. Each story unflinchingly examines the nuances of their relationship from different angles and perspectives, always focusing on the growing alienation and resentment between the couple. In terms of tone, the Bagot set of stories is not as fierce as the Derdon bunch but are still beautifully rendered sketches of an unhappy marriage. The highlight of the collection is the last story which also lends the collection its name – an astute, razor-sharp character study, unlike the relative gentleness of the previous Bagot stories.
The stories in The Springs of Affection are quietly devastating, perhaps even bleak, but they are thrilling to read because of the sheer depth of their themes, Brennan’s psychological acuity, and exquisite writing.
Encapsulating the heydays of the Jazz Age, Ex-Wife is a wonderful, whip-smart tale of marriage, relationships, freedom, and women’s independence set in 1920s New York.
The book begins with Patricia, our narrator, telling us that her husband left her four years ago making her the ex-wife of the title. Through Patricia’s reminisces, we learn of her marriage to Peter at a very young age, the events leading up to their separation, and how her life pans out thereafter post that tumultuous period. Luckily, Patricia is not completely down and out; she has her job after all, and a new friendship with Lucia, another ex-wife five years older than her. The two women decide to rent an apartment together and thereby Patricia is flung headlong into a world of freedom, endless partying, men, and one-night stands. Slowly and surely, after many hiccups, Peter recedes into the background.
Ursula Parrott’s writing is sassy, wise, and sharp – snappy one-liners, easy camaraderie, and an air of irreverence are abundant and belie some of the darker moments in the book marked by heartaches, tragedies, disappointments, and wistful yearnings. Patricia’s narrative is laced with the wisdom of hindsight and there’s much humour in her retelling as there is poignancy and understated sadness.
Maxine Clair’s Rattlebone is a gorgeously written, heartbreaking compilation of eleven interlinked stories that capture slices of life of an African American community in 1950s Kansas City. It sensitively depicts the journey of Irene Wilson our protagonist from when she is eight years old to her last days in high school; she and her friends traverse a particularly rough terrain of tumultuous family life, challenges and heartaches of growing up, and the blight of occasional violence. Irene is often the central feature in each story, at other times she is on the periphery – the points of view sometimes shift and there are stories where the focus zooms on other members of her family or the black neighbourhood of Rattlebone where she resides.
These are beautiful, sharply observed tales with their tender portrayal of characters who display a quiet strength, an inner reserve that compels them to dream big and carry on despite obstacles and hardships.
THE OPPERMANNS by Lion Feuchtwanger (Translated from German by James Cleugh, revisions by Joshua Cohen)
Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns is a haunting, powerful story charting the rise and fall of a rich, cultured, liberal German Jew family during the years leading up to and during Hitler’s rise to power. The author takes his time setting up his cast of characters while simultaneously juxtaposing their situation with the broader grim political developments sweeping throughout the country making it an incredibly immersive read right from the very beginning.
The Oppermanns comprise the three brothers – Martin, Edgar, Gustav, and their sister Klara, married to the East European Jew Jaques Lavendel who is an American citizen but chooses to live in Germany. Established in Berlin, the family’s furniture venture is largely run and managed by Martin. Edgar is an eminent and respected doctor with a thriving practice of his own, while Gustav, the eldest brother, is relatively naïve and sentimental; a man of letters, Gustav is absorbed with his world of books and writing a biography on Lessing, fine dining and women, while oblivious and uninterested in matters concerning politics or economics.
As the Nazis come into power, the Oppermanns are shocked by the scale of the country’s moral breakdown while also unable to fathom the precariousness of their existence in this dramatically altered landscape of their homeland. In this volatile situation, the three brothers are faced with a terrible dilemma – should they flee Germany, or should they stay back?
FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes (Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein)
There’s a scene in Forbidden Notebook where Valeria Cossatti, our protagonist and the narrator, is having lunch with her glamorous friend Clara at her place, a penthouse apartment in Rome. Divorced from her husband, Clara is now an independent woman and a successful filmmaker, but by then Valeria’s position has become much more complex. Her outward façade continues to be that of a traditional woman confined to the role of a homemaker and catering to the needs of her husband and two children, but inwardly Valeria has begun to seethe and resist these conventional norms she is expected to adhere to. Clara believes that Valeria has been lucky to achieve all that she wanted by marrying, but by then Valeria and the reader know the reality to be entirely different – Valeria has been experiencing a deep sense of disillusionment, a feeling she is unable to share with Clara.
It is this intense conflict, growing resistance, and the dual nature of her thoughts and emotions that forms the essence of Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook – a rich, multilayered novel of domestic dissatisfaction and awakening seen through the prism of a woman’s private diary. Set in 1950s Rome, not only does the book boldly challenge the validity of restrictive, orthodox roles thrust upon women, and the heartaches of motherhood, but it also dwells on writing as a powerful tool for a woman to find her voice and be heard when those closest to her fail to do so.
Billed as a feminist classic, Forbidden Notebook is a masterclass of insight and imagination, brilliant in the way it provides a window into a woman’s interior life, an internal struggle that oscillates between the desire to discover her true self and also keep it hidden.
Encompassing a period of one year, War in Val D’Orcia covers events between January 1943 and July 1944; an extremely difficult period for war-ravaged Italy fuelled by the intensity of the conflict and utter chaos in its political landscape. The author, Iris Origo, was an Anglo-American married to an Italian, and much before the war the couple bought and revived a derelict stretch of the Val d’Orcia valley in Tuscany and created an estate. At the height of the war, and at great personal risk, the Origos gave food and shelter to partisans, deserters, and refugees.
War in Val D’Orcia is a first-hand account of the complexity of Italy’s position, the politics prevailing at the time, and the difficulty of going about daily life. A compelling narrative laced with heart-stopping tension, these diary entries lose none of their edge even if we as readers already know how events will eventually pan out…the fact is that Iris Origo at the time did not; thus, the potency of the fear and stress felt by the Origos rubs on to the reader as well.
That’s about it, it was a wonderful year of reading for me and I hope it continues in 2024 too. What were some of your best books this year?
I read some excellent books in November and could read more thanks to some novellas thrown into the mix, as part of my contribution to the ‘Novellas in November’ reading project hosted by Cathy and Rebecca. I also participated in Kim’s #NYRBWomen23 readalong and to me the Jansson was the last book on this stellar list (I’ve already read the December selections in previous years) and I’m so glad this readalong ended on such a high, I’ll be back next year for #NYRBWomen24. In a nutshell, November was predominantly a month of short stories and novellas. All the books were great, but if I had to pick favourites it would be the Kerangal and the Frankau.
So, here’s a brief look at the six books…You can read the detailed reviews on each by clicking on the title links.
ROMAN STORIES by Jhumpa Lahiri (Translated from Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri & Todd Portnowitz)
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri is a quiet, contemplative, excellent collection of nine short stories at the heart of which lies the theme that is so central to her writing – the experiences of the immigrant or the outsider – but this time set in the pulsating, vibrant capital of Italy.
“The Boundary” is a beautifully penned story of family, city versus country life, trauma, and the pleasures of simple living set in an unnamed village in the Italian countryside, and told from the perspective of a caretaker’s daughter. One of my favourites “P’s Parties” unspools languorously and is a stunning piece on friendships, community, loss in its myriad forms, and unexpected bonds. “The Steps”, one of the longer stories in the collection, is excellent in the way a particular place in the Italian capital forms the vantage point from which the lives of six residents encompassing varied social spheres are explored, while “Dante Alighieri” is another wonderful story of reinvention, living life on your own terms, and the crucial crossroads that mark this journey
Written in spare, elegant language, Lahiri’s writing is subtle and intimate, the sentences simple but imbued with much depth. A tinge of melancholy pervades these stories and heightens their haunting power suffused with a lingering sense of what’s been lost or could have been. Roman Stories, then, is another fine collection from Jhumpa Lahiri once again showcasing her mastery of the short story form.
Lisa Tuttle’s My Death is a wonderfully uncanny, subversive tale of artists and creativity, identity, and the erasure of women in the world of art.
A writer by profession, we are told how our unnamed narrator has lost her mojo for conjuring up stories, especially since her beloved husband, Allan’s death. Utterly adrift but realising the need for change, she sets up a meeting with her agent Selwyn in Edinburgh. On the appointed day, our narrator visits the National Gallery where a painting stops her in her tracks. Titled “Circe” and painted by the artist W.E. Logan in 1928, we learn that Logan’s muse for this painting was the young art student Helen Ralston who, flattered by Logan’s interest in her, leaves America to study art in Glasgow. Our narrator is suddenly inspired to write a biography on Helen Ralston about whom not much is known or written, and is pleasantly surprised to learn that Ralston is still alive albeit quite old.
However, when the meeting between the creator and her subject takes place, things take a peculiar, unsettling turn, when uncannily the lives of Helen Ralston and our narrator begin to intertwine…
EASTBOUNDby Maylis de Kerangal (Translated from French by Jessica Moore)
Set aboard theTrans-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.
Pamela Frankau’s A Wreath for the Enemy – a wonderful coming-of-age tale of family, morality, friendships, and navigating the treacherous terrain of growing up, alternately set in the glittering Riviera and the quiet English countryside.
A montage of distinct voices and first-person narratives, the book is divided into three sections, each section told from a different point of view. The first part called “The Duchess and the Smugs” is narrated by Penelope Wells, our unforgettable charming heroine with a singular style of speech and a bohemian upbringing. Longing for an environment of peace and stability, Penelope is entranced by the Bradley family next door and spends time with the two children, but a tragedy at the end of the first section will teach Penelope not to take her freedom for granted plus she will finally see the Bradleys for who they are.
The point of view shifts in the second section which is now told from Don Bradley’s perspective in the first person and charts his friendship with the crippled genius Crusoe, while in the final section called “The Road by the River”, we are back with Penelope, but this is also a section where a panoply of narratives are introduced notably those of Cara de Bretteville and Livesey Raines, two characters who take centre stage in the final part and whose lives collide with that of Penelope.
By turns tender, wise, and perceptive, shimmering with lively tête-à-têtes and lush settings, A Wreath for the Enemy is a glorious, beautifully rendered novel about love, death, freedom, friendships, and forgiveness.
Tove Jansson’s The Woman Who Borrowed Memories is a sublime collection of short stories displaying Jansson’s delicate touch and mastery of the form complete with rich characterisations, evocative and often solitary settings, and keen insights on the nuances of human relationships. This collection comprises 26 stories assembled from five books (The Listener, The Doll’s House, Traveling Light, Letters from Klara, and Messages: Selected Stories) published between 1971 and 1998 and showcases Jansson’s incredible range.
“The Listener” is a beautifully expressed, poignant character study of an aging woman losing her sense of self as well as a meditation on loneliness and finding a purpose. “Black-White” is an homage to the talented artist and illustrator Edward Gorey; a story that dwells on the process of creating art with the artist’s sometimes obsessive tendency to strive for perfection. Another favourite “The Cartoonist” is a wonderful, unsettling piece on the price of ambition and the perils associated with the commercialization of art, while jealousy and rivalry take centre stage in “The Doll’s House”, which begins on an innocuous note but steadily descends into violence.
In graceful, sensitive prose that is filled with air and light, Jansson’s deceptively simple and enchanting writing style transforms into something profound as the stories progress often belying the darker undercurrents flowing underneath.
GHACHAR GHOCHAR by Vivek Shanbhag (Translated from Kannada by Srinath Perur)
Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar is a smartly-written, unsettling novella on the erosion of values, egos in relationships, and the evils of capitalism observed through the prism of one family, while also being an astute portrayal of middle-class urban India.
The book opens in a bar and restaurant called the Coffee House where our troubled unnamed narrator, a young man, is seeking refuge from the problems back home. What has particularly unnerved him is a nasty incident several days ago, an ensuing family fight, and its disturbing implications. Subsequent chapters flesh out the characters in greater detail which also provides a window to the family’s middle-class, humble origins; we get more details about the joint family he lives in with his wife Anita consisting of his parents Appa and Amma, his uncle Chikkappa, and his sister Malati. The novella enters a dark place in its feverish, final pages, insinuating a scenario that is frightening yet entirely plausible.
At barely a little over 100 pages, Ghachar Ghochar (slang for something messy and entangled), then, subtly touches on a wide range of topics – fragile family dynamics, gender politics, but more importantly how tensions over money can deteriorate relationships – and is immensely readable.
That’s it for November. In December, I’m reading The Oppermanns by Lion Feuchtwanger, a brilliant novel so far but one that is also filling me with dread. I hope to write a review as soon as I finish. More importantly, plan to release “My Best Books of 2023” list around mid-December, so watch this space!
Radhika's Reading Retreat 