Burning Secret’ by Stefan Zweig – “Oh, if He Only Knew the Secret!”

 

‘Burning Secret’ by Stefan Zweig     (1913) – 124 pages                Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

 

The Pushkin Press has reprinted a huge selection of fiction by Stefan Zweig including this novella, ‘Burning Secret’. The reprinting of so much of Zweig’s fiction is quite unusual for a writer who has been gone from us for over eighty years. After reading ‘Burning Secret’, I can fully understand why the publisher has taken such a huge interest in this writer. Stefan Zweig will be one of my “go to” writers in the years to come.

In ‘Burning Secret’, the Baron is staying in Semmering, a skiing resort in Austria, on holiday. The Baron is a young man “who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman’s sensuality and explores it”. The Baron is a ladies man, a seducer. There is a woman, Mathilde, staying at his hotel with her 12 year-old son Edgar. Her husband is not around, and the Baron is attracted by her and sets his designs on her.

The Baron uses the strategem of befriending the boy in order to reach the boy’s mother. This ruse works perfectly. However, when the boy Edgar senses that the Baron and the boy’s mother are paying more attentions to each other than to him, he gets angry and begins to interfere with their plans to see each other behind his back.

Edgar tells his mother that the Baron is a bad man.

“He’s a liar; he’s only pretending. He does it out of mean horrid calculation. He wants to get to know you, that’s why he was nice to me and promised me a dog.”

Edgar does not yet know what the Baron wants from his mother. That is the burning secret.

Meanwhile Edgar’s mother tells Edgar to stay out of her and the Baron’s way.

“Children don’t understand these things. You have no business meddling in them. You must behave better, and that’s all there is to it.”

The author tells this story of a boy starting to figure out what it is all about between adults, men and women, in a clear and vivid fashion. It was a real pleasure to read this novella. Since his fiction deals with elemental situations between people, the writing of Stefan Zweig will last.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

‘Wild Houses’ by Colin Barrett – After All, It is an Irish Novel

 

‘Wild Houses’ by Colin Barrett    (2024) – 255 pages

 

At the center of ‘Wild Houses’, the new novel by Irish author Colin Barrett is the hapless Dev Hendrick. Dev is in his late thirties. He lives by himself and keeps to himself out on his family farm, outside of town. He loved his mother, but she died a few years back.

“She could bear in on him of course, could berate, hound, and guilt-trip him like any mother, but she was the only living presence he could bear when he was at his lowest. Which was often. For as far back as he could remember, he had been prone to long consuming lows, but only ever felt half-alive, and half the time he wasn’t even that. It was the mother who kept him going during the worst years. She had.”

Only an Irish novel would have an unfortunate case like Dev as its “hero”. That is why I really like good Irish novels such as ‘Wild Houses’. I like that the characters in these novels are not defined by their income or their position, but instead are allowed to wander their own ways. I find it humorous yet realistic. Happily or sadly, they are humans.

Dev did have a job but quit it without a good reason back when his mother was still alive. His father is housed in town where they keep the severe mental cases. Dev has never gone to visit his father.

The drug dealers in town store their drugs they are going to sell on Dev’s remote farm after he gave them permission to do so. Now two of them, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, show up on Dev’s farm unannounced. They have kidnapped a young guy, Doll English, who is still in high school. They are going to keep Doll at Dev’s farm, because Doll’s older brother Cillian English who is also a drug dealer owes them money. If Cillian doesn’t pay up, Doll’s life is in danger.

Most of the male characters are either criminals or mental cases. The women are given a little more leeway. Nicky, the main female character is a bartender at one of the town’s many pubs. The young guy Doll had been out at the town bars with Nicky. They got separated that evening, and Nicky at first doesn’t realize that Doll’s been kidnapped. Nicky winds up at the final showdown.

There is very little explication or explanation of actions, thoughts, or feelings in ‘Wild Houses’. Colin Barrett does not force his characters to be a certain way. They are who they are, and nothing more can be said.

So what we have here is a wild Irish crime novel with offbeat characters. While this cast of off-the-wall crazies makes for an amusing fun ride, ‘Wild Houses’ also works as a well-plotted crime story.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

‘Kids Run the Show’ by Delphine de Vigan – A Social Media Crime Story

 

‘Kids Run the Show’ by Delphine de Vigan     (2024) – 297 pages        Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

I am both the very wrong person and the very right person to review ‘Kids Run the Show’. On the one hand, I have never watched a reality TV show except for a few early episodes of American Idol. On the other hand, I share the same disdain and distrust for these reality shows as Delphine de Vigan displays in this novel.

In ‘Kids Run the Show’, young French woman Melanie Klaux started her foray into reality TV as a contestant on “Meet You in the Dark”.

“Would they find love? Three women and three men, all single, convened in a big villa, the men on one side, the women on the other. The only common room was a dark room equipped with infrared cameras, where the particpants were brought to get acquainted in total darkness. They went on to choose a partner they’d be alone together with in the dark room.”

That show lasted only a few episodes before it was understandably dropped. Now, several years later, Melanie is a young mother with two little pre-school children, Kimmy and Sammy. Melanie has set up a YouTube channel, “Happy Recess”, where she posts videos of her and her children on a daily basis. Her channel has become tremendously popular with millions of subscribers tuning in to YouTube to watch these videos. Now Melanie’s husband has quit his job to help with the videos since they make a very good living through company product placements in these videos. The children Kimmy and Sammy have become YouTube stars.

“And in every corner of the planet, hundreds of families were sharing their daily lives with thousands of viewers.”

But is being filmed constantly having adverse effects on these two small children?

One day the kids have a rare opportunity to play with the neighbor kids, and they play hide-and-seek. Sammy who is “it” looks all over for Kimmy but can’t find her. Has Kimmy hid herself really well or has she been kidnapped? When the parents can’t find her, they call the police. Clara Roussel is a young police officer, assigned to the case after Mélanie’s daughter Kimmy is abducted. Several days pass, and Kimmy has still not been found. Does the disappearance of Kimmy have anything to do with those YouTube videos?

I’m not sure that these YouTube family video channels are as big a problem as Delphine de Vigan makes them out to be, but it’s a great plot for a novel and is well executed.

They “have been confronted, from their earliest childhood, with demands no child should ever be subjected to: they are expected to be charming, promote products, respond to fans, manage their image, and so on. Today many of them are paying the bitter price for it all.”

 

Grade :     A

 

 

 

‘Leaving’ by Roxana Robinson – A Love Affair at Sixty

 

‘Leaving’ by Roxana Robinson    (2024) – 327 pages

 

In ‘Leaving’, Sarah is nearing sixty and she has two grown-up kids, daughter Meg and son Josh. She has been divorced for many years. At an opera, ‘Tosca’, she runs into an old boyfriend from college, Warren. He is still married. He wants to see her again, and she agrees to go out with him.

“The restaurant is small, French, not grand. A long narrow room, a mirror along one side. A sense of Gallic festiveness. He’s in a booth in the back, watching for her. When she comes in he raises his hand and smiles; she feels a lift, a warming.”

On their date, she winds up spending the night with him, leaving his hotel room bed in the morning.

This tale of late love between these two upper-upper middle class people is very elegant and tasteful, but it could have used some lightness. It is essentially humorless. We never find out what the real attraction between Sarah and Warren is besides that they are both well-to-do. She lives outside New York City, and he lives in Boston. These characters are endlessly polite, but there seems to be little real feeling between them.

The affair between Warren and Sarah progresses, and Warren asks his wife Janet for a divorce. Sarah is quite happy with her independent single life and does not want to move from her large estate. Warren’s grown daughter Katrina is angry with him.

“On the phone he had felt Katrina’s rage like a blast furnace, a big open maw. He has never felt such rage. She would welcome his destruction.”

What ‘Leaving’ does have going for it is verisimilitude. Each word and action of each of these characters is plausible. These well-to-do characters behave entirely like we expect them to and their dialogue is realistic. However, besides Warren’s angry daughter, there is very little passion in this novel.

There is a lot of domestic description and detail in this novel, more than is necessary and more than was wanted by this reader. I’m sure Sarah’s dog Bella is a nice dog and is fun to play with, but I don’t need pages devoted to the dog’s antics.

We get little sense that this couple, Warren and Sarah, are nearing sixty. I suppose today sixty isn’t all that old, but still there could have been a few references to the problems and unexpected joys of aging.

 

Grade :    B-

 

 

‘Tell’ by Jonathan Buckley – The Life of an Inexcusably Rich Man as Told by his Gardener

 

‘Tell’ by Jonathan Buckley (2024) – 169 pages

 

I much liked and am impressed by the style of ‘Tell’. If ‘Tell’ had been written in the usual third person narrative style, there would probably have been a lot of dry exposition in order to tell the life of this rich man Curtis Doyle. By having his gardener relate it all in a conversational style, ‘Tell’ is a fun read.

“Different rules apply. And Harry’s right, of course. You see it all the time. The rich don’t pay – that’s what Harry was always saying. They get away with things.”

Harry is also on Curtis’s home staff at the “palace” and is a supposed friend of Curtis, but Harry is always making snide cynical comments about Curtis behind Curtis’s back. I particularly enjoyed Harry’s comments.

‘Tell’ begins with our gardener relating the details of billionaire Curtis’s severe car accident in Cambodia where he was almost killed. The psychic damage to Curtis was so severe that our gardener divides Curtis’s life into Curtis the First before the accident and Curtis the Second after the accident.

There have been women in Curtis’s life, both before and after the accident. His wife Lily died earlier, and later there are Lara and Karolina. He has two sons, Conrad and Karl.

“The women, before the accident. With them, I was usually wondering: “And what exactly attracted you to fifty-something squillionaire widower Curtis Doyle? It’s a cliche, I know, but maybe it is lonely at the top.”

At one point Curtis meets his real mother, the mother who gave him up as a baby.

“He didn’t dislike her. Disliking her would have made no sense. She seemed to be missing some bit of brain wiring that comes fitted as standard with most people. An empathy slip. That’s how Curtis put it. Feelings we take for granted were simply unavailable to her. She was an amazingly cold woman, but it was impossible to take it personally. She was what she was. He couldn’t resent her for it.”

His real father “had been a sperm provider with a bad personality, and that’s all.”

These descriptions of other characters are much more fun coming from the casual conversation of the gardener than they would be as dry exposition.

I can understand that ‘Tell’ may have been difficult to market to the general public, but it is a remarkably enjoyable book to read.

 

Grade :    A

 

 

 

‘The Names’ by Don DeLillo – A Middle Eastern Cult and the CIA

 

‘The Names’ by Don DeLillo     (1982) – 339 pages

 

You may ask why I read this decidedly old novel. Having read the three novels ‘White Noise’, ‘Libra’, and ‘Mao II’, I consider Don DeLillo one of the finest, if not the finest, writers in recent US history. I have a copy of ‘Underworld’ which I intend to read when I have time and space to read an 827-page novel.

Geoff Dyer wrote an article in The Guardian in 2014 stating that if US novels had been eligible for the Booker Prize in 1982, ‘The Names’ would have won. The original reviews of ‘The Names’ were rather negative, but over the years it has gained admirers.

Delillo has had an interesting career as a writer. Before ‘White Noise’ which was DeLillo’s big breakthrough he had written eight post-modern novels which had limited success. After ‘Underworld’ which is considered DeLillo’s supreme achievement, DeLillo wrote five shorter novels which have garnered mixed reviews.

So does ‘The Names’ belong with the set of DeLillo’s other four masterpieces or is it the last of his apprentice works? To find out the answer to this question, I read ‘The Names’ for myself.

Most of ‘The Names’ takes place in Athens, Greece. James Axton has followed his divorced wife Kathryn and their young son Tap to Athens who are there for an archaeological dig.

“This is what love comes down to, things that happen, and what we say about them. Certainly that is what I wanted from Kathryn and Tap, the seeping love of small talk and family chat. I wanted them to tell me how they spent their day.”

James has obtained a position as a risk analyst for a corporate insurer. The job is to evaluate the risks, especially the terrorist risk, for major executives as they carry out their corporate duties in the Middle East. As part of his job, he travels to various places such as Beirut and Ankara and Jordan.

“This is a relatively safe place for a Turk. Very bad in Paris. Even worse in Beirut. The Secret Army is very active there. Every secret army in the world keeps a post office box in Beirut.”

There is a mysterious “language cult” called Ta Onomata operating throughout the Middle East that is behind a number of unexplained murders. They murder people whose initials match the letters of place names. I found this rather silly, but I suppose that was the point.

“They intended nothing, they meant nothing. They only matched the letters. What beautiful names.”

One of the characters wants to infiltrate and film the cult

“The twentieth century is on film. It’s the filmed century. You have to ask yourself if there is anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves. The whole world is on film, all the time.”

Ultimately James finds out that his employer is a front for the CIA.

“American strategy. This is interesting, how the Americans choose strategy over principle every time and yet keep believing in their own innocence.”

While many of DeLillo’s lines about various topics, his digressions, are interesting in themselves, for me the novel as a whole does not cohere. Maybe it is because I’m out of practice reading DeLillo’s work. Who knows? However the ridiculous plot of a cult that kills people based on the initials of their names kind of spoiled the novel for me. I got the impression that not even DeLillo was interested in the plot since it is dropped without a resolution.

 

Grade:   B-

 

 

 

‘You Dreamed of Empires’ by Alvaro Enrigue – Cortés and Moctezuma Meet in 1519

 

‘You Dreamed of Empires’ by Alvaro Enrigue    (2022) – 219 pages          Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

 

‘Sudden Death’ was a highly successful tour de force of a novel by Alvaro Enrigue, and now Alvaro Enrigue returns once again to the 16^th century with ‘You Dreamed of Empires’.

This time we are in Tenoxtitlan which was the name for the Aztec ruling courts in what is now Mexico City. The year is 1519, and the Spaniard adventurer Cortés and his men have arrived in Tenoxtitlan. They are expecting to meet Moctezuma (often spelled Montezuma) and his court. Moctezuma is the “huey tlanoani”, the supreme leader, of the Aztec people.

Tlilpotonqui is the “cihuacoatl” (mayor) of the city of Tenoxtitlan and second in line for the imperial throne. Moctezuma’s son Cuitlahuac is next in line. The Spaniards are named Caxtilteca by the Aztecs. Hernán Cortés is called El Malinche.

The author Enrigue plays this early meeting of Moctezuma and Cortés for a wild black comedy farce. Of course no one knows what actually transpired between these two men in 1519, so Enrigue is free to imagine, and that he surely does. Moctezuma wanders his palace “cooked to the gills” on magic mushrooms and eating grasshopper tacos with avocado sauce. One room in the palace is dedicated solely to the 40,000 skulls of the human sacrifices which Moctezuma can order with just the nod of his head. The Aztec practice of sacrificing humans to their gods in particularly brutal ways often comes up for some dark broad humor in the novel.

“The festivals with their severed heads, dismembered bodies, and rivers of blood flowing down temple steps were disgusting, but they also brought feasting, music, dances, intoxication.”

Whereas ‘Sudden Death’ had only the two main characters playing a relatively simple tennis match, ‘You Dreamed of Empire’ has a larger set of characters and a much more convoluted situation. The story becomes even more complicated for the reader with the lengthy unfamiliar Aztec names and the untranslated Aztec words.

There is a guide to the characters at the beginning of the novel, and I would suggest that the reader refer to it as often as necessary. I also believe it would have been useful to have a short index of the several ancient Aztec words that are used and their meanings, although the author Alvaro Enrigue himself writes in a prefatory note “Let the meanings reveal themselves: the brain likes to learn things, and we’re wired to register new words.“ However, for myself, a short dictionary of the ancient Aztec terms used would have been very helpful.

 

Grade :    B-

 

 

 

‘Clear’ by Carys Davies – Minimalism is Alive and Well

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‘Clear’ by Carys Davies       (2024) – 185 pages

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The Welsh / Scottish writer Carys Davies has written another fine novel which, like her others, is far off the well-worn path of today’s literature.

In ‘Clear’, which takes place in 1843, Scottish Reverend John Ferguson has resigned his position from the high Presbyterian Church of Scotland to cast his lot with the Free Church, a group of ministers who are protesting some of the Church’s policies. John no longer gets his living expenses paid for by the Church of Scotland, so now John and his wife Mary are poor.

John has heard of a way to make some much needed additional money. There has been a mandate from the Scottish Clearances so that “whole communities of the rural poor were forcibly removed from their homes” so that the landowners could make room for sheep which returned a much better profit than the poor farmers did. Reluctantly, needing money, John Ferguson heads to an island in the North Sea above Scotland to evict a peasant named Ivar from his property.

John arrives on the island, and, exploring on his first morning there, falls off a cliff. Ivar finds John lying senseless on the shore. Ivar takes the injured John to his cottage and nurses him back to health. Ivar has lived on this remote island for a long time and he speaks his own dialect, Norn, which John can barely understand. John sets about learning the meanings of the various words in this ancient language. The friendship that develops between these two men is handled with realism and grace.

Meanwhile John’s wife Mary is waiting for him to return.

“Mary couldn’t help saying she wished there was work John could be getting on with for the estate that didn’t involve him going on an eight-hundred-mile round trip and being away for a whole month.”

This is not your typical modern novel plot. It’s a quiet, although at times harrowing and at times joyful, life-affirming story of three people trying to make a go of it in this world. Exposition and explanation are kept to a minimum, as we are drawn into the plights of these three characters, John and Mary and Ivar.

Somehow we small individuals must keep standing despite the overwhelming, often cruel, forces of society. Carys Davies has captured this dynamic. as well as the people and the land and the sea, in ‘Clear’.

 

Grade:    A

 

 

 

‘James’ by Percival Everett – A New Take on ‘Huckleberry Finn’

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‘James’ by Percival Everett    (2024) – 303 pages

 

‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’ by Mark Twain were two of the first non-picture books that I read. I’m quite sure these were the two books that, for good or bad, spurred my early interest in literature. I still remember the scenes of Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher lost in the cave vividly.

Now Percival Everett has written a new version of ‘Huckleberry Finn’, but in his version the black slave Jim or ‘James’ is the central character. Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was quite progressive and enlightened for its time, but still the slave Jim is treated as a minor character in Huckleberry’s story.

In ‘James’, the slave Jim tells the story. Jim has a wife and daughter, and when he finds out that he is to be sold to another slave owner and thus forever separated from his family, he makes his escape to the Mississippi River where he hopes to head north and somehow earn money to keep his family together. At the same time Huckleberry Finn is running away from his abusive father.

“But his father being back, that was a different story. That man might have been sober or he might have been drunk, but in either of these conditions he consistently threw beatings on to the poor boy.”

Huckleberry and Jim meet up on the Mississippi River. Jim has heard about the father’s brutal beatings of Huck. At that time, just before the US Civil War, an escaped slave, if caught, would often be hanged or shot on sight. So they are both running away from an intolerable situation.

Although Jim can read and write, he hides that fact from white people, because it would upset them. He can speak normal English, but he hides that also and speaks in a slave patois which is what the white people only want to hear from black people.

“Folk be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scare em.”

This last weekend I watched ‘American Fiction’ which is based on another Percival Everett novel, ‘Erasure’, which is a comedy that deals with modern-day writing and publishing by black writers, and how black writers must still write in a slave patois in order to please their white audience. It’s a clever funny movie, and I urge people to watch it.

So, just as in ‘Huckleberry Finn’, we follow Jim and Huck and their adventures along the Mississippi River. They meet up with two white con men, the Duke and the King, but later these two want to make some extra money by catching the runaway slave Jim and turning him in, so Jim and Huck must make their escape. Later they get separated.

Along the way, Jim sees a slave, Young George, severely whipped and beaten for stealing a pencil for Jim. Later he finds out that Young George has died from his wounds.

Later Jim confronts his owner Judge Thatcher to find out to whom the Judge has sold the rest of Jim’s family. The Judge tells Jim that Jim is in more trouble than he can imagine.

Jim responds.

“Why on earth do you think that I can’t imagine the trouble I’m in? After you’ve tortured me and eviscerated me and emasculated me and left me to burn slowly to death, is there something else you’ll do to me? Tell me, Judge Thatcher, what is there that I can’t imagine?”

I read ‘Huckleberry Finn’ probably when I was in the fifth or sixth grade. It would be a good idea for the publisher of ‘James’ to create a young adult version of ‘James’, with perhaps only a few pictures, to sell to the teen and young adult crowd.

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Grade :   A

‘Hard by a Great Forest’ by Leo Vardiashvili – Going back to Tbilisi, Georgia

 

‘Hard by a Great Forest’ by Leo Vardiashvili    (2024) – 338 pages

 

Here is a lively and humorous novel that takes place in a remote war-torn region in the Caucasus Mountains of far eastern Europe, in the country of Georgia.

Saba was only 8 years old when he and his brother Sandro and his father Irakli left Tbilisi, Georgia because of the war there in 1992. In their rush to leave the war-torn capital of Georgia, they had to leave their mother / wife Eka behind. She did not have a passport. The rest of the family moved to London, England.

“Life in Tbilisi was always on shaky ground when Georgia broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991. Decapitated, the government staggered on for a few months on momentum alone. It was a losing game. A question of when, not if.”

Now it is more than twenty years later, and Saba’s mother has died and his father and brother have both gone back to Georgia. However Saba hasn’t heard anything from either of them in a long time. He decides to head back to Tbilisi himself to look for and find them.

“Tbilisi’s a city that has been invaded, leveled, and rebuilt more than thirty times. Over the centuries, all manner of empires and their unhinged rulers have had their way with the city – the Ottomans, the Byzantines, the Russians. As a result Tbilisi’s architecture is schizophrenic.”

Tbilisi itself is no longer war torn, but the fighting is still going on in Ossetia and Abkhazia in the Caucasus Mountains that were part of Georgia but have been reclaimed by Russia. In his search for his father and brother, Saba must go to these regions still at war.

So this is a story of a young man returning to the place where he grew up as a little kid. He hears the voices of those who lived there back then and were very familiar to him. He hears these voices from his childhood of both the living and the dead. More often than not, these voices are heckling or berating Saba.

Later, Saba finds out that his childhood home has been turned into a shoe shop.

On his return to Tbilisi, Saba meets this new couple, Nodar and Keti, who befriend him and give him a place to stay. They are originally from Ossetia and they have lost their daughter Natia in the war. Nodar also drives Saba around on his searches for his father and brother. Saba owes a lot to “the dubious miracle of Nodar”.

Saba’s search leads him and Nodar to the Tbilisi police station.

“Down here, they haven’t bothered to wash the Soviet stench off the walls. Down here, it smells of lives ruined on a whim.”

So far I have described the plot of ‘Hard by a Great Forest’ so that it sounds quite serious due to the continuing wars in and near the country of Georgia. However what makes this novel special is the playful, even humorous, tone of Saba as he tells of his search. Yes, there is a lot of poignant death and destruction due to the wars, but the reader gets a strong sense that life goes on even under these difficult conditions. Saba uses a variety of comedic and dramatic techniques to tell his story. This keeps things from getting dull.

Tbilisi Zoo Animals on the Loose after Flood

The novel takes place in 2015. That was the year that the Tbilisi Zoo was flooded and all the animals escaped. This was a real-life occurrence, not something the author made up. So on their travels around the city, Saba and Nodar come across bears, tigers, and a giant hippo which have escaped from the zoo.

‘Hard by a Great Forest’ is a playful and very funny novel which may also break your heart.

 

Grade :   A

 

 

‘The Doll’s Alphabet’ by Camilla Grudova – Flaky and Surreal Stories

 

‘The Doll’s Alphabet’, stories by Camilla Grudova   (2017) – 162 pages

 

I read and was quite impressed by ‘Children of Paradise’ by Camilla Grudova, so I decided to read her earlier story collection ‘The Doll’s Alphabet’. Several critics praised ‘The Doll’s Alphabet’ very highly. However I did have my doubts due to the following line which was in a Guardian review by Nicholas Lezard which also extolled the collection.

“That I cannot say what all these stories are about is a testament to their worth. They have been haunting me for days now. They have their own, highly distinct flavour, and the inevitability of uncomfortable dreams.”

Nothing annoys me more than being unable to figure out what a story is about.

I did have some problems with some of the stories in ‘The Doll’s Alphabet’. The early stories can be described as experimental, surreal, and “Kafkaesque”. I usually try to avoid stories that are described as “Kafkaesque” because they are usually confusing, unpleasant, and bleak. Some of the stories in this collection did have those qualities.

Grudova’s descriptions of her characters and their rooms are usually nauseatingly disgusting and decrepit. This is intentional, I think. Here is just one example of many:

“I also took off my shoes, but the floor of her attic was dirty, covered with peeling linoleum, carpet and patches of wood, a repulsive mixture that reminded me of bandages that needed to be changed and the flaky, scabby skin underneath.”

OK, one more example:

“the often unclean fabric which often smelled like meat, soup, fruity liquors, and that fried-onions-and-mushroom scent which oozes from the bodies of grown men as if they were nothing but sacks of unwanted leftovers.”

Also some of these earlier stories contain long, long, interminable lists. This is a technique that is used often by today’s fiction writers but which I find off-putting.

“In her restaurant there were peacock feathers, plastic lilies, and flaking mannequin arms in vases, tin toys, devil and maiden marionettes that jiggled when the restaurant became busy,…” (and on and on and on)

Lists are fine as long as they are kept at a reasonable short length and do not distract from the rest of the story. Lists of things should be used sparingly and kept at reasonable length.

And I too cannot say what a couple of these stories are about. These stories are much easier to admire than to enjoy.

I do believe that the first story, ‘Unstitching’, is the real key to this entire story collection, and it is only two and one half pages long. It is based on the premise that girls, when they are little, are stitched together to become a woman who isn’t who they really are. Thus in order for a grown woman to become her real self, she must “unstitch” herself. However a little boy is allowed to grow up to be who he is, so if the boy tries to “unstitch” himself, he would only wind up hurt and disappointed.

Her characters are intentionally, relentlessly, unstitched. I get it, I think.

I felt that in the earlier stories of this collection, that Grudova was trying too hard to be experimental and Kafkaesque. It requires some effort by the reader to cut through these techniques to get to the real story, although it probably was a useful effort on Camilla Grudova’s part to make her stories have more depth. The later stories are easier to follow.

I much preferred ‘Children of Paradise’ which avoided some of these annoying off-putting techniques but kept the flakiness. ‘Children of Paradise’ is a much smoother read.

I will continue to read any new works Camilla Grudova writes.

 

Grade :   B

 

 

‘The Physics of Sorrow’ by Georgi Gospodinov – The Saddest Place in the World?

 

‘The Physics of Sorrow’ by Georgi Gospodinov   (2011)  281 pages      Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

 

Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov wrote this novel ‘The Physics of Sorrow’ in response to an article he read in The Economist in 2010 which called Bulgaria the saddest place in the world. Even the fall of Communism apparently didn’t improve the spirit of the country as the Economist article was written already twenty years after the fall of Communism in Bulgaria.

“The saddest place in the world, as The Economist called it in 2010 (I clipped out the article), as if there is truly a geography of happiness.”

Reading Georgi Gospodinov even in translation, it doesn’t take long for one to realize you are in the hands of a real master of literature. Only a few paragraphs, and you will figure it out. There is the self-assurance with which he writes, the easy relaxed humor. He just has that knack of stating important things plainly, without pretenses. I would follow his sentences everywhere he takes them. After reading his International Booker Prize winning novel ‘Time Shelter’ as well as this novel, I think it is time for those who are really interested in literature to get aboard the Gospodinov train. He is 55 years old.

“After all, the world is full of men with crooked noses and bulging Adams Apples.”

Gospodinov’s humor alone refutes the claim that Bulgaria is an endlessly sorrowful country. You will probably have as much fun reading his novels as he had writing them.

In ‘The Physics of Sorrow’, Gospodinov somewhat ties his account together using the Greek myth of the Minotaur in its labyrinth. The Minotaur was half human and half bull, and when it became ferocious and started eating humans, King Minos locked him in a labyrinth from which it could not escape. The Minotaur could only survive by eating humans; King Minos required seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian maidens to be sacrificed to the Minotaur every year. Many would-be heroes tried to slay the Minotaur without success until, finally, the hero Theseus was able to kill the Minotaur.

Gospodinov has great sympathy for the Minotaur who was locked in that labyrinth and slain just because of the sleazy circumstances of its conception and through no fault of its own. Although Gospodinov makes no direct comparisons between the Minotaur and Bulgaria, they are implied.

“… that half-human-half-bull boy was not just anybody but my “stillborn brother…”

In one chapter, Gospodinov lists all the responses he’s heard to the question “How Are You?” and explains each one. Here is one example:

“How Are You?”

“We’re fine but it’ll pass.”

“A waggish answer from the socialist era, someone clearly got fed up with the absurdity of the question and the system, in which complaining openly would only bring you grief.”

Towards the end of ‘The Physics of Sorrow’, the reader begins to notice that the parts of the novel read like high quality diary or personal journal entries that don’t necessarily refer back to anything that has gone before. Don’t go to this novel expecting a plot.

‘Time Shelter’ or the ‘Physics of Sorrow’, which Gospodinov novel should you read first? I would recommend you read ‘Time Shelter’ first, because ‘Time Shelter’ is somewhat more tightly written. ‘The Physics of Sorrow’ starts out strong but later tends to wander away from its primary subject.

 

Grade :    A-

 

 

‘Secondhand Time’ by Svetlana Alexievich – Perestroika and Beyond – Part Two

 

‘Secondhand Time’ by Svetlana Alexievich     (2012) – 470 pages Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich

 

In the early 1990s, the Gorbachev years, there was great hope in Russia for “Perestroika”, the restructuring of the economic and political system of the country. Russian leaders talked of bringing in capitalism, but there was no foundation for capitalism in the Russian way of life.

“Today, no one has time for feelings, they’re all out making money. The discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb.”

Instead they wound up with the Russian oligarchs.

“The Russian oligarchs aren’t capitalists, they’re just thieves.”

“so-called businessmen – thieves and swindlers – sitting there munching, chomping, drinking”

“The bad guys took over, and the smart ones became the idiots. We’d built it all, then handed it over to the gangsters – that’s what happened right?”

The author Svetlana Alexievich or at least one of her interviewees apparently believes that the great promise of Gorbachev was that he was going to fix socialism, not replace it with a spurious thieving capitalism.

“They felt that they’d been lied to, that no one had told them that there was going to be capitalism; they thought that socialism was just going to get fixed.”

One problem with an oral history in a country like Russia is that the interviewees are still afraid after all these years to criticize the murderous Stalin and today they don’t dare criticize Putin, so instead they complain about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, safe targets.

“I was listening to their endless grumbling: Gorbochev is all talk. . .Yeltsin is an alcoholic. . . The people are just cattle. . . How many times have I heard these things already? A thousand times.”

‘Secondhand Time’ was written in 2012. By then, it probably was already dangerous to criticize Putin. If an oral history were done in Russia today, would any interviewee dare say an unkind word about Vladimir Putin?

“I only liked perestroika when it first started. If someone had told us back then that a KGB lieutenant-colonel would end up as President,…”

Is this capitalism? Or organized crime, these Russian oligarchs? Somehow current Russian leader Vladimir Putin managed during this time to parley himself into the richest man on Earth.

However Vladimir Putin does not tolerate dissent or anyone criticizing him. In ‘Second-Hand Time’, Putin is rarely mentioned at all, even though he had been in power since 1999.

“If half of the country is dreaming of Stalin, he’s bound to materialize, you can be sure of it.”

Moscow today

In one of the last sections of ‘Secondhand Time’, the police in Belarus, mostly young guys, clamp down on a street protest. One thing the Soviets taught the modern police real well is how to torture the people who take part in peaceful demonstrations. By using an example from Belarus, a direct criticism of Russia is avoided.

 

 

‘Secondhand Time’ by Svetlana Alexievich – An Oral History of the Last of the Soviets and of the “New” Russia – Part One

 

‘Secondhand Time’ by Svetlana Alexievich (2012) – 470 pages       Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich

 

In the early 1990s, Russia and even the rest of the world had high hopes for Russian democracy and a new Russian economic system, but lacking the proper laws, rules and regulations it has since devolved down to another harsh dictatorship and a klepto-capitalism where a few politicians and businessmen, the Russian oligarchy of which some don’t even live in Russia, enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else. Now Russia’s main export is corruption. What happened?

“It was 1991…What an incredibly happy time! We believed that tomorrow, the very next day, would usher in freedom, that it would materialize out of nowhere, from the sheer force of our wishing.”

In her oral history consisting of a variety of Russian voices, Svetlana Alexievich tries to answer the question of what happened. First she deals with the vanished Soviet Union.

“The Soviet civilization…I’m rushing to make impressions of its traces, its familiar faces. I don’t ask people about socialism, I want to know about love, jealousy, old age. Music, dance, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story.”

In ‘Secondhand Time’ we do get some of what Soviet life was like outside the prisons and labor camps.

“The whole country lived in their kitchens. You’d go to somebody’s house, drink wine, listen to songs, talk about poetry. There’s an open tin can, slices of black bread. Everyone’s happy.”

However, in order to deal with the Soviets, you must deal with the murderous regime of Joseph Stalin which lasted for nearly thirty years. Some of Alexievich’s interviewees were uprooted from their homes and sent to work in the harsh conditions of Siberia or to prisons, based on the spurious testimony of some neighbor or friend. Parents were taken from their families and their children were put in orphanages. Many died by torture or the harsh living conditions. The interviewees tend to blame the person who talked about them to the authorities rather than Stalin and the authorities themselves. People tend to view their youthful days with rose colored glasses no matter how terrible they actually were.

“The Devil knows how many people were murdered, but it was our era of greatness.”

Some of the interviewees in this oral history sound like apologists for Stalin.

“Now everyone’s the victim and Stalin alone is to blame. But think about it…it’s simple arithmetic…Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported, and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all this…and they found millions of people who were willing to,”

The Russians are tremendously proud of their role in World War II. May 9, the day the victorious Russian army marched into Berlin in 1945, is Russia’s most important holiday. Some Russians believe they would not have defeated the Germans without Stalin’s harsh discipline.

“If it wasn’t for Stalin…without an “iron hand”, Russia would never have survived.”

Moscow Parade during Soviet Union time

In my next article regarding ‘Secondhand Time’, I will try to deal with what happened in the years following Gorbachev, “Perestroika”. “Glasnost”, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

“Russian people don’t expect ever to be happy.”

 

 

 

‘The Factory’ by Hiroko Oyamada – Working for a Massive Japanese Company

 

‘The Factory’ by Hiroko Oyamada       (2013) – 116 pages             Translated from the Japanese by David Boyd

 

‘The Factory’ takes place in an extremely large company in Japan known simply as The Factory. We follow three new employees as they are hired and start to work at The Factory.

The following will give you some idea of how large The Factory is.

“The Factory really has it all, doesn’t it?”

“Apartment complexes, supermarkets, a bowling alley, karaoke. All kinds of entertainment, even a fishing center. We have a hotel and more restaurants than you can count.”

“By the way there are all kinds of food options around the factory. We have nearly a hundred cafeterias, and a decent number of restaurants, too. If you want, mark your map as we go.”

Young woman Yoshiko Ushiyama, who can’t seem to hold a job for very long, has been hired as a contract employee and has been assigned to the Shredder Squad whose job is to destroy documents all workday long.

“I want to work,” she thinks. “Except, well, I don’t want to work. I really don’t. Life has nothing to do with work and work has no real bearing on life. I used to think they were connected, but now I can see there’s just no way.”

Her shredding paper job is rather mindless work.

“From my second day on the job, barring the occasional jam, I never had to use a single brain cell.”

Furufue, a young University research assistant in bryology – the study of moss and other fungi – is hired to green-roof The Factory which I suppose means to plant moss on the roofs of the buildings. The Factory is quick to hire him and his parents are happy he has a high-paying job at The Factory rather than doing low-paying research, but Furufue would rather still be working at the University. After he’s hired, he wonders why they haven’t assigned anyone else to his team.

Before Furufue can begin work on installing green roofs on the factory buildings, he is asked to undertake a census of the mosses growing on the extensive grounds of the factory complex; this takes him 15 years. His job, which also includes conducting company public relations events, has him often outside on the building grounds, and he spots a new species of the copyu rodent in The Factory’s drains.

A copyu is an invasive species of rodent which is sort of a cross between a rat and a beaver. Copyus were originally only from Brazil and Argentina, but during World War II the Japanese military brought them over to Japan to use their fur for coats. Now copyus inhabit river areas throughout Japan. They are especially prevalent in the river that flows near the Factory.

Employees have also noticed that small lizards hide in The Factory’s washing facilities, and that a large number of mysterious black birds are beginning to appear near The Factory. These animal sightings are an ominous portent.

The third new employee is Yoshiko’s brother, who was recently fired from his old job and is given a job at The Factory proofreading. He expected he would be working on a computer using editing tools, but instead he is supposed to proofread huge paper documents. His job is so mindnumbing that he often falls asleep at his desk, but he still says, “I was just happy to have a place to work, a place to go every day.”

So, for all three of these new employees, their labor for The Factory is essentially meaningless, but they all keep at it because to work at The Factory is prestigious. I’ll let you make any comparisons with the work in United States offices and factories.

One thing I noticed in the novel is that in Japanese business life, the surname is always followed by the honorific suffix “san”, meaning “dear” or actually “honorable Mr/Ms.”. That seems to me to be a respect-worthy practice.

–

Grade :     B+

‘Vengeance is Mine’ by Marie NDiaye – A Mother’s Terrible Act

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‘Vengeance is Mine’ by Marie NDiaye (2021) – 226 pages                 Translated from the French by Jordan Stump

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There are two plot lines to the French novel ‘Vengeance is Mine’.

One plot line is the aftermath of a horrendous act: a mother, Marlyne Principaux, admits that she has murdered her three little children, Jason, John, and Julia. Jason is 6 years old, John is 4 years old, and Julia is 6 months old. The mother drowned them in the bathtub. The mother’s husband Gilles is very supportive of his wife when the police come to question them. He hires the female lawyer M. Susane, who is at the center of this novel, to defend his wife.

“Principaux would be judged excessively loyal to Marlyne, so much so that he would be accused of duplicity, of supporting his wife for his own ends.

“It was simply that Principaux didn’t seem “emotional” enough.”

The second plot line concerns the lawyer M. Susane’s housekeeper Sharon. Sharon who is from the Indian Ocean island country of Mauritius and is undocumented. If the authorities found out that she is undocumented, they could send her back to Mauritius at any time. The lawyer M. Susane wants to help her get the necessary marriage certificate documents from Sharon’s sister, but Sharon resists. M. Susane tries to be helpful to Sharon in every way, but Sharon seems to reject her at every turn.

“The mere thought of offending Sharon horrified her.”

Both of these plot lines are quite straightforward, and the first half of the novel is easy to follow and understand, perhaps too easy.

However the novel takes a turn in the second half that is hard to follow. M. Susane has what amounts to a nervous breakdown and is plagued with self-doubt about her entire circumstances.

“Her memory of the few weeks Rudy and Sharon had spent caring for her was hazy, but she recalled with almost infuriating precision her desperate return home after leaving her office, locking the door, and telling herself she would never go back, that she had none of the qualities of a respectable lawyer, that even her parents, the only people on earth who loved her unconditionally, were now passing the cruelest but surely the most accurate judgment on her; she’d failed in every way.

There was no one she hadn’t let down.”

I don’t believe that Marie NDiaye adequately prepared her readers for this radical change to the plot. It’s like Ndiaye realized her original plots were not deep enough, so she tried something else.

I was disappointed with the ending, because it didn’t seem to answer any of the questions that the two earlier main plot streams naturally raised. To me, the ending did not fit what had happened before. The ending is unclear, murky. Neither plot line is given a satisfying conclusion. Instead we seem to be dealing with a main character who is falling apart.

I much preferred Marie NDiaye’s earlier work, ‘Three Strong Women’, to ‘Vengeance is Mine’. The plots of the three novellas in ‘Three Strong Women’, if not as dramatic, are much more relatable.

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Grade:    B

‘Martyr!’ by Kaveh Akbar – An American-Iranian Novel

 

‘Martyr!’ by Kaveh Akbar    (2024) – 323 pages

 

First note that there is no “translated by” reference on the title page of this novel. ‘Martyrs’ is written in good old English, lively American English. A love of English infuses ‘Martyr!’

“You’re the most American kid I know. You taught Shane how to play Madden, how to torrent Marvel movies. You buy fucking vinyl records. We’re having this conversation in Indiana, not Tehran.”

The above is a description of Cyrus, the main character in ‘Martyr!’. Cyrus is a young man who was born in Iran, but came to the United States when he was very little. His mother Roya was killed when Cyrus was still a baby when the USS Vincennes warship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airliner, an Airbus, on July 3, 1988. All 290 people on the plane were killed. The United States never did fully apologize for the incident, but did recompense the families of the victims in 1995. Cyrus’s father Ali moved himself and the baby to Indiana in the United States soon after the accident to work on an industrial chicken farm.

As a young man, Cyrus considers his mother Roya as well as the other 289 people who were killed on the plane as martyrs. He becomes fascinated by other martyrs such as Joan of Arc, Bobby Sands, the man who stood up to the tank in Tiananmen Square, and others. He decides to write his own book of martyrs.

By this time Cyrus’s father Ali has died.

“A wife’s sudden and meaningless death, immigration to a hostile nation, nearly two decades of six-days-a-week manual labor. Ali had earned the right to rest, even in Cyrus’s dreams.”

Cyrus becomes fascinated with this woman artist in New York City, Orkideh, who is dying of cancer and spending her final days in a museum speaking to visitors for an exhibition known as “Death-Speak.” Cyrus views Orkideh as a martyr also, and decides to go to New York City to talk to her.

“What about you though, Cyrus Shams? Orkideh asked. “If you become a martyr, won’t you be hurting the people who love you?”

Cyrus nodded. “Of course,” he said, then after a beat, “but it’s hard to figure out if that hurt would be worse than the hurt of my being here.”

Orkideh shook her head.

“It will be worse,” she said. “I promise. If you let yourself get a little older, you’ll understand that.”

Near the end of ‘Martyr!’ there is this inconceivable, unbelievable, far-fetched story twist in his family story that changes everything. But Cyrus has been so upfront about the rest of his crazy life, his addictions and his sex life, that we almost believe this insane incredible twist, almost. But even if we can’t accept this twist it still makes for a good resolution.

There are a lot of funny scenes in ‘Martyr!’. Kaveh Akbar is a poet also, and there is a lyrical energy to even his prose writing. As a shining example, consider this sentence:

“Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it. Cyrus understood that now, and stepped.”

.

 

Grade :    A-

 

‘Children of Paradise’ by Camilla Grudova – A Job at the Paradise Movie Theater

 

‘Children of Paradise’ by Camilla Grudova     (2022)  –  196 pages

 

The Paradise is an old movie theater built around the time of the outbreak of the First World War. The young woman Holly is new to this unnamed town, and when she sees a sign at the Paradise on its big dusty doors saying “We’re Hiring” she decides to apply for the job. She has to clean up the spilled popcorn and all the other even more disgusting stuff found on the floors of the theater as well as clean the toilets.

“I guess people found an animalistic pleasure in eating and drinking in the dark, in making a mess, leaving bags, boxes and cans behind.”

There are a lot of gross-out lines in ‘Children of Paradise’ of the toilets getting majorly clogged by movie patrons or disgusting stuff showing up on the theater seats or inside the popcorn machine. These kind of incidents probably happen in a lot of movie theaters but especially at the Paradise.

When Holly meets some of the other employees and regular customers of the Paradise, she finds that they are about as decrepit and spiky as the old theater itself. At first these other characters, the projectionist, the ticket sellers, the ushers avoid her. They are a clique.

However, in time they accept Holly and invite her to home screenings of their favorite movies. All of the offbeat weird employees share one thing in common, a love of the movies.

“They were a necessary evil, customers, so that we, the true devotees, could have access to the screen, our giant godlike monument.”

In time Holly becomes one of them, these strange lovers of movies. “I became a part of the Paradise.”

However, when the Paradise is bought out by the movie theater conglomerate chain CinemaTown, ‘Children of Paradise’ becomes a horror story. First the projectionist is fired, because movie theaters don’t need projectionists anymore. Instead of the older esteemed movies which the Paradise had shown, a steady diet of Marvel Universe superhero movies is brought in, which the former employees of the Paradise cannot tolerate. Things at the theater further deteriorate from there.

I was quite impressed with the author of ‘Children of Paradise’, Camilla Grudova, for setting up the gruesome scenes and characters of this ultimate horror story so vividly. This is her first novel. I will be reading her previous collection of stories ‘The Doll’s Alphabet’ soon.

 

Grade :   A

 

 

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan – Stories of Women and Men

 

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan   (2023)  –  118 pages

 

Note that the subtitle of this collection of three stories is “Stories of Women and Men”, not “Stories of Men and Women”. In each of these stories, the woman is the main protagonist and the man plays a peripheral though critical part. “Critical” is the operative word here.

“That was the problem with women falling out of love; the veil of romance fell away from their eyes, and they looked in and could read you.

But this one didn’t stop there.”

The man can only react to the woman’s lessened opinion of him.

“He had looked at her then and again saw something ugly about himself reflected back at him, in her gaze.”

The second story has a nice twist to it, a female writer retaliating. She is staying at the Boll House, the former home of the famous German author Heinrich Boll on Achill Island, to work on her new story. Heinrich Boll’s family left this house as a working residence for writers.

A German literary professor visits her at the house and she hopes he won’t interfere with her writing progress, However it turns out that he has been spying on her and is highly critical of her.

“You come to this house of Heinrich Boll and make cakes and go swimming with no clothes on.”

Our woman writer retaliates the best way she knows how. She puts him in her story and gives him “the long and painful death” in the story, which is the story title.

The first lines of the last story, “Antarctica”, are :

“Every time the happily married woman went away, she wondered how it would feel to sleep with another man. That weekend she was determined to find out.”

I doubt there are very many readers who could stop reading after those opening sentences

It’s proving very difficult to criticize anything Claire Keegan writes, and I am not going to do it. These three stories are all fine. This is a very quick lively read.

 

Grade:   A

 

 

‘This Plague of Souls’ by Mike McCormack – Terror in Ireland

 

‘This Plague of Souls’ by Mike McCormack     (2023) – 177 pages

 

Can one fault a writer for the key information he intentionally leaves out?

In ‘This Plague of Souls’ paints a picture of a man who has just been released from prison who returns to his small farm in western Ireland to find that his wife and son are not there. He cannot reach them by cell phone either, so he takes up living on the farm as he did before he met his wife.

This man, Nealon, gets these mysterious sporadic phone calls from a guy who seems to know all about him. This strange unknown guy wants to meet up with him, but Nealon hesitates at first. Who is he? What does he want?

In the meantime, I should mention something about the writing style of Mike McCormack. His descriptions are over the top, but so deadly acute and accurate. It’s as if every single word in this novel matters.

“The morning sky is swollen with clouds and driving rain through the gray light, in a steady fall, this day is down for good. Some people are already abroad, a harassed breed with their eyes fixed to the ground, dispirited before the day has drawn breath. They have about them the resentful look of men and women who wish they are elsewhere, anywhere.”

This unique inimitable description of the rain and the people of this city that Nealon is approaching could only be made by McCormack.

Meanwhile a major terrorist incident is occurring in Ireland, and the television anchors are filled with impending doom except when they continue to cover sports events.

Finally Nealon agrees to meet with this mysterious stranger who knows too much about him.

At this point, I was quite satisfied with ‘This Plague of Souls’ even though there were many unanswered questions. What were the crimes that Nealon had been in prison for? How did they relate to this new major terrorist threat? How did this mysterious stranger find out so much about Nealon? Surely they would all be answered in the denouement.

No, none of these questions was specifically answered. Instead we get a lot of dire talk from this mysterious stranger that seems to imply that Nealon was somehow directly involved in this new terrorist threat, but we get no new details about Nealon’s involvement. Instead we get hints like “ripping off insurance companies”.

I’m quite sure that Mike McCormack left out these details on purpose to create a modern ominous atmosphere of menacing terrorist doom, but this reader was left hanging with too many unanswered questions and critical facts left out.

 

Grade :    B