Jan - March 2018: Travelling the TBR Road

The first quarter of 2018 is set aside to catch up on Reading Globally themes from the past. Looking forward to particular themes, many of us seek out books that would be just right for that quarter. Then, for one reason or another, those books just don't get read. This quarter is a chance to catch up on at least a few.

Take a few moments and tell your fellow travellers

a) Do you have one or more groups of books for certain themes all ready to go?

b) If so, what are the themes and what will you be reading?

c) Will you be starting a previous theme from scratch, one you might not have been interested in before but are now?

d) Why do you think your books weren't read the first time around?

What if you don't have a TBR pile all ready to go? Try a theme you might find interesting, or find a completely new to you topic you haven't considered before, revisit an old favourite, or just wander around as the spirit moves you.

Here is a link to a list of themes from the past: http://www.librarything.com/groups/readinggloballyficti

Post your thoughts and reviews here, letting us know to which quarter you have travelled. Post them on that quarter's theme page as well if you wish.

______________

ETA the image is from a street exhibition in Melbourne.

LOVE that photo! Perfect start to what will be a very interesting quarter in reading!!

I do need to spend a bit of time thinking about your questions. Generally I have enjoyed seeing several titles in the last year since I started here. But there is so much new - overswhlming and yet exciting at the same time!

I’m looking forward to this one, although I probably won’t be doing much with it until I get back to my physical TBR next week. I’ve got quite a few things left over from two themes I engaged with fairly energetically at the time, the Nordic theme we just completed and the Caribbean from last year. Mostly additional books I bought by authors I discovered through the theme but simply didn’t have time for then. Also a few odds and ends that fit in with previous themes but weren’t bought specifically for them (e.g. three books from sub-Saharan Africa that have clocked up a total of well over 25 years of TBR time between them...). I’m bound to have a few things there that could count for Benelux or Post-war Germany as well, but I don’t know if that counts, since I’m always reading things from those regions anyway.

>2 cindydavid4: Agree completely: overwhelming and yet exciting

>3 thorold: Looking forward to seeing what you settle on.
Benelux and Postwar Germany certainly count, even if it is your usual fare, as people use those threads to discover new to them authors and books. They're certainly the first place I go.

I've caught up with one leftover from the Nordic thread, the first part of Moberg's Emigrant tetralogy: http://www.librarything.com/topic/270651#6327271

Looking through my TBR, I found 48 items that definitely match at least one past theme read, plus a few maybes. That's just under half my TBR shelf. (I'm counting paid ebooks or physical books present on my shelves before the start of 2017)
Somehow I don't think I'll get around to all of them!

The Delight of Hearts: Or What You Will Not Find in Any Book by al-Tifashi, Ahmad - TBR since 2007-04-17 2012 Q3 Middle East
La Invención de Morel (Penguin Ediciones) by Casares, Adolfo - TBR since 2015-01-20 2013 Q4 S America
Yo el Supremo by Roa Bastos, Augusto - TBR since 2016-10-11 2013 Q4 S America
Hijo de hombre by Roa Bastos, Augusto - TBR since 2017-06-15 2013 Q4 S America
Mr. Myombekere and his wife Bugonoka, their son Ntulanalwo and daughter Bulihwali : the story of an ancient African community by Kitereza, Aniceti - TBR since 2011-11-28 2014 Q1 sub-Saharan Africa
African laughter : four visits to Zimbabwe by Lessing, Doris - TBR since 2014-02-11 2014 Q1 sub-Saharan Africa
The Interpreters (African Writers Series) by Soyinka, Wole - TBR since 2007-04-17 2014 Q1 sub-Saharan Africa
Isara a Voyage Around Essay by Soyinka, Wole - TBR since 2007-04-17 2014 Q1 sub-Saharan Africa
Aspects of Provence (Travel Library) by Pope-Hennessy, James - TBR since 2014-05-11 2014 Q2 Travel
Alexander's path from Caria to Cilicia by Stark, Freya - TBR since 2012-08-06 2014 Q2 Travel
El laberinto de la soledad by Paz, Octavio - TBR since 2014-05-02 2014 Q3 Mexico
Sämtliche Gedichte. by Bachmann, Ingeborg - TBR since 2007-04-17 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Ein Lesebuch by Bernhard, Thomas - TBR since 2012-02-09 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Gesammelte Gedichte by Bernhard, Thomas - TBR since 2016-02-09 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Ansichten eines Clowns : Roman by Böll, Heinrich - TBR since 2017-06-13 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Mein Name sei Gantenbein by Frisch, Max - TBR since 2013-04-10 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Alles über Sally : Roman by Geiger, Arno - TBR since 2017-06-15 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern ein Gespräch mit Angelika Klammer by Müller, Herta - TBR since 2016-11-12 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Campo Santo by Sebald, Winfried Georg - TBR since 2013-02-06 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Ein perfekter Freund Roman by Suter, Martin - TBR since 2016-12-06 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Die Verteidigung der Kindheit : Roman by Walser, Martin - TBR since 2014-05-11 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Voraussetzungen einer Erzählung: Kassandra: Kassandra Frankfurter Poetik-Vorlesungen by Wolf, Christa - TBR since 2015-03-12 2014 Q4 Postwar Germany
Fasting, Feasting by Desai, Anita - TBR since 2015-03-12 2015 Q1 India
La colmena by Cela, Camilo José - TBR since 2014-03-11 2015 Q2 Iberia
El monarca de las sombras by Cercas, Javier - TBR since 2017-06-16 2015 Q2 Iberia
Malena es un nombre de tango by Grandes, Almudena - TBR since 2014-03-28 2015 Q2 Iberia
El caballero del jubón amarillo by Pérez-Reverte, Arturo - TBR since 2014-02-11 2015 Q2 Iberia
El maestro de esgrima by Pérez-Reverte, Arturo - TBR since 2017-07-11 2015 Q2 Iberia
Dublinesca by Vila-Matas, Enrique - TBR since 2014-11-29 2015 Q2 Iberia
Así empieza lo malo by Marías, Javier - TBR since 2017-06-16 2015 Q2 Iberia
L'espace d'un cillement by Alexis, Jacques Stéphen - TBR since 2016-01-21 2016 Q1 Caribbean
Long road to nowhere by Johnson, Amryl - TBR since 2016-02-18 2016 Q1 Caribbean
Cristo si è fermato a Eboli by Levi, Carlo - TBR since 2015-03-12 2016 Q4 Dictators
The kindly ones : a novel by Littell, Jonathan - TBR since 2011-07-16 2016 Q4 Dictators
Suite française by Némirovsky, Irène - TBR since 2017-06-15 2016 Q4 Dictators
Kélilé en Demné by Abdolah, Kader - TBR since 2017-04-06 2017 Q1 Benelux
De thuiskomst roman by Enquist, Anna - TBR since 2016-12-06 2017 Q1 Benelux
Blauwe maandagen by Grunberg, Arnon - TBR since 2017-06-15 2017 Q1 Benelux
De ingewijden by Haasse, Hella S. - TBR since 2012-04-18 2017 Q1 Benelux
Uit talloos veel miljoenen roman by Hermans, Willem Frederik - TBR since 2012-02-14 2017 Q1 Benelux
Vallende ouders by Van der Heijden, A.F.Th - TBR since 2011-06-23 2017 Q1 Benelux
De gevarendriehoek by Van der Heijden, A.F.Th - TBR since 2011-06-23 2017 Q1 Benelux
Verzameld werk 2 : Poëzie by Van Ostaijen, Paul - TBR since 2013-08-05 2017 Q1 Benelux
Meneer Beerta by Voskuil, J.J. - TBR since 2014-11-29 2017 Q1 Benelux
Pélagie-la-Charrette : roman by Maillet, Antonine - TBR since 2017-07-11 2017 Q3 non-maj languages
The good hope by Heinesen, William - TBR since 2017-10-31 2017 Q4 Nordic
The wreath by Undset, Sigrid - TBR since 2015-08-19 2017 Q4 Nordic
The emigrants by Moberg, Vilhelm - TBR since 2017-12-01 2017 Q4 Nordic

10/48 read as at 03.03.18

>6 thorold: oh I love Freya Stark and was not familiar with her Alexander book. Do let me know what you think of it.

>6 thorold: Like the way you have broken this down. So many titles to contemplate. I think I should try this too and see if there is a pattern to my RG TBR.

One more down today: this is one that's been lingering forgotten on my TBR shelf since long before I joined LT. I found a receipt from a local secondhand bookshop still tucked into the front cover, dated 25 May 1995. I think I must have bought it with a vague idea that it might be useful for a postcolonial lit dissertation I had to write, but then I found something else more interesting to write about and never got around to opening it...

The delight of hearts: Or what you will not find in any book (ca. 1250; English 1988) by Ahmad al-Tifashi (Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, 1184-1253)
- translated from Arabic to French by René R Khawam (Syria, France, 1917-2004) and from French to English by Edward A Lacey (Canada, 1938-1995)



Ahmad al-Tifashi was a 13th century Berber writer. Not much is known about him except that he was the compiler of this anthology (also known as A promenade of the hearts), a frequently-cited book on minerals, and a couple of medical texts.

The delight of hearts is a collection of medieval Arabic jokes, anecdotes and poems on the topic of sex, strung together and made to look respectable by suitable editorial comments and (pseudo-)scientific discussion from al-Tifashi. The respected French Arabist René Khawam produced the first complete translation of the text in 1971 (revised 1981); the English edition published in 1988 is a partial translation of the French text by the Canadian poet Edward Lacey. Logically enough, Gay Sunshine Press only paid Lacey to translate the bits about sex between men, which is about 60% of al-Tifashi's book. Obviously, anyone with a serious academic interest (or simply curious about the other 40%, which deals with topics like massage, flagellation, and anal sex with women) would do better to read it in French or Arabic.

In his introduction, al-Tifashi explains that his chief object is to entertain and amuse his readers. The Prophet himself is known to have indulged in jokes (although the examples al-Tifashi quotes don't seem very funny at this distance in time...), and there is plenty of evidence that laughing at life is a good thing. We shouldn't assume that he endorses any of the activities he writes about, or that they are safe and legal (much has changed in the world in 800 years, but not the porn industry's instinct for protecting itself with disclaimers!).

Actually, a surprising number of the anecdotes he recounts could fit into a comparable modern anthology given a few minor tweaks relating to types of clothing, means of transport, etc. Tales about sexual partners playing tricks on each other, being more or less well-endowed than expected, and so on, are surprisingly interchangeable. Other things are a bit more exotic - for instance, there's a whole chapter about incidents of "sleepwalking", penetrating someone (usually not the person you intend to) in their sleep, which only make sense in a culture where it's usual for groups of men to share a sleeping area, and where it's very dark at night.

Edward Lacey clearly does his best to preserve this light-hearted and subversive tone by using informal language in his translation, which sometimes gives rise to slightly odd transitions as we move from delicate quatrains about fish and gazelles to prose passages that read like an American 1980s hardcore porn paperback. And there are definitely some expressions that we could have done without - notably "dinge queens" (which he uses for men who like being penetrated by black slaves). I can't imagine that many people were still using that, even in 1988...

The translated poems, many of them by the 8th century poet Abu Nuwas, preserve rather more exotic atmosphere than the prose passages, but again Lacey isn't trying to outdo FitzGerald - he keeps the rhyme and metre quite loose most of the time.

An amusing and very sexy anthology, but I don't think it really tells us anything we didn't know about medieval Arab culture. Unless you have a very narrow view of the world, it will be no surprise to learn that men liked to fantasise about sex just as much 800 years ago as they do now, and that the number of imaginable permutations was not also so different from what it is now. Since we know that writing about beautiful boys became a fixed literary convention for later poets influenced by Abu Nuwas even if what they were thinking about were beautiful girls, or they were trying to describe religious ecstasies, we can't really take al-Tifashi as representative of the Arab world in the 13th century any more than we could draw conclusions about New York City in the 1970s from a reading of Larry Kramer.

You who wipe away my kiss
from your cheek,
fearing if your master saw it,
it would speak

and he'd punish you; if I'd
only known this
fear of yours, beautiful boy,
I'd have kissed away my kiss.
      (Abu Nuwas, translated by Lacey)

This one is rather younger (4 years on the TBR), but it counts for several themes: not only 2014 Q1 sub-Saharan Africa, but also 2014 Q2 Travel and Q4 2016 Dictators (Mugabe is a big off-stage presence throughout). Maybe we could also class her as a non-European travel writer, but that's stretching it a bit...

African laughter : four visits to Zimbabwe (1992) by Doris Lessing (UK, 1919-2013)

  

Doris Lessing grew up on a farm in what was then the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, an experience that left her with a profound love of the country and an equal detestation for the racist values of the colonial society that ran it, both of which strongly influenced her writing. She moved to the UK in 1949 (aged 30), and apart from one visit in 1956 was not permitted to return until after independence - the Smith government classified her as a "prohibited immigrant" because of her political affiliations.

In this book, Lessing describes returning to newly-independent Zimbabwe in 1982, 1988, 1989 and 1992. Although the material covers a period of ten years, she has obviously tried to avoid hindsight as far as possible and records her impressions of what she saw and heard in a very direct, immediate way - not quite a diary, but something very like it. The text is divided up into short, essay-like sections under sub-headings, in a slightly jokey newspaper style that looks as though it might be meant partly as a tribute to one of the friends she visits, a teacher in a remote bush school who is managing against all the odds to help his students produce a school magazine. But it also allows her to foreground how life in Zimbabwe is changing, by returning to a topic from a previous year under the same sub-heading.

In 1982, she is full of optimism - Zimbabwe is doing much better economically than most of its neighbours, it is able to feed itself, the scars of the long civil war seem to be healing, politics is not noticeably more corrupt than it was in 18th century Britain, and everyone (apart from her white farmer relatives, who are all muttering about selling up and going to South Africa) seems to believe in the country and its future. Where there are big problems, she sees people working hard to find ways to solve them.

On the subsequent visits, the tone changes a bit - many of the whites who left have come back, disappointed with what they found in South Africa, and are now putting their weight behind building a fair and multi-racial society in Zimbabwe, but climate change, soil erosion, AIDS, frequent shifts of agricultural policy, galloping corruption, and the increasing isolation and paranoia of Mugabe's single-party government all seem to be pushing the country into crisis. Of course, we know with hindsight that things only got (a lot) worse after 1992.

As we would expect, Lessing is a very clear and frank observer, both of what is going on and of her own reactions to it, which are obviously complicated by her status: she's simultaneously an outsider, a member of the colonial white farming class, and a left-leaning revolutionary. Most of the time she tells her story through the things people say to her and the things she directly observes herself, without resorting to newspaper reports or statistics. She works hard to see the positive and not allow herself to be distracted by the everyday inconveniences of African life.

There's a lot in the book about how the Zimbabwean landscape has been changed by the impact of increasing population - the bush that Lessing and her brother were able to roam in freely as children in the 1920s has shrunk, wildlife has disappeared in many areas, and the soil is suffering from erosion and overuse of chemicals.

Lessing also writes very perceptively about how aid projects work out on the ground. There is a very heartening description of the Book Team, a self-help project to provide villages with easily-intelligible handbooks on everyday topics. She goes out on the road with the team and is impressed with the enthusiasm and commitment of the village women who travel long distances to join in meetings and provide content for the books. And the sheer fun that they have doing it.

But we also hear about the mismatch between what people need and what aid organisations think they should have; how good ideas fail from problems in the supply of basic resources: schools that can't get books because of import restrictions; machines that can't be used for lack of spare parts; qualified teachers and nurses who don't want to work in remote areas, so their places have to be taken by enthusiastic but inexperienced foreign volunteers, etc. (all problems I've come across in many other countries when I was working with a development fund).

A constant refrain in the conversations Lessing has with black Zimbabweans is the comment "If Comrade Mugabe only knew..." - Lessing doesn't need to remind us of how many other kings and dictators that has been said by their loyal but worried subjects...

I've tried reading Lessings novels and never could get into them, but this sounds like it could be a very interesting read.

I'm definitely feeling the need for a catch-up quarter, which I think has a lot to do with two factors: 1) there were a couple of theme reads last year on topics that particularly interest me, so I have "leftovers" (books I had but didn't manage to read during the quarter, or books I bought as a result of the quarter but too late to add to my to-read stack for the quarter). And it turns out that leading a theme read is not good for my TBR shelf! 2) 2017 was a less productive reading year than it might have been, because I got distracted by a job change and cross-country move, and I also spent too much time obsessing over terrible politics I can't do much about.

Looking at my TBR shelf, I think there may also be another dynamic happening in my reading and purchase choices: I'm more likely to actively seek out books and writers who are more obscure, because with the familiar and/or better known ones I tend to figure, I can read them any time. So instead of ordering those books I leave it up to chance, waiting for them to cross my path.

My current stack includes several books that were inspired by 2017 Q3 (non-majority language writers) and 2017 Q4 (Nordic countries). While not specifically purchased for a particular quarter, I have a number that would fit 2016 Q2 (writers at risk) or 2011 Q4 (migration/immigration), 2016 Q3 (Soviet and Post-Soviet writers), and a bunch for 2014 Q4 (post-war Germany). I also have a few that probably also fit into 2016 Q4 (dictators and tyranny) or 2011 Q2 (war and conflict) by virtue of being in one of the previously mentioned categories -- war and dictatorship are the major themes of 20th-century German and Russian literature. I also have 1 or 2 books each for Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula, East-Central Europe, the Mediterranean, and the British Isles.

German and Russian literature are on-going themes in my regular reading. I've been gradually starting to read more anglophone writers again because I go through phases of frustration with German novelists' tendency to limit themselves to a small range of topics, while literature from the English-speaking world is often more diverse thematically and innovative stylistically. Another topic of on-going interest is authors who write in a language that is not their mother tongue (variously referred to as "translingual" or "exophonic").

One of my personal goals for this year is to read more writers from Africa and more non-fiction that looks at social justice issues. These are, however, at present better represented in my virtual wishlist than my physical to-be-read shelf.

New post to avoid this being quite so much a wall of text. You can start here if you're interested in the book reviews rather than me waffling about reading choices.

So far, true to form, I have done no catch-up on reading books that I had specifically earmarked for theme reads in 2017. Instead I have finished 2 books by contemporary German-language writers, who, however, could otherwise hardly be more different:

Jenny Erpenbeck's Heimsuchung is a collection of interlinked miniatures centered around a vacation property in rural Brandenburg. The people come and go, not always in chronological order, and we see the house and property grow and change and finally decline. Between these chapters, as a counterpoint we watch the changing of the seasons, presided over by the silent figure of the gardener. Erpenbeck isn't a showy writer, and readers interested mostly in plot are likely to be disappointed. Her writing is, however, incredibly crafted and the experimental form is completely suited to the philosophical level of her writing. She's written a handful of other short novels, equally original in approach, which I will be adding to my reading list in due time. (Read in German; the novel is available in English in a translation by Susan Bernofsky titled Visitation)

Abbas Khider was imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq and eventually ended up settling in Germany. He writes in German and has published several novels that address themes inspired by his experiences as a political prisoner in Iraq and a refugee in Germany; however, his fiction is not simply veiled autobiography. His novel The Village Indian is available in English. I read Brief in die Auberginenrepublik ("A Letter to the Eggplant Republic"), which follows the path of a letter that a young Iraqi exile in Libya sends through an underground network in order to let his girlfriend know that he is still alive. Each of the chapters is narrated by one of the people who comes in contact with the letter. The reader thus gets a tour of the Arab world and the various forms of surveillance and propaganda prevalent in each of the countries. It's told in a conversational style that seems naive but isn't really; the light tone helps to balance what would probably otherwise be fairly grim content. It's generally well-told and has a nice twist at the end; nonetheless, the novel is probably more valuable for its content than its literary qualities alone. Khider isn't quite as skilled a writer as, say, the Syrian Rafik Schami (who also writes in German), and the first-person present-tense narration occasionally felt artificial. One suspects a didactic purpose, although he manages to avoid being preachy, and certainly what he has to say is worthwhile for German readers to hear. But I was left feeling like I would have liked the book to offer a bit more.

>13 spiphany: Erpenbeck is very interesting. I liked Heimsuchung almost as much as Aller Tage Abend - I should find time to read some of her other books as well.

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This one counts for 2015 Q1 India and it's been on the TBR for three years. I bought it after reading Clear light of day and then put it aside "for a bit" because it looked as though the two novels would have very similar themes (they do...). I've also read Baumgartner's Bombay, quite a long time ago.

Fasting, Feasting (1999) by Anita Desai (India, 1937- )

  

Anita Desai grew up in India with a German mother and a Bengali father. She spoke German at home but had most of her schooling in English, which is the language she writes in. She's lived in the UK and US as well as India. Amongst other things, she's an (emeritus) professor at MIT. Several of her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker but - unlike her daughter Kiran Desai - she's never actually won it.

Fasting, feasting is another novel that builds on Philip Larkin's famous line about parents(*), looking at two seriously dysfunctional families. Uma's middle-class, provincial, Indian MamaPapa (she finds it hard to think of them as separate entities) don't see any particular need for her to have a life of her own. Several attempts to marry her off have failed ignominiously, as have some half-hearted attempts at rebellion, and since she's not clever enough or pretty enough to get away with fighting her parents long-term, she finds herself stuck in a life of looking after her baby brother and running pointless errands. Her pretty cousin doesn't fare much better, either - she is married off only to find herself at the mercy of a bullying mother-in-law.

Lest we think that all this is just a rant against "traditional" attitudes to women in India, Desai then changes the scene to Massachusetts, where Uma's overprivileged little brother has been sent for the obligatory "studying overseas". It becomes clear immediately that he's been just as heavily damaged by being pushed to succeed as Uma has by being pushed to fail, and moreover he finds himself staying with an American family that is every bit as dysfunctional as his own, with none of its members (least of all the father, who blithely keeps on barbecuing meat for vegetarians...) paying any serious attention to what's going wrong in the lives of the others. The only real difference between the Indians and the Americans seems to be that the American parents get a chance to mitigate some of the harm they've done before it's absolutely too late.

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(*) Or possibly that tries to disprove Tolstoy's...

>13 spiphany:, >14 thorold: I just read my first Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone and loved it. I will definitely be reading more by her.


I just finished this by Spanish writer Jesús Carrasco, a visceral coming-of-age story set in a bleak, arid landscape, inhospitable to life. Carrasco's descriptions make us feel the scorching sun and feel the constant thirst that accompanies his boy protagonist everywhere.

A boy runs away from home, fleeing the drought, poverty, and some unnamed horror. He has no real plan except to go north. He soon runs out of food and water and is helped by an old goatherd. As they journey together, we learn more about what the boy is running from, and he learns valuable lessons of survival:
"The old man was clearly not going to be the one to hand him the key to the world of adults, that world in which brutality was meted out for reasons of greed or lust. He himself had been guilty of meting out violence, exactly as he had seen those around him do, and now he was demanding his share of impunity. The elements had pushed him far beyond what he knew and didn't know about life."

I read and very much enjoyed Enquist's 2008 novel Contrapunt for the 2017 Q1 Benelux theme read. This one wasn't on my TBR list above, because I only bought it last week (but her Mrs Cook novel De thuiskomst is on the list - maybe I should have read that first...):

Het meesterstuk (1994; The masterpiece) by Anna Enquist (Netherlands, 1945- )

  

The Dutch classical musician and psychoanalyst Christa Widlund-Broer has been publishing poems and novels under the pen-name Anna Enquist since 1991. She's also recorded several poetry and music CDs with the pianist Ivo Janssen.

Enquist's début novel Het meesterstuk obviously picks up on both sides of her professional background, although there's rather more psychology and less music than in the later Contrapunt. The painter Johan Steenkamer is preparing for the opening of an important retrospective exhibition in one of Amsterdam's top museums. Johan's ex-wife's-best-friend, Lisa, a psychiatrist, looks on with a mixture of fascination and detached amusement whilst tension mounts among the members of the Steenkamer family: something spectacular is clearly going to happen at the opening.

It soon becomes obvious that this is a Freudian whodunnit in the best Oedipal tradition, with a fine assortment of suspects including Johan's absent father, controlling mother, dead child and jealous sibling. There's more fish-imagery than you can find in a barrel of herrings, and when you start looking at the names of the characters you begin to wonder whether there might not be a Don Giovanni thing going on here as well. Especially when you see that Johan has defiantly invited his missing father (now living in New York as Charles Stone...) to the party.

Thankfully, Enquist manages to avoid most of the tramlines that all this structure is trying to force her into, and delivers a novel that is never quite predictable and a set of characters who refuse to sit themselves in neat little boxes. And some passages of wonderfully - sometimes heartbreakingly - memorable intensity. If it is a Don Giovanni, it's a Don Giovanni that makes us think more about what happens to Anna, Elvira, Zerlina and Ottavio and less about the Don and Leporello. But I felt that this did come at a certain cost: by avoiding the pitfalls that the structure has set for her, she diverts a lot of the emotional impact away from the big finale and leaves us feeling a little bit unsatisfied at the end of the novel. We weren't really expecting Johan literally to be dragged down into the flames of Hell in the foyer of the Nationaalmuseum, but a few trombones at least would have been nice...

>1 SassyLassy: Thank you SassyLassy for getting us started! Even though we're always free to participate in an old challenge on an old thread, I love the idea of a catch-up quarter to give an extra push.

>17 frahealee: Hi frahealee! I loved The Painted Girls and I hope you like it too!

Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder has been on my tbr for awhile and I didn't get to it during The Nordic Countries quarter (October-December 2017). It didn't get read because I was trying to wrap up too many other challenges at the end of the year. Hopefully I can do it this time around.

>19 frahealee: I'm almost done!

I've finished another one from the TBR. Unusually, this was an ebook I bought in August 2012 but then put aside - I'm not sure why now (maybe I bought it to take on holiday?).

This could be counted for 2012 Q3 Middle East or 2014 Q2 Travel

Alexander's Path (1958) by Freya Stark (UK, etc., 1893-1993)

  

Freya Stark was one of the great British travel writers of the last century, but for some reason I've read hardly any of her work. She grew up mostly in Asolo in Italy - her British father, an artist, was a close friend of Pen Browning (son of EBB and Robert); her mother was a German-Italian. After studying at SOAS and war service as a VAD nurse in Italy, she started to travel extensively in the wilder parts of the Middle East from the 1920s onwards. Her last expedition was to Afghanistan in 1970.

Alexander's Path was the result of three lengthy trips Stark made to Southern Anatolia in the 1950s. In the course of her travels, she became interested in puzzling out the exact route that Alexander the Great followed through Asia Minor with his Macedonian army between the battles of the Granicus and Issus (334-333 BCE). The book evolved into a composite narrative of Stark's travels, geographically arranged "in reverse order" from East to West, followed by a more scholarly appendix that sets out the evidence Stark found for and against the different theories about where the Macedonians actually marched.

Although I'm moderately interested in Alexander, I don't really know the source material well enough to be seriously interested in the nitty-gritty of this mountain pass versus that one, and I didn't have any good maps of the region to hand when I was reading this anyway, so I skipped rather lightly over a lot of the military history, but I very much enjoyed Stark's often almost lyrical accounts of the landscapes and cities she found, and her hard-nosed but also oddly sympathetic comments on the people she met, the realities of their lives, and their reactions to her as an independent woman traveller. Although her chief business is to look at Hellenic-era ruins in the context of the landscape, she isn't one of those archaeological writers who regard the current inhabitants of the area they are visiting as merely a nuisance and/or a source of cheap labour - she clearly has a lot of respect for the Anatolian villagers who are often struggling to make a living in very difficult conditions. And when she stays the night in someone's house, rents horses from them, or employs them as a driver or guide, she wants to know about their families, how they live, what their aspirations are, and so on. In several cases this clearly develops into a real friendship. But she is also an old hand at Asian travel by this time, so she doesn't hesitate to hit back when someone tries to feed her misleading information, or to cheat her beyond the generally understood permissible limit. Her scorn falls equally on lazy Turkish innkeepers and on inexperienced British archaeologists who don't know the first thing about managing horses on mountain tracks. But not on Alexander, with whom she's clearly more than a little in love, and who can do no wrong...

A very entertaining, very human bit of travel writing.

>21 thorold: Thanks for that review. I mentioned above that Ive read quite a few of her book, but some how missed this one. Will definitely need to read it!

>21 thorold: Alexander's Path was the very first Freya Stark book I ever read -- it was a long time ago, before I went to college. It made me a fan for life, and Freya became the first person ever to go on my "People I'd love to have dinner with" list.

>22 cindydavid4: Yes, I want to go back to her earlier books now...
>23 southernbooklady: Hmm. She's evidently not a fussy eater, so it wouldn't be hard to find a restaurant that suits her, but I think the cook and the waiters would get a very frank opinion afterwards, so you might not be able to go back there for a while!

I managed to strike another one off the list. A book that simply got overlooked on the shelf because its moment passed, like The delight of hearts. I don't know for sure, but would guess that I bought it somewhere around 1992, when I was taking a course during which we studied one of Soyinka's plays, so it must have clocked up around 25 years of TBR time.

This one counts for 2014 Q1 sub-Saharan Africa

The interpreters (1965) by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1934- )

  

Wole Soyinka, the 1986 Nobel Laureate, is probably the most famous name in African literature (closely followed by his fellow-Nigerian, Chinua Achebe). He's best known as playwright, poet, professor, and political activist, but he's also written memoirs and a couple of novels, of which this was the first. He writes in English.

The Interpreters probably came over as a very African novel when it first appeared, but the first thing that strikes you reading it now is what a very 1960s novel it is. A group of intelligent young men (and their girlfriends) are struggling against the dull, conventional and corruptly self-interested way of life of the older generation, a struggle that mostly takes the form of long, earnest discussions about politics, philosophy and religion, all punctuated by drink, sex and subversive music and undermined by a series of absurd accidents and social embarrassments that leave them more-or-less back where they started.

But it is African as well, of course: the young characters are caught between the temptations of aspiring to one of the competing value-systems of western capitalism (most of them have studied abroad) and "old Africa" - where the tribal gods are competing with Christianity and Islam. At the same time, they are confronted with the unholy compromises that the current postcolonial ruling classes have made to protect their own interests.

Soyinka knows very well that adopting the form of the novel means that he's committing himself to the metropolitan mechanisms of production and distribution that go with that - he has to get it published in London, and he knows that the audience he can deliver it to is restricted by language, the written medium, access to books, and the leisure to read. Unlike plays and poems - accessible to everyone because they can be delivered orally over the radio, or live wherever actors can find a space to perform - novels are read only by people-who-read-novels, which for Soyinka in 1965 means students, foreigners, and the wealthy middle classes. That's presumably why he's only written one other novel. And why this is such a complicated, literary novel, full of direct and implied references to other books of the time, mostly at least slightly mocking: One of the characters keeps talking flippantly about cultivating his negritude (by going out in the sun); another has mapped out a pastiche existentialist philosophical system based on the pleasures of defecation; there's an American refugee from a James Baldwin novel who also happens to be a James Baldwin fan; there is a faculty party given by a pompous professor and subverted by one of the drunken characters, who is gatecrashing - to make sure we don't miss the Lucky Jim allusions there, we keep overhearing someone in the background talking about the Madrigal Group. And so on.

The nasty portrayal of the gay Baldwin-fan, Joe Golder, was probably offensive at the time, and of course feels doubly so now, when we know about the ways that the notion of homosexuality as an "unafrican" import has been used to whip up anger against LGBT people in so many African countries. We keep expecting Soyinka as narrator to step back from his characters' disgust with the fact of Golder's homosexuality and put it in perspective, but he never does, and it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that (at least when he wrote this) he shared their views.

Soyinka is a magnificent writer with a great feel for surprising and devastating images (often in very unexpected places, e.g. Like two halves of a broad bean, the pachydermous radiogram and the Managing Director.). He is also a dramatist who knows exactly how to place a major speech or a deflating incident where it can have the most impact, so this is never a dull book. But it is a complicated book, with a very heavy load of symbolism that never quite gets resolved, and many people who read it seem to feel afterwards that they aren't much further on. Given that it was published on the eve of a terrible civil war, it's perhaps not surprising that there is no neat ending with a vision for the future of Nigeria.

>24 thorold: Thanks for that review - he sounds very interesting. I might take a stab at that book.

>24 thorold: thoroid: I definitely want to come back to him and check out his books. Trying to cover some of the African countries/cultures I haven't read before I read another Nigerian but I'll always detour for a good book.

>24 thorold: Interesting current take on Soyinka, which makes sense. I really liked his work years ago, but haven't read him for some time. It would be worth another look at him given, as you say, all that has happened since. Sort of like reading Joseph Roth and knowing what is to come, but then Roth was never to know, while Soyinka knows all too well.

>27 SassyLassy: Similar ideas kept coming up when we were looking at the Caribbean - the black writers of the 60s were strongly inspired by négritude as expressed by people like Césaire and Senghor, and that all too easily turns into a cult of black masculinity. There’s at best a fine line between that and what looks to us like sexism and homophobia. To be fair to Soyinka, we ought to be looking at what he’s written rather more recently than the sixties.

Oddly enough, I always think of Roth as one of the few people who had a pretty clear idea in the early thirties how bad things were going to get. Unfortunately his strategy for dealing with it was to consume as much alcohol as possible...

>28 thorold: That Caribbean quarter was excellent: http://www.librarything.com/topic/209482 for anyone who missed it or wants suggestions or a revisit.

I also need to catch up with Soyinka, and I'm currently wandering in and out of The Hotel Years

Meanwhile, following thorold's example in >6 thorold: above, I have assembled some TBR books which were shelfless. This does not count any of the books in my unpacked boxes labelled TBR, but it is probably fairly representative. I am afraid to open those boxes.

The Saga of Gosta Berling Sweden
Paradise Reclaimed Iceland

Silent Close East Germany
Too Far Afield Germany
Austerlitz Germany

The Ghost Rider Albania
Doruntine Albania

The Maias Portugal
Mazurka for Two Dead Men Spain
The Abruzzo Trilogy Italy

The Nine Guardians Mexico

Hopscotch Argentina
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll Colombia

Doing a bit of analysis, I see the biggest problem: out of the thirteen books, three are over 600 pages and one is over 500.

The books with the best chance are Kadare's, as he is a favourite author. The Germans probably have the least chance of being read, as for some reason they require more work, a reflection on me, not them.

I have been reading Mazurka for Two Dead Men for a week now and not making any progress, which is slowing down my reading.

How is everyone else doing?

>28 thorold: I just read Kadare's Twilight of the Eastern Gods and enjoyed the insight into how art and censorship and nationalism collide, as well as the story of Paternak's Nobel. I have Hopscotch on my TBR pile as well and need to get to it.

I'm jumping around to honor Black History Month, so I'm currently in Florida trying to make out what they were seeing when Their Eyes Were Watching God.

>29 SassyLassy: Silent Close is end-of-the-DDR in a nutshell, and quite short - probably a good investment of your time. Maron’s a writer I only found out about quite recently, but well worth pursuing. Austerlitz is an amazing book, but it’s one to be taken slowly, because you’ll probably remember it for a long time. Gösta Berling is a quick, fun read.

>29 SassyLassy: >30 jveezer: You could quite legitimately cheat with Hopscotch - he allows you to decide your own reading sequence, and a sequence doesn’t necessarily need to have more than two chapters in it...!

This was one I ordered after reading The lost musicians for the Nordic theme read. It arrived last October, but looked dauntingly fat, so I didn't quite get around to it before Christmas...

The good hope (1964; English 2011) by William Heinesen‬ (Faroes, 1900-1991), translated by W Glyn Jones (1928-2014)

  

(Don't be misled by the messy, amateur-looking cover design: this is from a perfectly respectable publisher, Dedalus.)

I liked The lost musicians, but it didn't really strike me as a book by someone who could have been seriously discussed as a candidate for the Nobel. This one does. It's easily in the same league as Independent people, and deserves to be better known.

It's a historical novel in the form of a serial letter from Peder Børresen to a friend in Denmark, describing his experiences after being appointed as pastor to the parish of Tórshavn in the Faroes in the spring of 1669.

Peder is clearly a learned, conscientious and fearless clergyman who numbers some of the most influential people in Denmark among his friends from college days, but a weakness for alcohol has got him into trouble on numerous occasions in the past, and this is only the latest in a series of transfers to remote and backward regions designed to get him out of the way. And obviously another miscalculation, because he is not someone to accept the way his poor parishioners in Tórshavn are being treated by the authorities, and he's soon involved in the fight of his life.

Under the overlordship of Frederick III's notoriously rapacious minister Christoffer von Gabel, the islanders are being robbed blind through the trading monopoly of the Royal Store. They are absolutely dependent on imported grain and timber, and their only real income is from the wool they export. Gabel's officials have absolute control over all communications to and from the islands, and they use that and the criminal justice system - which is equally under their thumbs - to quash any hint of political opposition. The military commandant of the islands is free to amuse himself by raping the islanders' young daughters - anyone who objects is arrested on a trumped-up charge and thrown into the Black Hole.

The pastor finds himself involved in opposition to Gabel from the start - his predecessor's daughter, Rachel, is one of the commandant's victims, and her fiancé, the son of the parish clerk, is in jail awaiting sentence after daring to challenge the commandant. But somehow, although he scarcely believes in that sort of thing himself, he also gets caught up in the islanders' active sense of the supernatural, acquiring a reputation for driving out demons after succeeding in calming a couple of people with mental health problems.

Heinesen manages to capture the flavour of Peder's fiery 17th century combination of anger and self-doubt brilliantly. In Glyn Jones's elegant translation it comes across as belonging to the tradition of Robinson Crusoe and John Bunyan, without ever quite being conspicuously archaic, but also without ever stepping out of the frame to remind you that this is a 21st century translation of a book written in the 1960s. Obviously, the book does have a political agenda: Peder's opposition to the evils of absolutism is meant to make the reader think about Nazi abuses, and also about Denmark's current relationship with its dependencies. He possibly reacts to things that someone used to 17th century absolutism would not have considered unduly excessive (even if he was a graduate of Leiden). But that didn't trouble me whilst I was reading - Heinesen pulls you so completely into Peder's world-view that the 20th and 21st centuries seem quite irrelevant for a while.

>32 thorold: That looks really interesting. Thanks. Also, it suggests another theme read: Authors Who've Had their Likenesses on Postage Stamps.

>33 rocketjk: Could be interesting - in effect it might turn out to be a variation on the “classics in their own country” idea, I suppose.

This was another one that was recommended in Sjón's Guardian article on Nordic fiction last October (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/11/top-10-modern-nordic-books) - it sounded interesting, but he was a little bit too quick off the mark in promoting it, as the English translation only came out this month. It landed in my letter-box a few days ago, so I'm counting it as off the "virtual TBR".

The endless summer (2014; English 2018) by Madame Nielsen (Denmark, 1963- ), translated by Gaye Kynoch

  

Madame Nielsen is a multi-gendered Danish actor, musician, dramatist, journalist, performance artist, novelist, etc., etc., who has also written books under her "boy's name" Claus Beck-Nielsen.

Like most of the other books, songs, and albums called (The) Endless Summer, this novella takes its title from a group of young people spending a holiday somewhere nice with lots of sex, fresh air, sunshine, and no depressing thoughts about tomorrow. But Madame Nielsen treats the concept with more irony than most. The "endless summer" - always in scare-quotes - is something that ended a long time ago, time only flows forwards, the life-choices that were up for grabs then have all been used up, the promises have mostly not been fulfilled, and most of those extraordinary people have ended up with quite predictable and dismal lives. Or deaths.

But the language of the book seems to fight that depressing message - the long, swooping lines of the text circle delicately, often beautifully, about the drabness and squalor. They loop back and forth as though to undermine the monotony of time, they pin down the irrelevant and leave the important largely undefined and ambiguous. There is power in having had moments of beauty in our lives, the book seems to be telling us, and the futures we didn't exploit are still meaningful to us.

It's difficult to say whether this is a lovely, consoling piece of Proustian melancholy or a slightly banal triumph of style over substance. It probably depends on how cynical you are feeling when you read it. I quite enjoyed it, and it's apparently been a success in Denmark, but I don't think it's really something I'm going to come back to.

>33 rocketjk: Too funny

>35 thorold: ...The dry wit, the willingness to dwell in melancholia and look at the world through its blue-tinted glasses, the social criticism that comes with bringing to light the stories of the marginalised..." I thought for a moment Sjón was in Scotland.

I need to read more of him. I loved From the Mouth of the Whale.

>35 thorold: I will look for this one.

>36 SassyLassy: Yes, in what Sjón sees there is definitely some overlap with the “Literate herring this way” side of Scottish culture. https://youtu.be/mNguddGEdw8

Probably applies a bit better to Tómas Jónsson bestseller than to The endless summer.

>37 thorold: That was wonderful.

This one has been on the TBR since July 29, 2012.

2015, Q3: Nobel Laureates Writing in a Language Other than English

Cela won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1989.



Mazurka for Two Dead Men by Camilo José Cela translated from the Spanish by Patricia Haugaard 1992
first published as Mazurca para dos muertos in 1984
finished reading February 12, 2018

This book made me work. That's not a bad thing, but along the way it almost drove me crazy. I couldn't make sense of it. Was there a clue in the title? I looked up the structure of a mazurka to see if there was a link between that and the prose rhythm. There wasn't.

Then one day, about one hundred and seventy-five pages in, I discovered the secret. Up 'til then, I had been reading it in ten to twenty page segments, and that day I read about seventy. It clicked. This is a book which requires immersion. There is a rhythm and music to it which can't be appreciated in brief bursts.

Set in a rural village in Galicia during the Spanish Civil War, the novel tells a story of clan loyalty and revenge that could have happened in any era, but is one which the war magnifies and repeats again and again. The mazurka in question is one which the blind accordion player from the brothel will only play twice: once for the oldest of the nine Gamuzo brothers, Lionheart, when he was murdered in 1936; and once more when his death was avenged three years later. However, the novel starts with another murder, that of Lazaro Codesal, whose death had caused the rain to fall continuously ever since, obliterating the line of the mountain range beyond it, and keeping the villagers in their own world. Here we have the two great themes of the novel: revenge and superstition.

Imagine an old bard telling a story. There is repetition. There are digressions, complications, and red herrings. Cela's novel is like that, only there is not just one narrator there are many. There are no chapter breaks and it is up to the reader to know when the changes in narrator occur. Added to these voices is that of the recorder, who sometimes interjects his own thoughts, and sometimes stops his recording altogether to converse with a narrator. Time is like a tide in this novel, ebbing and flowing back and forth.

As each assertion is introduced, it seems like a simple fact. It grows with a slight embellishment each time it is repeated, connecting to other facts, other characters, setting up rivalries, explaining family histories. It's like elderly aunties competing with each other to air the dirty laundry in the baldest of language, leaving nothing out. These are peasants, close to the land, their animals and each other. Often they fail to make the usual distinctions. Always there is that underlying bloodlust, that drive to avenge the murder. As the arrangements are made, the pace quickens, a certain tension is introduced.

In this novel of layers though, there is yet another death that must be avenged. Cidrán Segade was killed half an hour after his comrade Lionheart. His wife Adega's wish was to live long enough to see the murderer dead and buried. She wouldn't utter his name, she just wanted to see him dead and his remains sullied. Sullied they were when the time came after revenge had been extracted. Even then, Adega could not speak his name, calling him always "the dead man that killed my old man", one of the refrains of the novel.

Throughout, Cela pokes fun at those in authority. He gets his last dig in with a coroner's report on the dead man. While there is truth in it, it is so far off the mark as to be ludicrous. The villagers have won.

__________
crossposted from my Club Read thread

>39 SassyLassy: Interesting - I keep meaning to have a proper go at Cela, and I've had La Colmena on my shelves for ages. I suspect that it's another one that needs a lot of time and attention. The little travel book Viaje a la Alcarria is the only one I've read so far.

---

Meanwhile, I'm ploughing on with 2014 Q1 sub-Saharan Africa:

I ordered this some seven years ago after a German friend told me about it, but I wasn't quite prepared for its remarkable bulk - when it finally appeared (on back-order from Dar-es-Salaam, apparently) it turned out to be going on for one and a half kilos of paper, 700 pages of large-format paperback. Not something you want to lug about with you on buses, and guaranteed to break free and fall in your muesli if you try to read it at the breakfast-table. So it stayed on the TBR shelf for rather a long time...

Mr. Myombekere and his wife Bugonoka, their son Ntulanalwo and daughter Bulihwali : the story of an ancient African community (Kikerewe 1945 unpublished; Kiswahili 1981; English 2002) by Aniceti Kitereza (Tanzania, 1896-1981); translated by Gabriel Ruhumbika (Tanzania, 1938-)



This book has developed a significant, if modest, reputation, especially in Germany, as a classic of "naive literature", a Things fall apart without the literary underpinnings, and in particular as one of the very few early African novels to be written in a pre-colonial African language.

Aniceti Kitereza (that's him in the cover picture) grew up in the early days of German colonialism on Ukerewe, a large island in Lake Victoria (somewhere between Anglesey and the Isle of Wight in size), in the north of what is now Tanzania. Partly because he belonged to the family of the traditional ruler of Ukerewe, he was educated in a mission school and then studied at a Roman Catholic seminary, but he seems to have decided not to enter the priesthood, and worked in the rice business in Mwanza for some years. On the outbreak of WWII, he returned to Ukerewe where he worked for the rest of his life as a lay staff member of the Catholic mission.

Kitereza wrote Mr Myombekere in 1945, primarily for the benefit of the Wakerewe people, whom he saw losing touch with their traditional culture through the effects of colonialism. It's really a primer in the practices of daily life in Ukerewe, wrapped up in the form of a long and rambling story set in an unspecified pre-colonial period, in which nothing in particular happens except for the normal events of family life - courtship, marriage, birth, death, sickness, minor disputes, the work of cooking, butchering, hunting, farming, fishing and craftsmanship, the brewing (and consumption!) of banana beer, religious rites, healing, etc., etc., etc. (yes, definitely a three etc. book - two would be inadequate to describe it). It's directionless, repetitive, inconsistently paced, totally lacking in suspense and drama, and should be a disaster of a book, but there's just so much detail that it becomes crazily fascinating. You can't help wanting to know more about a society in which men were not supposed to be able to see their mothers-in-law, or in which the resumption of marital relations after childbirth was marked symbolically by husband and wife both urinating into a cow's horn.

The mood is very much that of oral storytelling, full of digressions and verbatim repetitions of long speeches, and it is something that is best read slowly, a chapter or two at a time, adapting yourself to an "African pace". Given his educational background, Kitereza must have been well aware of the biblical and classical Greek foundations of western culture, but quite unlike Achebe, he chose to shut them out of his story and structure it in a way that would speak first and foremost to African readers. If Europeans wanted to read it for some strange reason, well, they would have to learn Kikerewe first.

Not surprisingly, Kitereza had no luck finding a publisher for an endlessly long novel written in a language that at the time had fewer than 50 000 native speakers. The manuscript hung around for decades unpublished. Kitereza was initially reluctant to translate it, because he felt that so many of the cultural concepts he talks about were so local to Ukerewe, but he agreed to produce a Kiswahili translation in the late 60s, which was eventually published in Tanzania just after his death in 1981.

The book finally came to the attention of European readers in 1990, when a German translation (from the Kiswahili version) by Wilhelm Möhlig was published under the odd and rather Edgar-Wallace-sounding title Kinder der Regenmacher. Tanzanian novelist Gabriel Ruhumbika, who is an Mkerewe himself, eventually produced a pedantic and heavily-annotated English translation in 2002. He takes care that we can trace all the culturally-specific terms back to Kikerewe words, so this would be a useful text for anyone who is reading the book with a serious linguistic or anthropological interest, but it can be a little frustrating when - for example - the endnote gives us no more information about a bird referred to only by its Kikerewe name than that it eats snakes (which we already know from the context...). Ruhumbika also seems to have worn out the endurance of his Tanzanian typesetters - the frequency of minor errors gets higher and higher as you advance through the book, until you get to the back-cover blurb which is almost unintelligible.

It was fun, and it's definitely recommended for those with more time than sense - others might want to reflect carefully and check for vacant shelf-space before seeking out a copy.

...And the last one on the shelf as far as 2014 Q1 sub-Saharan Africa goes.
I think I must have bought this one about the same time as The interpreters, not long after it was published:

Ìsarà: a voyage around "Essay" (1990) by Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1934- )

  

This could well be classed as one of those books with a wilfully misleading title - unless you happen to remember from reading Aké that Soyinka's father was known by the nickname "Essay". It's actually an imaginative memoir about his father's life as a young headmaster in the colonial Nigeria of the thirties and forties, reconstructed from various documents that Soyinka found in a tin box after his father's death (the title is an allusion to John Mortimer's play about his own father, of course).

I didn't plan it that way, but it turned out to be very interesting to read it soon after The Interpreters, because there are a lot of parallels between the two - both focus on a group of clever, ambitious young professionals keen to better themselves and their country, but of course they are set a generation apart, one during the colonial period, the other soon after independence. The young men are all alumni of St Simeon's Training College, Ilesa (they call themselves the "Ex-Ilés", although the - British - college principal prefers the term "Simians").

The author's father - who is bafflingly never called "Essay" here, but appears as Akinyode Soditan or Yode - loyally teaches a curriculum full of pro-imperial propaganda, but isn't taken in by it himself, and doesn't really expect his students to be. Together with the other Ex-Ilés, he believes in a future in which educated Nigerians will take advantage of the skills they've learnt from the colonial powers to take over the running of their own, progressive and thoroughly modernised country. But they find that it's not as easy as all that - there are still strong forces in play that want to get rid of the poison of European ideas and take the country back to an - illusory - ideal of the African past. This ideological conflict is brought into a tangible form when the traditional ruler of Yode's home-town, Ìsarà, dies, and there are two obvious candidates for the succession, one a conservative and the other an Ex-Ilé with a civil-service job in Lagos.

On the whole, this is a lighter, funnier book than The Interpreters - the mood is closer to Aké - but it has its moments of dark violence and sinister magical influences as well.

I was amused to see that Soyinka manages to bring in a sub-plot in which a foreign conman is practicing an advance-fee scam on innocent Nigerians. Especially since the perpetrator is a Trinidadian-Asian based in London. Surely Soyinka wouldn't be using this as a way to tease a future fellow-Nobelist...?

And another late entrant for the Nordic theme, although this is one I found recently on Scribd and has never actually been on my TBR shelf.

Fair play (Swedish 1989; English 2007/2011) by Tove Jansson (Finland, 1914-2001), translated by Thomas Teal

  

(Photo of Tuulikki Pietilä, Tove Jansson and her mother on their island in the 1950s, from Wikipedia)

Tove Jansson is of course the best-known Finnish author outside Finland, thanks to her children's books about the Moomin family. I always used to be impressed by the author bio in the front of those books that told us she lived on her own on a small island. Obviously there were some compensations to be looked forward to in adult life...

It turns out that that wasn't entirely true - the island was the site of her parents' summer-house, and she lived there only seasonally, and mostly together with her life-partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä. Since we wouldn't have got this rather lovely little book without that set of circumstances, I'm not too disappointed, though.

Jonna and Mari are two women of a certain age - one a visual artist and film-maker, the other a writer and illustrator - who live and work together, but not too close together. They are Finnish, after all. There has to be an attic corridor with many closed doors between their two studios.

We see their life in a series of short glimpses, on their island, in Helsinki and on various journeys. We see them enjoying the oddness of each other's ways of seeing the world, confronting artistic and practical problems together, quarrelling and making up, and above all feeding into each other's creative work. Although what Jansson tells us about Jonna and Mari is never objectively any more than what we might have seen and heard as a visitor to their house, put together in context it becomes an incredibly intimate account of how two people can share their lives without ever giving up their own contrasting personalities. A beautiful, restrained, delicately funny and very Nordic love story.

>42 thorold: That was a wonderful book. I loved the way Jansson slid into the relationship with that first story along the corridor.

In the meantime - it's difficult to justify keeping a 90-page novella on the TBR pile for three years. But it's almost as difficult to know how it got there in the first place, since I know that science-fiction usually fails to stir my interest...

2013 Q4 S America

La invención de Morel (1940) by Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina, 1914-1999)

  

Adolfo Bioy Casares and his wife, the writer and artist Silvina Ocampo, were both close to Jorge Luis Borges and often collaborated with him on literary projects. Borges wrote the preface for this, Bioy's first stand-alone novella. He and Octavio Paz both famously categorised it as "an almost perfect novel" - so obviously it's more or less compulsory to read it if you want to say you know something about South American literature...

The narrator is a fugitive from Venezuela (we aren't told why he is on the run from the law, but there are hints that he's the victim of some sort of political persecution) who has taken refuge on what is meant to be an uninhabited island. Naturally, he's a bit miffed when a bunch of tourists suddenly appear and start playing the gramophone a week or two after he first arrives. At first, he keeps a low profile, thinking that this might be a plot by the police to flush him out of hiding, but then he gradually becomes fascinated with one of the tourists, a woman called Faustine, and discovers that something seems to have gone seriously wrong with either the way he perceives the world, or the way in which everyone else does.

There turns out to be a very ingenious solution to the mystery, and we are bombarded with references to H.G. Wells, Faust, Robinson Crusoe, and much profound speculation about the relationship between human individuality, memory, and perception, but none of it ever really grabbed me very profoundly - it's all just clever philosophical juggling, really, and it seems to take itself far too seriously. As one of the other LT reviewers says, it might have been much more interesting if it had been a five-page story by Borges rather than a 90-page novella in which we have time to become irritated with the lack of any real interaction between characters.

Well I'm new here, but this was a good way to start out reading. I'm very eclectic in my reading, but want to become more globally by design. Since they have been read before this day, I will just list them and then review the new ones as they are read:

This quarter I completed:

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff Locale: Greenland Author: American

The Boys in the Boat The 1936 Olympics Locale: Training in US/west coast Olympics: Berlin Author: American

The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow by Krystyna Chiger Locale: Lvov, Poland Author: Polish (in translation)

The Bear and The Nightingale by Katharine Arden Locale: Medieval Russia, Author: American

The Gulag Archipelago Vol 1 by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn Locale: Russia Author: Russian (In translation)

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn Locale: Nazi occupied France Author: American

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood locale: Gilead, a dystopian area in the US, author: Canadian

Embers by Sandal Marai Locale: Hungary Author: Hungarian (in translation)

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink Locale: Germany Author: German (in translation)

The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham Locale: English colonial Shanghai Author: British

West Cork by Sam Bungey Locale: Ireland Author: Irish

The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey Locale: 1920's Colonial Bombay, India Author: British

Isabella: Braveheart of France by Colin Falconer Locale: 13th century England and France Author: British

So now you know why I need to expand my horizons! But I do have one question, how do most here categorize their reading: by author nationality, by setting, etc?

>45 Tess_W: Welcome. That's quite a reading list for this quarter! Looking forward to your reviews.

I suspect there may be many answers to how readers categorize their reading. Author nationality and setting are definitely some. Others are language, era, topic and so on. You could have a look at some of the libraries of members of this group for ideas. It can get complicated however! Take Marguerite Duras, born in one country, living in a completely different one, but writing often about the first. Then there are writers living in exile. Writers like Graham Greene are another conundrum. He is most definitely English, but his books' locales are all over the world, and very convincing. Use whatever makes most sense to you.

Maybe others would like to jump in here.

Just a note that there are two Reading Globally Groups, this one, which mostly deals with non English writers (Chiger, Solzhenitsyn, Marai, Schlink from your list) as well as authors writing in English but from parts of the world such as India, Africa and the Caribbean. Then there is Reading Globally II
http://www.librarything.com/groups/readinggloballyii1 which encompasses writers whose language is English, but who are from countries with which the reader may not be as familiar. These countries are Canada, the US, Scotland, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Australia and New Zealand. For instance, as an American, writing from Scotland may be of interest to you, and feel somewhat foreign or global.

That said, there are no hard and fast rules, these groups are for the readers and it is they who decide what is of interest.

Almost current with this title from last quarter, crossposted from Club Read 2018

2017, Q4, The Nordic Countries



To Siberia by Per Petterson translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born 1998
first published as Til Siber in 1996

The blurbs on the back of this book were somewhat contradictory and definitely generic, for example, "...makes us see our world with clearer vision". Still, based on the positive reviews I had seen for Out Shooting Horses, I picked it up.

To Siberia starts out in a promising enough fashion. Two children, at the beginning aged nine and twelve, lived in a rural town in northern Denmark. It was 1934. The town wasn't as insular as it sounds, however, for its shipyard and harbour attracted boats from Sweden, Norway and beyond, giving a sense of connection with the outside world. The children dreamed of that world, the girl imagine the Trans Siberian Railway journey from Moscow to Vladivostok. For her, "every journey I made by train was a potential departure on my own great journey." Jesper, her older brother, dreamt of Morocco, with its mountains, light and sun. They made a blood pact that each would make their journey when they grew up.

Things were difficult in northern Denmark. The children's mother was a devout hymn singing Christian. Their father had left the family farm and become a failed carpenter, then a dairy manager. Against this bleak desperation, Jesper became enamoured of Rosa Luxemburg and Greta Garbo, hanging their pictures in the children's shared bedroom. "He hopes they will merge into one when he is not looking."

Time passed. The Spanish Civil War and then the German occupation of Denmark gave Jesper a quasi political education, leading him into danger. Through the eyes of the girl narrator, known only as Sistermine, we see these events, but her lack of understanding of what is actually happening became a reading impediment as the book went on. 'Two German soldiers stand on the quay weeping... They are being sent to Norway. There is a war in Norway, in Denmark it is quiet. They have had a good time in Denmark." Jesper often had to interpret what was happening for her. This may have been in part Petterson's way of developing the strong relationship between brother and sister, for it is that relationship which is the novel, but as the girl aged, it became tiresome.

The end, when it came, was almost a relief, although life looked as if it was about to get more complex and interesting. There is nothing really wrong with this book, faint praise indeed, it was just that nothing stood out. This made it my first reading disappointment of the year.

>46 SassyLassy: I have reviewed them in the past (most of them) and so won't bore you with reposting them. However, books I finish from now on I will review, in my own fashion. Since a lot of my work is writing, or grading writing, it almost kills the thrill of a book for me to have to do a lengthy review. So my reviews are short and sweet, by design.

About reading globally II, only 2 posts in 2017...seems sorta dead?

on the TBR pile since May 20, 2015, crossposted from my Club Read 2018 thread

2012 Q1: Turkey and the Balkans

ALBANIA



Doruntine by Ismail Kadare, translated from Albanian into French by Jusuf Vrioni 1986, then translated from the French by Jon Rothschild, 1988. Also known in English as The Ghost Rider
first published as Kush e solli Doruntinën? in 1980

Ismail Kadare would be my first, second, and third choice for the Nobel prize in literature. He can bring the past into the present, making it seem as real as today. He can bring the history and politics of his native Albania to life, even when caution is required. Best of all, his writing is completely immersive; the outside world ceases to exist when reading one of his novels.

The story of Doruntine is an old Albanian legend*. Doruntine was a beautiful young woman with nine brothers. Tradition had held that girls married within easy visiting distance of their families. However, Doruntine married a man from far away, at least two weeks' ride to the west, in Bohemia. Her mother and eight of her brothers opposed the marriage, based on distance. The ninth brother, Constantine, insisted on the wedding, giving his mother his bessa that be he dead or alive, he would fetch Doruntine back personally whenever their mother "yearned for her daughter's company".

Three weeks after the newly wed couple rode off to Bohemia, a plague infested Norman army attacked the principality. All nine Vranaj brothers died within a week of plague or wounds.

No one could recall a more impressive funeral. All the counts and barons of the principality attended, even the prince himself, and dignitaries of neighbouring principalities came as well.
However,
...the mother, in those days of grief, did not have her only daughter, Doruntine, at her side. But Doruntine alone had not been told about the disaster.

Now three years had passed. The Lady Mother cursed Constantine for not fulfilling his pledge. One night word spread that Doruntine had returned. She and her Lady Mother were ill and near death at the castle. Furthermore, Doruntine said she had been brought back by her brother Constantine.

Kadare now adds his own classic twist to the legend in the form of Stres, the prince's local functionary and administrator. Like all good bureaucrats, Stres must decide what information to pass on to his employer, and at the same time, try to investigate and take control of the events, before rumour and superstition have run completely amok. Like other Kadare characters whom fate has burdened with difficult situations, Stres is not just a bureaucrat, he is a skilled one, a thinker, a character in a highly structured system able to appreciate nuance, a man of integrity.

The women's illness was attributed to shock. Stres felt his superior should know of the event, and after attempting to interview the women, wrote in his report,

I concluded that neither showed any sign of mental irresponsibility, though what they now claim, whether directly or indirectly, is completely baffling and incredible. It is as well to note at this point that they have given each other this shock, the daughter by telling her mother that she had been brought home by her brother Constantine, the mother by informing her daughter that Constantine, with all her brothers, had long since departed this world.

What then to make of this mysterious stranger, the one who had brought her home, then left her at the castle gate saying "Go on ahead. I have something to do at the church"? On examination, Constantine's grave was disturbed. Had someone tried to perpetuate a hoax? Could the dead man have risen from his grave in his lonely mother's hour of need? The peasants could not stop talking about the matter. The story grew and spread, ... changing shape like a wandering cloud.

The prince reported the events to the Archbishop, who summoned Stres to an interview. It was a time of passionate division between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. There was only one man who could rise from the dead. That a man could rise from the dead now was "...a ghastly heresy. An arch-heresy" Heresy could mean a painful death indeed for those who subscribed.The story must be squelched. It must be managed. Perhaps Stres could produce a lover who had brought Doruntine home? There had to be a rational explanation, or at least the appearance of one.

How Stres conducted his investigation and how the case was concluded, become in Kadare's version a nationalist statement. Kadare was still living in Albania when this novel was first published, and the matter of dogmatic orthodoxy was still one of life and death, so its treatment is more muted here than in his later work, written in France. That however does not make it any less a novel.

______________________

* A translation of the legend, which some say is the basis of the German legend Lenore, is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantin_and_Doruntinë

>49 SassyLassy: That is on my reading list after he made several references to that legend in his Twilight of the Eastern Gods...

>49 SassyLassy: definitely going on my wish list!

>50 jveezer: That's one I haven't seen, but will certainly have to look for. Thanks for mentioning it.

Well, I managed two more RG books from the TBR before month's end from:

another Q4 2017: The Nordic Countries - Paradise Reclaimed by Halldor Laxness, Iceland and

Q1 2014: Literature from Sub-Saharan Africa - Emergency Continued by Richard Rive, South Africa.

Reviews to follow.