Welcome to this week’s blog and apologies for the delay in putting it up. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week:
Several conversations revolved around literature in translation.
I finished a new release from Istros Books (a kind gift from the publisher) called Farewell, Cowboy by Croatian author Olja Savačević (tr. Celia Hawkesworth). It’s the story of a feisty young woman who returns to her crumbling hometown from Zagreb to find an explanation for the suicide of her brother several years earlier. She looks after her mother, confronts a neighbour whom she believes knows what might have provoked her brother and falls for a handsome young man, all against the backdrop of a western movie that is being filmed in the area. But nothing is quite that simple. This is heartbreaking but also humourous and very original and dynamic in its use of language. I loved the narrator’s voice. This book has an entirely different tone than the other Balkan work I have read. Despite the underlying tragedy it is neither dark nor bleak.
Albertine67 has been having a bad week:
Really struggling with this month’s choice for my literature in translation group, The Seamstress by Maria Duenas (trans Daniel Hahn). The choice for our first meeting last month, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, was always going to be hard to follow, but this truly is from the sublime to the ridiculous. I fully admit to being something of a book snob, but only in relation to my own choices; I think the most important thing is that people read, and if they want to read something I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, it’s fine with me. But this book is doing my head in; I’ve never read Mills and Boon (see above) but I suspect it must be something like this.
The highlight of the week for me has without a doubt been In the Beginning Was the Sea (Tomas Gonzalez). This story of a young couple giving up their city life to search for an unrealistic and naive rural existence was a beautiful and immensely powerful short novel. I’ve been very suprised reading around to see that it hasn’t been a favourite of a lot of bloggers, who seem to have found the characters (admittedly unlikeable) offputting. The book is powerful and the writing paints so physical a picture that at times I could almost smell the air and feel the sweat dripping down the back of my neck.
Over on GuardianWitness, skeptical_sam struck comedy gold:
James Thurber and E.B. White dissect sex with hilarity
I saw this in a charity shop in Walthamstow and bought it for 10p. I picked it up for two reasons. One, it sounded hilarious and that particular Saturday turned out to be rather dismal. Two, E. B. White wrote the 'style guide' which was recently mentioned in a beautiful article in The New Yorker, by the Comma Queen. Best Buy Of The Year.
MsCarey’s reading has been altogether more serious:
I’m reading The Classical World: An Epic History of Greece and Rome by Robin Lane Fox. Or, to be more precise, I’m reading the Greek half now and am leaving the Roman half for later in the year. The book runs from roughly 800BCE to the end of Hadrian’s reign in 138CE. What I really like is that Lane Fox has rejected the common approach of talking about the ancient world in thematic chapters eg Culture, Religion, Warfare. He says that it’s far too simplistic to assume that each of these themes remain unchanged across a span of history that numbers, very roughly, five hundred years for each of Greece and Rome. Instead he approaches the history more or less chronologically (with a bit of thematic mash-up) and sets himself the task of viewing the whole through three main subjects: freedom, justice and luxury. It’s a great read so far (I’m a third of the way through the Greek section) and it comes with bite-sized chapters which makes managing the reading easy for those, like me, who are put off non-fiction which looks unmanageably dense.
Sara Richards, meanwhile, has been in search of short reads. She photographed some of her choices for GuardianWitness but also asked for recommendations.
conedison’s tips were:
Saul Bellow’s first, Dangling Man is great and a mere 191 pages. Or for even more brevity I recently read a gem of a little book (only 140 pages), The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide.
Short Story Binge
I decided to join the discussion this week and read some short stories as well.
SharonE6 , meanwhile, has been continuing her mission to rank all the winners of the Booker prize and reports:
I finished William Golding’s Rites of Passage. A sobering read - pulls you up short in terms of how you (mis)judge others. It goes into the top third of my Booker list so far.
Finally, thanks to Swelter for drawing our attention to two contrasting reviews of Saul Bellow’s collected nonfiction.
Some links and a question. Here is Martin Amis reviewing the collected nonfiction of Saul Bellow:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/books/review/there-is-simply-too-much-to-think-about-saul-bellows-nonfiction.html
Amis gives a much more favourable impression of the book than Dwight Garner in an earlier review in the same newspaper:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/books/review-revisiting-saul-bellows-words-on-society-chicago-and-other-writers.html
The question concerns Amis’s assertion that Russian literature, before Stalin, was emphatically comic - “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin.”
“Does anyone else find Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky funny, even occasionally, or Zamyatin “emphatically comic”? asks Swelter. All opinions welcome in the thread below.
And that’s it for this week. If you would like to share a photo of the book you are reading, or film your own book review, please do. Click the blue button on this page to share your video or image. I’ll include some of your posts in next week’s blog.
And, as always, if you have any suggestions for topics you’d like to see us covering beyond TLS, do let us know.
