rachbxl reads around the world

What a fantastic idea - I have to do it!
I think I must be at about 40 countries already, but I'm not sure, so I've decided that I want to start from scratch. I'm going to go for the 192 member states of the UN, and wherever possible I want to read works by writers that are new to me, and I want them to tell me something about the culture of the country. I think this is going to be a great opportunity to branch out with my reading; I'm really excited!
At the moment I'm reading the following, which will turn a few little bits of the map red before long:

Argentina: Los Premios (The Winners), by Julio Cortazar
Iraq: Gilgamesh (Stephen Mitchell version)
Morocco: L'Enfant de Sable (The Sand Child) by Tahar Ben Jelloun

welcome, rachbxl, we'll look forward to following your progress!

Yes, welcome to the group. Make sure you get to Russia early, you'll turn half your map red in a jiffy.

Perhaps you could explain your criteria for assigning nationality to a book. We had a lot of discussion about this a while back but it has all been lost in the mists of time.

A fascinating triumvirate to start with!

Isn't a blank map a beautiful thing - all those possibilities!

Resurrected from "the mists of time":
the Deciding Which Country a Book is From thread.

Welcome rachbxl!

Avaland, depressaholic, A_musing and linsacl: thanks for the welcome messages.
A_musing: yes, three wonderful books, aren't they? When I'm reading more than one book at the same time (which I normally am), I usually find that one book elbows the others out of the way, but in this case they're all fighting for my attention. (Except for Gilgamesh, which I've already finished).
depressaholic: I've been thinking a lot about how to assign nationality (lindsacl, thanks for the link - I enjoyed seeing how others tackle this). Country of birth is a reasonable starting point, but not enough, I think. For example, I'm currently reading something by Cortazar, who was born here in Brussels to Argentinian parents (they returned to Argentina when he was 3 or so); as far as I'm concerned, his novels are Argentinian, as that's the culture he identifies with.
I think it might change for the same writer from book to book, though. For example, although I know she was born in Bangladesh, I struggle to think of Monica Ali as anything other than British - she grew up in my home town in the north of England, and we went to the same school. Going by my criteria (which admittedly have rather more to do with gut feeling than with anything more scientific), Alentejo Blue is not a Bangladeshi novel - but Brick Lane perhaps is, in that it is partly set in Bangladesh, and that's where the characters are from.
I'm not doing this just to tick countries off a list as quickly as possible. I think Stendhal was right - "le roman est un miroir qu'on promène le long d'un chemin" - and I want to see as many different cultures reflected in my mirror as I go along my way. At present it seems to me that the best way of doing that is by looking for a sense of cultural identity - but I reserve the right to alter my plans mid-route!

Rachbxl,
The answer you have arrived at is pretty much identical to mine: gut feeling, combined with some hard rules to reduce any temptation to list tick, with a reserve clause that its my game and I can alter the rules anytime I want. I'll follow your journey with interest.

Nearly forgot!

Country no.1: Iraq
Gilgamesh, version by Stephen Mitchell
I'd heard of this, but had no idea that I wanted to read it until it leapt off the shelf at me in a bookshop on Sunday - and I'm glad it did. This epic poem is some 3,500 years old, yet fresh, full of life, and immediate. Mitchell's freeform verse flows effortlessly, and his introduction and notes make the work very accessible. I was struck by how the voice of the author comes across all these thousands of years, in his economy of words, which at times I found so effective that it made my spine tingle, and in his use of repetition, and I was overawed that something so old could still make me laugh and cry. I think I'll be coming back to this again and again.

2. Morocco
L'Enfant de Sable by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Please ignore! If I do this right, it's a link to the Gilgamesh review, which is in >10 rachbxl: anyway - I'm just seeing if I can do it...

I can!

This is a reminder to myself (and anyone else who's interested) that the instructions came from here.

3. Japan
Snow Country by Kawabata

I really feel like I've been somewhere new with this novel, to a country and a culture I know very little about. Set in western Japan, apparently the snowiest region on earth, the story deals with a doomed love affair between a rich man from Tokyo and a young geisha in a remote mountain resort. (Mountain geishas, we're told in the translator's introduction, didn't enjoy the social status of their urban sisters, and were little more than prostitutes, which makes the relationship between Shimamura and Komako all the more poignant).
What really made this book for me was the style - the narrative is sparse, minimalist, even haiku-like at times, and the reader is left to infer changes of mood and shifts in the way the characters relate to each other through subtle imagery. Great importance is attached to the natural surroundings, and the changing seasons in the mountains reflect changes in the relationship between the two characters.
Edward G. Seidensticker's translation, first published in the 1950s, I think, was excellent.
I think this one will stay with me for a long, long time.

Great review! I had moved away from Japanese literature after a long binge a few months ago, but Snow Country sounds like it's worth returning for.

-->14 cestovatela: Thanks, cestovatela. I look forward to hearing what you make of it - it's certainly made me want to read more by Kawabata. (And it's only about 175 pages, so a quick read in theory, although I found that I was making myself slow down to savour it).

4. Haiti
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat

edited to correct spelling

5. Argentina
Los Premios by Julio Cortazar

As well as inspiring me to read new authors I might not have tried otherwise (Danticat, for example), my trip round the world is helping reduce my TBR pile too - if I'd known how much I was going to enjoy this, I'd never have let it sit unread for so long! I bought it years ago, with a view to reading it as part of my degree, but opted for other writers instead. The eponymous winners are the winners of a mysterious government lottery, the prize being a cruise about which they know very little; the book opens with them and their accompanying friends/relatives convening on the cafe to which they have been summoned, without knowing where they are going or even for how long - absurd, in both senses. The plot thickens when they embark on the "Malcolm", only to find that half the ship is out of bounds, without satisfactory explanation. The passengers are conveniently drawn from all different sectors of Argentine society, and, as in Albert Camus's plague-infested Oran, their isolated condition serves to draw out their characteristics, as some display blind faith that the authorities will look after them, whilst others rage against their condition and try to take action.

6. USA
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I read all 653 pages of this in 2 days, mainly on a plane on holiday, and I think that's partly why I enjoyed it so much - not sure it's a book for dipping into a bit at a time. The storyline, for what it is, involves a mother's attempts to bring together her dysfunctional family for one last family Christmas, but the book mainly consists of background and related storylines. I often get frustrated with this kind of sprawling narrative, but this worked for me, apart from the section about Lithuania, which I found was at odds with the credibility of the rest of the novel. I particularly like Franzen's way of portraying everyday things; I think he captures the little things in life - a conversation round a dinner table, for example, with several different conversations/monologues going on at once. I have The Twenty-Seventh City on my TBR pile, and on the basis of The Corrections, I'm looking forward to reading it.

7. Sweden
One Step Behind by Henning Mankell, trans. Ebba Segerberg

I already had something else lined up for Sweden (Inge and Mira by Marianne Fredriksson, which I picked up in a second-hand shop recently), but this was lying around the dive boat last week so I thought I'd try it. It was my first Inspector Wallander mystery, and I enjoyed it - will definitely read more next time I feel like a whodunnit. I was pleasantly surprised by just how much 'Sweden' there is in the novel - my aim being to learn about other countries and cultures, after all. I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the area around Malmo, which had me getting the atlas out to find out more.

8. South Africa
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer

Gordimer is one of those writers that I've been meaning to read for ages, so I'm pleased that my world trip has given me the push I needed.
Upper-class white Julie's car breaks down in a seedy Johannesburg street, and an Arab mechanic, Abdu, an illegal immigrant to South Africa, comes to help her from a nearby garage. Despite their differences of class and culture, the couple start a relationship and fall in love, gently challenging each others' assumptions and certainties. Estranged from her family, Julie has a support network of left-wing friends who meet regularly at a cafe table to talk; despite their much-vaunted liberal values, they are concerned about Julie's increasingly serious relationship with an outsider. Eventually, Abdu's fears come true, and he is ordered to leave the country, forcing Julie to face up to the reality of immigration, idenity and belonging, issues which, for all their talk, she and her circle have never had to tackle. Julie surprises Abdu by deciding to accompany him back to the unspecified Arab country which is his home, where it is her turn to be the outsider.
Julie and Ibrahim, as we discover his real name to be, are a couple united by their hatred of and shame at what and where they come from - she, privilege and money, he, a dusty village in the desert. They come together by chance, but ultimately cannot be together, for each wants what the other is trying to flee - she wants an authentic sense of family and community, whilst he wants success and money.

9. UK
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O'Farrell

Another one from the dive boat - a couple of friends had recommended O'Farrell, so I read it. This was an easy read, but very enjoyable - I have no objection to lighter literature, as long as it's well written, which this is. Iris, the main character, discovers that she has a great-aunt she never knew about; Esme was locked away in an asylum as a teenager, and her family erased all traces of her. As the novel progreses, Iris unravels her family's real history, which makes a good story, as well as providing interesting insight into the treatment of madness in Britain in relatively recent times. There are echoes of On Chesil Beach, as here, too, we find newly-weds in the 1950's whose ignorance about sex has far-reaching consequences. The novel is narrated partly by Esme, partly by Iris, and I found Esme to be particularly engaging; far from being mad, she embarrassed her family by not conforming.

Edited to correct Touchstones.

Clocking up some serious air miles there rachbxl!

A friend of mine who is a writer from Mexico rates Cortazar as his favourite spanish language writer and despite numerous reminders from my friend, I still haven't got round to reading him yet. I'll have to add him to my DTBR pile (as opposed to PTBR, SPSBR or VPTBR)*.

*Thats Definitely To Be Read, Probably TBR, Should Probably Sometime BR and Vaguely Planning TBR.

> 18
Love your TBR labels, depressaholic! Then there's also Should Really Read Quite Soon Because Friend Who Gave It To Me Keeps Asking What I Thought...

10. Iran
Je viens d'ailleurs by Chahdortt Djavann
It's taken me several weeks to read this short (160 pages) novel, not because I didn't enjoy it, but because it was disturbing. It relates fragments of the life of a girl growing up in Iran at the time of the Revolution, based on the author's own life. This book was published in 2002, 9 years after Djavann left Iran for France at the age of 26; she wrote the novel in French, a language which she didn't speak on her arrival in the country (I've read interviews in which she explains that she couldn't write about her experiences in Iran in her own language as it was too immediate - she needed the distance of another language). Her style is lyrical yet simple, and is used to describe both everyday things and unimaginable acts of violence - all the more shocking for being related in such a calm, matter-of-fact way.

7a Sweden
Inge & Mira (Two Women)by Marianne Fredriksson trans. Anna Patterson
(I've invented a new rule for myself. As this round-the-world trip is not just about ticking countries off a list, I'm going to record everything I read from new countries, rather than just one book per country.)
Didn't enjoy this very much, but persisted because it was quite short. Again, otherness and identity are important themes - the novel is about a friendship that grows from a random meeting between 2 women, one Swedish, one a Chilean immigrant to Sweden. My main problem with it was that I felt that the characters weren't sufficiently developed, so I couldn't see why they were behaving as they did (I felt that I was being required to take the author's word for it, rather than being shown what brought them to this point). Consequently, I didn't much care what happened to them. I was also very much aware that I was reading a translation; it didn't read all that smoothly a lot of the time.

11. Canada
Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali by Gil Courtemanche
(A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali)

I wanted my first Canada read of my round-the-world-trip to be in French, because I've read a fair bit of English-language Canadian lit, but nothing French. One of my rules is that I want to learn about the country in question, and of course this particular book told me lots about Rwanda and very little about Canada - but I'm still counting it because I'll be back to Canada again soon anyway.
This novel, written on the basis of Courtemanche's experience as a journalist in Rwanda, combined with material collected by the human rights group African Rights, has brought me to a much better understanding of the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Not an easy read, set as it is in a country ravaged by AIDS and genocide, but worth the effort.

Two Solitudes was written in English, so obviously is not a candidate for you to read about Quebec.

I did a tagmash on Quebec, roman and these are the top four:

Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hemon
Comment devenir un monstre by Jean Barbe
Wash this blood clean from my hand by Fred Vargas
In the shadow of the wind by Anne Hébert (Les Fous de Bassan).

The first and the fourth are probably the most relevant.

Why didn't I think of that? Thanks for doing that, vpfluke - it's good to have a couple of new ideas.

Since you're interested in Québécois writers, you might want to check out the work of Marie-Claire Blais. Blais has written around two dozen novels as well as essays, some poetry and plays. She's a major French-Canadian writer, has received two Guggenheim fellowships and much acclaim. Her work is quite dark in tone, sometimes brutal and generally tragic. She's probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I think she's admirable and uncompromising if not exactly all that easy to read.

> 23 marietherese, thanks for the recommendation.

12. Slovenia
Joyce's Pupil by Drago Jancar, trans. various

A collection of (sometimes very) short stories, contemporary, set mainly in ex-Yugoslavia, and generally involving characters who are swept along by the course of history, by events that are bigger than they are, virtually losing their free will in the process.
More details to follow in the group read on ex-Yugoslavia...

13. Sri Lanka
Colombo; a Novel by Carl Muller

Since no journey ever goes entirely smoothly, I suppose it was only to be expected that my round-the-world trip wouldn't be all plain sailing.
My boyfriend brought this back for me from a recent trip to Sri Lanka, and I was looking forward to reading it. According to the blurb, it's a quasi-fictional portrait of Colombo and its history, interspersed with scenes from contemporary everyday life, which I found quite appealing as an idea. In fact, it reminded me of a child's school project - throw in everything you can get your hands on (and make no attempt to order it) in the hope that the teacher will be impressed by quantity rather than quality. There was history - but it jumped around so much that it was impossible to follow. There were fictional scenes, which I did like - but what a shame Muller decided against developing any of the characters and using them throughout the book, which I think would have been more effective than this series of walk-on parts. There were quotes from other sources - but they were up to 10 pages long! There was also far too much of the author's own somewhat mediocre poetry, which served no discernable purpose other than to make an already too-long book even longer.
I wouldn't usually finish a book that I disliked so intensely, but I was stuck in deepeset, darkest Slovenia with nothing else to read and no bookshops for miles around - torture! (I did have a Mexican novel with me too, but I wasn't particularly enjoying that either). Fortunately, I do have another book from Sri Lanka waiting to be read (short stories this time) - it can only get better...

14. Norway
Before You Sleep by Linn Ullmann, trans. Tiina Nunnally

What a relief to pick up a book and read it straight through because I was enjoying it so much! The story is told by Karin Blom, a wonderfully unreliable narrator who veers off into wild exaggeration without warning, as she tells the story of her family, and its women in particular, set mainly in contemporary Norway, with flashbacks to 1930's New York, where her Norwegian grandparents met and married. Ullmann has a fine eye for relationships, and with her light touch she pinpoints the way people play roles in relation to the others around them. She is gentle with her characters, yet still allows their faults to show, and this is what I really liked about this novel; it's about real people - funny, cruel, selfish, generous, kind, malicious people. It's not exactly a happy novel, but nevertheless I felt uplifted by the end of it.

10a Iran
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

I loved this! I'm really sorry to have finished it. I'd never read a graphic novel before, and it was a French friend and her parents who convinced me to give this a go - I'm glad they did. This is a fascinating portrayal of everyday life during the Islamic Revolution, as seen through the eyes of Marjane the child, then the adolescent, then the young woman. The child is bewildered by events which make no sense to her; we see her awareness of what's going on around her increase as the executions and disappearances start to affect her immediate family. The teenage Marjane is sent by her parents to Austria for several years - saved from the outrages of Iran, yet condemned to exile, alienation and loneliness, both in Europe and then again on her return to Iran.
Persepolis is a good complement to my original read from Iran, Djavann's Je viens d'ailleurs. Both are about growing up under the Islamic Revolution, and about the search for identity both in a new country and the old. Unlike Djavann, Satrapi came from a politically engaged family, and the extra details about the political situation given by Satrapi have helped me understand Djavann's book better (for example, in Djavann's book the heroine's parents' are horrified when she gets involved with student communists; until reading Persepolis, I wasn't aware of the important role played by communisim in Iran).
I've got really interested in Iran, thanks to these two books. I have another Djavann on my TBR pile, but what I'm really looking forward to is an English translation of Iraj Pezeshkzad's My Uncle Napoleon ("the most beloved Iranian novel of our time", according to the back cover).

15. Mexico
Arrancame la vida by Angeles Mastretta

I didn't enjoy this novel, set in 1930's post-revolutionnary Mexico. The book opens with the marriage at an early age of the narrator, Catalina, to a much older general, Andres Ascencio, and ends about 15 years later with Ascencio's death. Catalina is my main problem; I found her wholly unlikeable, and often found myself wanting to reach into the novel and give her a slap (I don't think this is the reaction the author was after). I know that this is supposed to be a feminist novel about a woman's journey towards self-determination in a macho world, but in fact her "journey" seems to take her from submissive wife who refuses to believe her husband is involved in mass killings, to selfish woman who, at best, ignores her children completely ("it was years since I'd last played with my children") or, at worst, lives out her many affairs under their noses. Yes, I know we've seen the heroines of the great 19th century adultery novels behave like this, but Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Ana Ozores get away with it by being better-drawn characters in better-written novels.

Sorry to hear about your Sri Lanka pick - I have read quite a look of Sri Lankan books because I used to live there, but I could never see the point of Carl Muller either. I would highly recommend Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai if you would like to try another Sri Lankan book.

I too am sorry to hear that your Sri Lankan experience wasn't good. Some of my favourite books over the past year have been Sri Lankan. My two favourites were Anil's Ghost and Mosquito. Sri Lanka is my favourite literary destination, but I doubt I'll ever physically get there. What was your boyfriend doing there? And Wandering Star, what brought you to live there? Family, work or ?

> 28 and 29 Thanks for the sympathy, Wandering Star and Nickelini! And for the recommendations.
Nickelini, I read Anil's Ghost a few years ago, and I loved it - I'm not counting it here because I'm starting from scratch - as if there weren't enough countries to visit without making myself revisit ones I've already been to...;) I just picked up another Ondaatje this week, actually - Divisadero.
My boyfriend was in Sri Lanka for work - he's a photographer, and he specialises in underwater stuff. In other words, he went diving for 2 weeks while I stayed in Belgium working...;)

Country number 6a USA
The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud

My second read from the USA on this trip. I can't rave about it, but the story kept me just about interested till the end, without ever really drawing me in.

16. Dominican Republic
Drown by Junot Diaz

A collection of short stories, written in English, about life among the poor in the Dominican Republic, and among Dominican immigrants in New York. Some of the stories are interlinked (perhaps all of them, but I found it hard to tell). I really enjoyed the first 2 stories, set in the DR, but apart from the last story in the collection, "Negocios", I struggled with the ones set in the USA, although I can't really put my finger on why - a bit too gritty for me, perhaps. However, it's powerful stuff; whilst I couldn't reconstruct the narratives, I'm left with some very striking images of the life of Dominican immigrants in New York and of those they left behind, even from stories that I read a couple of weeks ago.

I'm interested to note how my round-the-world trip is changing the way I buy/borrow books. Until now, I'd always have to find the blurb on the back interesting (not that it's always reliable!), I'd have to like the IDEA of the book - and I'd often read just a page or so before buying to see if I liked the style. I was aware that I'd got into a bit of a reading rut, but I didn't know how to get out. Now I'm selecting things more BECAUSE they're from a certain part of the world, to hell with whether I think it's "my kind of book" or not - not because I'm keen to tick off as many countries as soon as I can, but because spreading my reading wings geographically has made me want to branch out in other ways, too. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn't - but even when it doesn't, it's a lot more fun than reading my way, yawn yawn, through the Booker shortlist. A few months ago, I'd have left Drown on the shelves, because it's not my thing - and it's true, ultimately it's not really my thing, but I still got something out of it.

17. Zimbabwe
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga

Really enjoyed this! A young black girl from a poor family in a small village sees her life change when her only brother dies; she is given the chance to go and live with her rich uncle's family and go to the mission school, an avenue closed to her as long as a male child lived. The novel is about her changing sense of identity, and her relationships with those around her, in particular the women - her anglicized cousin, her educated aunt who gradually becomes increasingly emancipated, and her uneducated mother and aunt, two very different characters, back in the village. Her uncle is a strong male who rules his household firmly, and strives to be fair, although he is left standing in the wake of progress; although not so extreme, he reminded me of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart. I particularly liked the way that the characters seem to be real people - there are no goodies and baddies, but instead they all have their strengths and weaknesses, which made them believable.

18. Uganda
Snakepit by Moses Isegawa

A fascinating portrayal of power, corruption, betrayal and various other evils in Idi Amin's Uganda in the 1970's. I found it very well-written, and the subject was interesting, in part because it's not one I knew much about.
However, I feel fairly indifferent about this book. I've been trying to work out why, and I think it's because the characters aren't particularly developed. By the end of the book, I didn't feel that I knew them any better than at the start, so whilst I was objectively interested, I didn't feel at all involved.

19. Bangladesh
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

I could almost cut and paste what I said about number 18. This is set at the time of the Bangladeshi War of Independence, another time and place about which I knew (know) very little, so on that score it was interesting. I enjoyed reading it, by which I mean that I like Anam's style. Again, though, I felt that the characters let it down - rather than them being credible and autonomous, I could almost see Anam pulling their strings. Another novel, then, that failed to draw me in - I seem to have had quite a few of these lately, but it could just be that I'm preoccupied with other things.

rachbxl, glad you enjoyed Nervous Conditions! I did also.

20. Pakistan
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

I seem to be getting a taste for short, sparingly written novels. In the past I've always enjoyed longer novels that I could get really caught up in, but if I look back at the books I've enjoyed most this year, I see that it's this economy that stands out (much easier to see this now that I've started writing down my thoughts on what I read).
The narrator meets an American tourist in Pakistan, persuades him to join him for tea, and tells him his life story. From the start, the narrator's choice of language and way of speaking suggest that he is both highly educated and westernised, impressions which are confirmed by his story. He recounts how he achieved the American dream by leaving his humble origins in Pakistan for an American education, followed by a well-paid job with excellent prospects which allowed him to send money back home. It's clear from his story, though, that despite his success he never stopped being an outsider, initially mainly in his own mind, but increasingly, after 9/11, in the minds of others. Eventually, feeling let down by America and by the American woman he loved, he fled back to Pakistan.
This is a convincing story of one man's development, as well as a thought-provoking look into East-West relations. I can see from other reviews that not everyone shares my admiration for this book, but I for one would recommend it.

21. Colombia
Delirio by Laura Restrepo

Oh, I enjoyed this! Leafing through before I started, I thought I might find the long, long sentences off-putting, but once I started reading I found that all I had to do was relax and trust that it would all make sense - and it did. The narrative often switches mid-sentence between first and third person, referring to the same individual, a device which could have been horribly confusing, but which Restrepo pulls off well.
The novel begins with Aguilar returning to Bogota after a few days away, only to find his wife, already unstable, completely delirious in a hotel room with a strange man who immediately disappears. Naturally suspecting an affair, Aguilar sets out to unravel the mystery, discovering in the process how little he knows about his wife's family and their past. The story, told from various different points of view, all of which I found compelling, is the story of one family, intertwined with the recent history of Colombia - a backgournd of drug barons, guerillas, the gulf between the north and south of Bogota, with normal life going on in the foreground.
I always try to combine my literary travels with my real travels (unfortunately, I can't rush off to a new place with every book I read, but whenever I visit a new place, I do try to read a book from there), and my enjoyment of this book was definitely increased by reading it in Bogota last week. The dialogue was exactly what I was hearing around me, and refences to places and to food, in particular, made sense in a way that they wouldn't have done otherwise.

22. China
The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices by Xinran, trans. Esther Tyldesley

A collection of beautifully written (and beautifully translated) true stories about the lives of women in twentieth century China, all of them very moving. The material was collected by Xinran during her time as a radio journalist; through her groundbreaking programme, "Words on the Night Air", on which she encouraged women to speak out as never before, she became fascinated by the way women lived in her country, and by how much they put up with in silence.
My rough rule-of-thumb for a translation is that if I don't find myself stopping and thinking, "hmmm, I wonder what the original said?", then the translation's good. Here, although I knew when I started to read that this was a translation, it read so smoothly that I really did forget, and was brought up short to find, on the last page, a messasge of thanks from author to translator.

13a. Sri Lanka
Mosquito by Roma Tearne

A much happier return visit to Sri Lanka, thanks to Nickelini's recommendation - a recommendation I wouldn't hesitate to second. I don't understand why this wonderful book isn't better known.
Theo, a writer grieving for his wife, returns to his native Sri Lanka after years in the UK, to find a country that he no longer understands or even recognises. Slowly, an unlikely love affair (unlikely, yet convincing and moving) develops between him and a much younger local girl, a budding painter, until they are torn apart by the civil war. The two main characters are beautifully drawn, but what really impressed me was how even the more minor characters come across as rounded people.
This is Tearne's first novel; she is first and foremost a painter, and I think you feel that in her writing - she paints pictures with words, and I came away with some very clear, colourful images in my head.
I really can't do this book justice in a few sentences; it's much more than the love story. The Sri Lankan civil war features prominently, and often gruesomely; Tearne conveys its horror by showing its effect on the lives of Theo and Nulani, and cleverly uses Rohan and Giulia to show how the horror moves out in concentric circles, deeply affecting the lives of those further out, too.

23. Peru
Crisis Respiratoria by Susanne Noltenius

I loved this collection of short stories. I picked it up whilst in Lima for work the other week, because I wanted to buy something local, which I'd struggle to get in Europe. All the books in the shop were shrink-wrapped (why do they do that?), so I'd no idea what I was buying, but it paid off.
All the stories are set in times of instability in the lives of the protagonists. This might be divorce or death of a loved one, but might equally be something less clearly defined - a general sense that all is not well in a marriage, for example. With one exception, when the protagonist does have an affair, the protagonists take no action to resolve their situation; the stories are about the unstable situations, not about what comes next, and I liked the ambiguity of this, in part because it required something of me, the reader - at the end of each story, I had to think about what the implications were, what might happen next.
I thought there was something very fresh about these stories. They all have their different voices, but in each case I felt I was reading a letter from a friend, so direct was the style, as well as confiding, engaging.
I'm not sure Noltenius has been translated into English, but for anyone who reads Spanish, highly recommended.

13a. Sri Lanka
Mosquito by Roma Tearne

A much happier return visit to Sri Lanka, thanks to Nickelini's recommendation - a recommendation I wouldn't hesitate to second. I don't understand why this wonderful book isn't better known.
---------------------

I don't know why either! You're the second LTer in the last day who has raved about this book, so maybe word is slowly starting to get around. I'm so glad you read it and loved it. My sister-in-law just read my copy, and she also had high praise for it.

Reading Mosquito now, (thanks to a generous LTer) withholding judgment until I finish:-)

Country No. 24 Cuba
La isla de los amores infinitos by Daina Chaviano

Cecilia, a lonely Cuban immigrant in Miami, meets an old woman in a bar. The old woman, Amalia, starts to tell her story, which is in fact several stories, reaching back over several generations, to Spain, Africa and China. Cecilia is entranced, and goes back night after night to hear more; the novel consists of Amalia's tale, entwined with Cecilia's own story of life in exile...and damn good stories they are too!
My complaint is that this book is far too long (it's 380 pages and could happily lose 100 of them). I enjoyed the first half, and then got completely bogged down; it just seemed to be more of the same, and I got very impatient with it. I'd have given up if I hadn't already got so far, and I'm glad I didn't, because the last 30 pages or so won me back. There's a twist at the end that I really didn't see coming - I'd smugly thought I could see where it was going from way back, but I was glad to be wrong.
From a learning-about-Cuba perspective, great. The bulk of the novel is set in Cuba a couple of generations ago, but what I found most interesting was Cecilia's perspective on "the island", which she can't turn her back on, try as she might. She hates Cuba and what it has become, and tries to forget her life there, yet at the same time she is defined (defines herself) by her Cuban-ness. Cuba, she says, "is more ubiquitous in Miami than Coca-Cola", and its lights can be seen across the sea even on cloudy nights.
I've read a fair bit of Cuban literature in the past, and deliberately went for something a bit lighter this time for some escapism - but it turned out to be the most Cuban of the lot.
English translation just out this month, I believe: The Island of Eternal Love.

Visited so far this year (24 countries):


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25. Spain
Los Mares del Sur by Manuel Vazquez Montalban
available in English as Southern Seas

I'm more familiar with Spanish literature than with that of any country other than my own (UK), so according to my rules it was just a question of reading something by an author I'd not read before. Several books on my TBR shelf would have fit the bill, but this one turned out to fit it perfectly, in that as well as being a great read, it also told me a lot about a particular period of Spanish history.
Los Mares del Sur is one of a series of detective novels starring private investigator Pepe Carvalho, and is set in Barcelona in 1979 - in other words, in the middle of Spain's transition to democracy, after Franco's death in 1975. The events of the novel are inextricably rooted in the political and historical setting; it's a context that I already knew quite a lot about, but even so I had to look a couple of things up (that said, I think you could still enjoy the novel without prior knowledge; I looked things up out of curiosity rather than a need to know). For example, there is a mention of an "Inspector Creix", which is clearly meant to have an impact on both Carvalho and the reader; it turns out that Creix was an infamous torturer during the fascist dictatorship, and that the author (a communist, like Carvalho) was tortured by him.
Vazquez Montalban wrote this novel for a contemporary audience (and a Spanish one at that) - it's a commentary on the political situation in Spain at the time - but it hasn't dated, and is still relevant and accessible. As well as the political references, there are literary references, to the Poema de Mio Cid, for example, and to the great Spanish novel La Regenta. I congratulated myself on understanding most of them, but I'm sure there were others that I didn't even notice (in other words, the political and literary references are there for the informed reader, but the touch is light, so if you miss them you don't feel that you're missing out).
This novel won the Planeta prize in 1979; initially I was surprised, because detective novels don't tend to win such prestigious awards. By the time I was a few pages in, I understood. It's wonderfully written, the characters walk off the page, the dialogue is short, snappy and realistic, and as a portrayal of a particular place at a particular point in time, it can't be beaten. I'll defintely be reading more Carvalho mysteries, as well as Vazquez Montalban's other works.

Great review, rachbxl. Sounds like an author that's well worth putting on the tbr list :-)

> 46 Thanks, LizT - glad you liked it.

Country number 26: Poland
Zdazyc przed Panem Bogiem by Hanna Krall
(available in English as Shielding the Flame)

This is the highlight of my reading year, or possibly of my reading life - it's the first book I've read in Polish! I promised myself in January that I'd do it this year.
This is a non-fictional account of a lengthy conversation between Hanna Krall and Marek Edelman, a Polish Jew who was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, Edelman became a cardiologist, and the book moves easily between his account of life in the ghetto, and details of his pioneering operations decades later (he was involved in introduces revolutionary new techniques to Poland). It struck me as I was reading that I was as moved by the suffering of individual patients as I was by mass suffering in the ghetto; the last sentence of the book makes it clear that this is partly Krall's intention - to get across the idea that each indivual life has its intrinsic value and is worth fighting for.
Another point which I found particulary interesting was Edelman's insistence on "what people want to hear", which creates different versions of "the truth". For example, when Krall asks why he became a doctor, he tells her that what she wants him to say (and what I wanted to read, it turned out) was that, having saved so many lives in the ghetto, he wanted to go on saving lives, and go on being a hero -whereas, in fact, at the end of the war, the hero of the ghetto took to his bed, depressed, and spent months staring at the wall. His friends persuaded him that he had to go to university, and he was toying with the idea of economics, but the woman who was to become his wife went against his wishes, and signed him up for medicine.
I chose this as my first book in Polish because I'd already read a couple of Krall's short stories, which made a real impression on me. Even 18 months ago, when my Polish was even shakier than it is now, her deceptively simple style gave me goose bumps. Perhaps it's time to read the rest of the stories in the collection now.

27. Algeria
La Disparition de la langue française by Assia Djebar
(No English translation?)

A beautiful book, sparing and haunting. Bekrane, his 50th birthday approaching and a ruined love affair behind him, returns to Algeria in 1991 after 20 years in France. However, he struggles to settle back into life in his beloved homeland, because his memories of it don't square with the reality of a country rife with the fervour of Islamic extremism. He finds solace in the arms of Nadjia, another exile who, like him, moves between 2 cultures, without really belonging in either, and it is only after Nadjia's departure that Berkane is able to do the writing that he came back to Algeria to do; he starts to write an account of his imprisonment during the war of independence in the 1950's, which constitutes the bulk of the last third of the novel.
The novel's title, "The Disappearance of the French Language" is important. Berkane has lived his life in French before returning to Algeria (his French partner of 10 years, Marise, knew only one sentence of Arabic), and in his first weeks back home we see him delight in the use of Arabic, through his developing friendship with the fisherman, Rachid - "Since I got here, I have only spoken my dialect with him, with the excitement of having rediscovered a kind of verbal dance made up of all those lost words". He and Nadija, too, speak Arabic, and Berkane identifies with Nadjia's assertion that this is the first time in years that she has loved "in Arabic".
It's not a straightforward question of "Arabic or French", though, as French is essential for Berkane, too (as Marise says, he needs his two languages), as the language he writes in.
However, in post-colonial Algeria language is a fraught issue, and in the second half of the novel it becomes clear that "the disappearance of the French language" refers not just to the increasing use of Arabic in Berkane's life; rather, it refers to the disappearance of Algeria's French-speaking intellectuals at the hands of the nationalists.
In short, a wonderful blend of the personal and the more general, each serving to shed light on the other. I found this novel fascinating, particularly as its main theme - language and identity, moving between cultures - is something I have a personal and professional interest in.

I'm looking forward to reading more of Djebar's work.

>48 rachbxl: Your comments on The Disappearance of the French Language are excellent and certainly makes the book sound like a wonderful read. I do hope it will be translated into English in the near future. Can you tell me when this one was published? It would be interesting to know where it falls in her career. You might also enjoy her Women of Algiers in Their Apartment as some of that same language & identity theme comes up, particularly with regards to women.

>49 avaland: Avaland, I'm glad you found my comments so interesting! I'm really starting to enjoy writing down a few thoughts about what I read (my degree involved so much writing about literature that it's something I haven't been able to get back into until now, over 10 years later), and there was a lot more I could have said about this particular book. It was published in 2003.
Thanks for recommending Women of Algiers in their Apartment - I'll look out for it.

28. Chile
Lo que esta en mi corazon by Marcela Serrano

I had misgivings about this because of the title ("What's in my Heart") - a bit soppy? - but this turns out to be the way Mayan women traditionally finish stories about themselves - "and this is what's in my heart". This is relevant because the story is set mainly in Chiapas, Mexico, and at least one of the characters is Mayan.
I have mixed feelings about this novel. I enjoyed it as a well-paced adventure story with a nice love story thrown in, but enjoyment of it required major suspension of disbelief, and I didn't have much sympathy for the main character a lot of the time.
Camila, a Chilean living in Washington, is recovering from a nervous breakdown following the death of her baby son. Through her journalist husband she gets an assignment to go to Chiapas to write about the aftermath of the Zapatista uprising in 1994 (this is in 2000) - no training, no experience, has spent the last year in bed crying, but lands this great 2-week assignment because the editor just happens to want a "fresh voice"...how convenient. This is the kind of thing I mean about suspension of disbelief.
Through her mother's contacts, once in Chiapas Camila falls in with a rag-tag collection of foreign residents, from the politically engaged Reina (previously imprisoned with Camila's mother, who fought for democracry in Chile) to the wonderfully attractive Italian artisit Luciano, who just happens to have all the qualities Camila's poor husband lacks (charm, spontaneity, sympathy, empathy, generosity...)
Camila has not inherited her parents' political engagement, yet when Reina is fatally injured in a palamilitary attack, the world's doziest paramilitaries decide that Camila is Reina's number 2, and therefore their next target. This is where I ran out of sympathy for Camila. If I knew I was on a hitlist, I might just be a little bit careful; no matter how obsessed with my new lover Luciano, I might just avoid rushing to open the door (in his house) when there's a knock before dawn - and it might not come as such a surprise when I get kidnapped.
My other problem with Camila is that, from interviews and articles that I've read, Serrano writes feminist books about strong, liberated women. Whilst there is some change in her, Camila seems to me to be a woman who relies heavily on other people (men in particular); when left to her own devices, she makes dubious choices which lead her into danger, from which she needs rescuing by Luciano. For me, Camila comes across more as the fragile little woman who needs protecting by this heart-stoppingly brave (yet sensitive and artisitc) man, who arrives like Superman to take care of all the things she can't do on her own.

7b Sweden
The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell, trans. from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson

My second Inspector Wallander mystery, just as un-put-downable as the first. This one is set partly in Sweden, partly in Riga, Latvia, at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union, and illustrates the stark contrasts which existed at the time between East and West; in moving between one country and the other, the inspector is moving between two different worlds.

How did you like it? It's on my wishlist on BM and when I will finally save some points then I was thinking to mooch it.

26a Poland
Aliantka by Regina Kowalska

A less successful return visit to Poland with this YA novel. I enjoyed the first third or so, but then couldn't wait to get through it.

Yayy! You did it!

Thanks for the encouragement, Akeela! I'm proud to announce that I've done it again (much easier this time):

26b Poland
Trzepot Skrzydel by Katarzyna Grochola

About how an apparently fairy-tale marriage turns into a hell of domestic violence. What I really liked was how the main character - the beaten wife - could have been me, or any woman I know, which made her easier for me to understand. I was completely drawn in by this book, and couldn't wait to pick it up again whenever I had to put it down.

I'm happy that you liked it! :) I have exactly the same thoughts in my mind during reading it.

I'm also happy that you've got the book already, as well as that I've got the book already ;) And with this wonderful postcard inside! Thank you :)

14a Norway revisited
Calling out for you by Karin Fossum
Translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund

At this rate, maybe I should read around the world in detective stories.
Really enjoyed this one, an Inspector Sejer mystery. (Sejer was new to me, but apparently there are several more, which I'm going to keep an eye out for). Different style to the 2 Inspector Wallanders I read recently, though I couldn't say I like one more than the other. Here, the focus is less on the reserved, old-fashioned Sejer (who nevertheless emerges as a fully-formed character, and one I warmed to) and the police investigation than on the community in which the crime took place, in a claustrophobically small Norwegian town, miles from anywhere. The townspeople are more than witnesses and suspects; they are real people who, in different ways, are suffering the varied consequences of a series of events culminating in a murder.

If you like detective stories - how do you like books of Agatha Christie? Did you read anything by Harlan Coben? If yes - how did you find it?

Hi Aga,
I'd never have said that I liked detective stories, that's the thing - until the last few months I'd hardly ever read any, but it seems that I can't avoid them at the moment; recently I've read detective stories from Spain, the UK, Sweden and Norway, and of course I'm in the middle of that Polish one at the moment, and then I've got one Israeli and one Chinese one TBR.
I've only ever read one Agatha Christie, I think (Death on the Nile), which I enjoyed. As for Harlan Coben, someone at work passed on a copy of one of his novels a couple of years ago (I think it was Just One Look), and I really didn't like it - I don't think I finished it. Can't remember what was wrong with it, though. I suspect I thought it wasn't very well-written, which is something that always irritates me so much that I have to stop reading. With the exception of the Spanish one, which is in a different league altogether, the detective novels I've been reading recently have all been light and entertaining BUT that doesn't stop them from being well-written.

Thanks for your answer :)

In my life I've read plenty of detective stories - that's mostly thanks to one Polish author Joanna Chmielewska, who wrote a lot of books for kids, youth and adults, all of them are kind of this style. And she did it very well in my opinion, keeping the plot and attention well + having a cool sense of humour. So, at some point I've started to add some more stories written by other authors. I also read quite some books of Agatha Christie and I enjoyed it much. I'm slowly starting to like the pile of books "Cat Who..." by Lilian Jackson Braun - I read two of them lately and - even if it's not a highest lit of this kind - it's quite nice. Coming to Harlan Coben - I read one of his book and by my surprise I enjoyed it more than I expected (you may find my opinion about the book on my blog http://zyciowapasja.blogspot.com/)

I need to check the books read by you lately :)

29. Dominica
Sleep it off, Lady by Jean Rhys

Breaking one of my own rules here - I'm aiming to read books by authors that I haven't read anything by before (have already read Wide Sargasso Sea), but unsure if I'll find anything else from Dominica. (Any ideas out there?)

I've been dipping in and out of these old-fashioned little stories, set partly in the Caribbean and partly in Europe, for several months; I took them slowly not because I didn't enjoy them, but because they were all merging into one in my mind. In the end, I'm not sure spreading them over time made any difference - I've come away with a general impression, rather than clear recall of any particular story. I liked each story as I read it, I liked Rhys's wit and perception, and yet now that I've finished I'm struggling to remember.

I have another Dominican writer on my shelves (though not yet read) called Phyllis Shand Allfrey. She had a slightly longer association with Dominica than Rhys, from what I can tell. I have The Orchid House which was adapted for TV in the 1980s, but she also has a book of short stories. It looks like fairly standard costume drama type fare, but I am looking forward to reading it.

Thanks for that, depressaholic - I clearly hadn't done my homework very well. Will look out for it (although I might wait to see what you think of it first...)

Sri Lanka again
Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai

Beautiful book -Sri Lanka keeps on improving after my first try!
Arjie is a young boy from a Tamil family in Colombo, growing up into the last thing his family wants - a "funny boy". In the first chapter (or story, as this is "a novel in six stories") we see how the little boy prefers dressing up as a bride with his girl-cousins to playing cricket with the boys. His father strives to make him "normal", although his attempts invariably backfire (when he forces Arjie to play cricket with the boys, nobody wants to be on his team and the game falls apart; when he sends Arjie to a different school to make a man of him, it is here that Arjie meets the boy who helps him realise he is gay).
The beautifully observed portrait of boyhood and family life is set against a backdrop of tension between Tamils and Sinhalese, culminating in the family having to flee in the 1983 riots. The reader gradually becomes aware of the racial tension as the novel progresses, parallelling Arjie's increasing awareness of it as he grows up; the contrast between the innocent childhood scenes with which the book opens (Arije is unaware of the problems in his country, just as he is unaware as yet that his love of dressing up in women's clothes is going to set him apart) and the baldly-described riot scenes is heart-breaking.
I would recommend this book in particular to all those Mosquito fans out there, because I think it complements it well. Unusually for me (if I read more than one book about a given place and/or time, I tend not to associate them in my mind's eye- they invariably evoke different images), I was seeing exactly the same Colombo as I read this; the characters in the two books inhabit the same world in my head.

I taught Funny Boy several years ago. I really enjoyed this novel. I'm glad you liked it. Selvadurai has another book out that I also enjoyed: Cinnamon Gardens.

Another great Sri Lankan book is Anil's Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje. That and Mosquito are my two favourites from Sri Lankan lit. I also liked Cinnamon Gardens, but not quite as much. I own Funny Boy but haven't read it yet. Another one that was worth reading was Reef, by Romesh Gunesekera. Someone else here didn't like it (Avaland, perhaps?), but I thought it was good. What I like to call "a quiet novel." I found that it captured the feeling of Sri Lanka in much the same way as Mosquito and Anil's Ghost. Michael Ondaatje has also written a "memoir" (for lack of a better term) titled Running in the Family that was worth reading.

Urania and Nickelini, thanks for your comments -I'm going to be on the lookout for Cinnamon Gardens. And Reef is on my mental TBR list. I agree with you about Anil's Ghost, Nickelini; I enjoyed it when I read it several years ago (although all I remember about it now is the fact that I liked it). As for Running in the Family, maybe one day - but I recently read Divisadero and was so disappointed that I think I'll be steering clear of Ondaatje for a while, until I get over it!

30. Israel
Bethlehem Road Murder by Batya Gur
translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden

Another very enjoyable read - I'm on a roll at the moment! Gur wrote several mysteries starring Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, and this isn't the first, but that didn't matter. This one is set in a residential area of Jerusalem during the second intifada, and Gur portrays a society of which security concerns are an everyday part. The heightened tensions mean that everyone could be the enemy, so when a beautiful young woman of Yemeni descent is found murdered, suspects abound. The book is peopled with carefully-drawn characters, both the police (the Arab-hating intelligence man, the young sergeant who grew up on a farm, the gentle, lonely Ohayon) and the community (the feuding neighbours, Jews from one ethnic group rattling their sabres at Jews from a different background, the lonely little fat girl who observes everything around her). And to top it all off, I learnt a lot about Israel - and reading the book spurred me to go and look more things up, too.

I've had enough of detective novels for a while, but I'd certainly read more Batya Gur in the future.

rachbxl, thanks for the description of Bethlehem Road Murder. I've recently read two books by Israeli writers. Each book was curiously "apolitical," if that's the word I want. The tensions between Jews and Arabs and Jews and Jew were absent. I felt curiously suspended, out of history if you will. I found myself wondering, "Is this the typical Israeli experience? Are the people there that much like Americans - walking around oblivious to any reality that falls outside a certain party line?" Obviously, I know that a lot of tension exists there as in the US; however, my experience as an American living in the south (and born in the south as well) is that the majority of people I know simply refuse to process any evidence that does not tally with certain preconceived notions they already hold. I have always thought of this as a peculiarly American trait. I did not post on either book because the topic is so loaded, and I have my own hot buttons about the situation. Anyway, all of this is a roundabout way of saying, I will put Batya Gur on my reading list even though I'm not generally a fan of mystery and detective fiction.

I have read at least two of Batya Gur's novels, and will add them to the my list. I am not normally a fan of detective fiction, either.

Always a pleasure to read about your reading, rach!

I do like some 'detective' novels - mostly good police procedurals. I use them especially as 'literary palate cleansers' when I need to transition from one kind of book to another. I also use them to kickstart me out of a reading funk. I prefer non-American mysteries.

Hi rachbxl, you appear to own Olga Tokarczuk's Anna In w grobowcach świata - I found reading OT a great way to get into reading Polish, though this one is a bit harder than her others. Loads of interesting leads in this thread, I will be following them up.

31. Senegal
Le Ventre de l'Atlantique by Fatou Diome

I thought it was time to explore Africa a bit more, and this was on my TBR pile.

What to say? I really enjoyed this book, and yet I didn't. It's set on a little island off the coast of Senegal, where all the young people dream of emigrating to France, which is what the narrator has done. On her return visits she strives to make them see the immigrant's life in France for what it is - lonely, poor, unstable - but her warnings fall on deaf ears; her brother and his friends see themselves as the next generation of Senegalese footballers to be trained in Europe (and this despite the presence on the island of the father of someone who, having failed to fulfil his footballing potential, was deported from France in unpleasant circumstances).
I liked the handling of the themes of identity/belonging/otherness; the narrator, away in Strasbourg, is detached from her community, which she no longer belongs to, and nor does she belong in France. However, this same detachment meant that for me, things didn't really come alive (with a few exceptions). There are a lot of long descriptive passages, as though the author really, REALLY wants the reader to understand what she's saying, whereas for me the sections with dialogue, where something was actually happening, got the message over much more effectively.
The novel is beautifully written, with a wonderful flow to it, and I felt that I could almost hear the author's voice in my ear, reading aloud.

The Belly of the Atlantic is my Senegalese read as well (I have also read So Long a Letter, but enjoyed Dioume's book much more). I thought you review echoed my thoughts perfectly. I enjoyed reading it, and thought the themes of hope and disappointment in immigrants were very well brought out, but mostly in the action and dialogue, rather than the more wistful passages of the narrator.

btw In ref to your comment in post 64, it is likely to be a while before I get to Allfrey's book, but hopefully before the end of the year.

#75, I loved So Long a Letter too. Mariama Ba wrote one other novel with which I'm familiar Scarlet Song. It's too bad, she died in her early fifties

32. Russia
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
translated from the Russian by Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley

This novel was a revelation to me. I had always assumed (on the basis of nothing) that Solzhenitsyn's work would be inaccessible and difficult. I don't know about his other works, but that's not the case here, and it's precisely the simplicity with which the story is told that makes it so striking.
Ivan Denisovich, Shukhov, is in the 8th year of his 10-year term in a hard-labour camp in Siberia, and this is the story of one day in his life. Shukhov presents the horror and brutality of his world in a matter-of-fact way, because it IS matter-of-fact to him. This particular day is an exceptionally good one - he gets an extra ration of gruel at both lunch and supper, and an extra bit of bread that he hides in his sawdust-filled mattress for later use, he manages to sneak an old piece of steel back into the camp to make a knife, he is given a little piece of sausage by a fellow prisoner, he managed not to get his feet wet all day, and his felt boots have prime position on the stove overnight, so at least tomorrow he'll start out with warm feet. Life is so terrible that the only way to survive is by taking pleasure in small mercies such as these.
On the basis of this novel, I'll be reading more by Solzhenitsyn.

Time for an updated map (because Russia makes all the difference!)


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What an admirable project. And you're doing so well, good for you.

Impressive indeed! Time for an Australian read, perhaps?

>79 posthumose: thanks, posthumose. I was inspired by others doing the same thing (particularly depressaholic), and decided I had to do it for myself. I don't think I've ever enjoyed my reading so much.

> Akeela, how did you know? Just yesterday I started Remembering Babylon by David Malouf.

:) Well, it will take care of an entire continent, so it seemed liked a good idea!

Country no 33 Australia (just for Akeela;) )

Remembering Babylon by David Malouf

The Australian friend who lent this to me proved to be correct in her prediction that I wouldn't like it as much as I like Tim Winton and Kate Grenville, to whom she also introduced me.
The novel is set in Queensland in the mid 19th century, in a community of Scottish settlers, and opens with a real event: an almost-naked man staggers out of the bush and announces, "Do not shoot! I am a B-b-british object", and Malouf develops the story from there. The wild man, Gemmy, after being thrown overboard off the Australian coast as a child, was rescued by Aborigines and taken to live with them. By the time he rejoins European society, he has forgotten virtually all his English, as well as his "civilised" behaviour.
There are some fascinating themes in this novel - The Other, the Europeans' utter failure to understand the Aboriginal culture (and mistrust of Gemmy because he does understand), use of language and the importance of naming - and it's beautifully written, but for me there was something missing. I also felt that there were a few loose ends- Mrs Hutchence and Leona, for example; why make so much of their mysterious circumstances if you are never going to tell the reader what they are?
(My boyfriend is from Queensland, and he found this novel to be such a perfect evocation of home that he was homsick for days after reading it!)

Cool! Thanks, Rachel ;)

I look forward to seeing where you go next!

Country no 34 Iceland

The Journey Home by Olaf Olafsson
translated from the Icelandic by the author

I became aware of how much I was enjoying this book because of how frequently by thoughts turned to it whilst I wasn't reading it. It's the story of Disa's return to Iceland, a journey of redempton, after many years in England; it's told in the form of recollections which she jots down on her way, on the ship. At first I was almost repelled by Disa's strong character, her belief in herself, but I later warmed to her - she's another of those flawed characters who are likeable because of it. It's been a couple of days since I finished reading it, but it's still very much with me.

As far as I can make out, the novel was originally written in Icelandic, and the author produced the English translation himself. The only thing I have a little problem with is that sometimes the English wasn't very English (ie of England) - for example, it jarred to hear "I had gotten" from the lips of an Icelandic woman who had spent several decades in England and who (as far we know) had never even been to the USA. There's also a mention of an English county which only came into existence under that name well after the time when it was supposed to exist in the novel.

These are minor details, though (but irritating!), and I would heartily recommend this novel.

Thanks again, Lois!

-->85 rachbxl:
Its amazing how getting the English from the wrong side of the Atlantic can really destroy a character. It must be a nightmare for translators.

>85 rachbxl: So glad you enjoyed it, rachel. How very interesting about the English translation. Of course, I never picked up on it. Do we know if Olafsson studied in the US?

>87 avaland: he did - he studied physics in the US, and he's now Executive VP of Time Warner. How come some people are good at so many things?

>88 rachbxl: interesting (I just rushed off to read his wikipedia entry). I noticed the other Olafsson novel I have is set in the US and Iceland. When does he have any time to write?

Country no 35 France

Kiffe kiffe demain by Faiza Guène
available in English as Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow

With a degree in French and Spanish literature, France was hardly new territory for me, but this was a good chance to read a new author, and I throroughly enjoyed this short novel about contemporary life in the soulless Paris suburbs. The narrator, Doria, the 15-year-old daughter of Moroccan immigrants has a fresh, captivating voice, and is without a trace of self-pity. I think it's this refusal to feel sorry for herself that makes the reader really appreciate the bleakness of her life in a high-rise block, denied access to life's opportunities because of her poverty and her immigrant status. I really felt for Doria as she described how she was helping her mother learn to write, or how her mother had never seen the Eiffel Tower despite having lived 10km away for the last 20 years - but by the next paragraph she would have me laughing out loud with her irreverent descriptions of the world around her.

Doria really came alive, and I miss her now I've finished the novel.

Country no.36 Antigua & Barbuda

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

I liked this, but I didn't love it. It's a vivid tale of childhood and adolescence on the island of Antigua, narrated by Annie John herself. A brilliant, headstrong child to whom everything comes easily, she has an idyllic childhood as the apple of her parents' eye, enjoying a particularly close relationship with her beautiful mother, whom she adores. When she reaches adolescence, though, everything changes, as her mother tries to put distance between them and force her to be a young lady, not a child. What I found interesting here was the idea of perception; the reader sees everything through the lens of Annie's perception - so does her mother really behave in the cold way that Annie says, or is that only Annie's childish reading of her behaviour? (In this I was reminded of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child - how reliable is Harriet's interpretation? Are we supposed to believe her, or should we draw our own conclusions?)

Jamaica Kincaid is also my Antiguan read, though not this book (I read Mr Potter). I really didn't enjoy it, largely because I struggled with deciding which voice I was listening to (the adult author, the adult trying to see as a child, or the child). I eventually decided (perhaps erroneously) that the fault was Kincaid's, rather than mine, in the sense that perhaps her voices were unrealistic or inconsistent. I was wondering if this contributed to your slightly lukewarm response to Annie John. I have been tempted to read more Kincaid since, but haven't quite been motivated enough to do it yet.

depressaholic, I think you're right. I tried to give Kincaid the benefit of the doubt, but as I read I was aware that I was wondering whether this was really the teenage Annie John, or whether it was the author. As I said above, the reader is only presented with Annie John's view, so when you're not even sure that that really is her view, you're right, it becomes somewhat unrealistic. Not a bad book, I didn't think, but not good enough to make me want to read more Kincaid.

Country no. 37 Afghanistan

Earth and Ashes by Atiq Rahimi
translated from the Dari (Afghanistan) by Erdag M. Goknar

A beautiful little book. And it really IS so little - 81 pages, big margins, wide spacing - that it could actually be a short story, except that that somehow it needs to be a novel and stand alone. Normally I'd have raced through something this short in an hour, but I couldn't do that here; it begged to be read slowly.

It's set in Afghanistan at the time of the Soviet invasion, and it involves an old man, Dastaguir, travelling with his grandson, Yasin, to find the boy's father, Murad, who works in a mine, to tell him that their village has been devastated. The book is written in the second person - Dastaguir talking to himself. I unearthed an interview with the author in which he explains that the grandfather, son and grandson represent 3 generations of Afghanistan which are unable to communicate with each other; the grandfather is the old, noble Afghanistan with its traditional values, the son is the Mujahideen and chaos, the grandson (deafened by the bombing of his village) is handicapped by war and unaccessible. I can see that now, but I'm afraid I didn't know enough about Afghanistan to be able to get there on my own - but then, part of the reason for reading around the world is to find out about the world.

Thanks to Akeela for another great recommendation!

(edited to add the number of the country)

Poland revisited, again.

Chwila/Moment by Wislawa Szymborska

I don't read much poetry, but whenever I do, I wonder why that is. This is a short collection from one of Poland's Nobel prize winners, with the English translations alongside the Polish originals. Initially I was only dipping into the translations to check my understanding, but I was so impressed that I ended up reading them for the pleasure of it, as well as the original. The translators are Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, the latter being a well-known translator of English into Polish, at least among my Polish friends (admittedly not, perhaps, a representative sample, given that they're almost all translators or interpreters themselves). One of my friends raved about Baranczak's translations of Shakespeare, another about his translations of children's stories.

Some of the poems in this collection are reflections on abstract concepts (eg "A Few Words on the Soul"), whilst others are about everyday things, but from an interesting angle ("Receiver", "A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth"). My favourites are "A Memory", about reactions to a beautiful girl, and "A Contribution to Statistics", in both of which Szymborska's succint, witty style is particularly effective.

yet more Poland
Szafa by Olga Tokarczuk
(Not sure if this is available in English - Andrew, do you read this? I know you could tell us...)

Enjoyable collection of 2 short and one longer story. The short story from which the book takes its name involves a young couple who buy a wardrobe for their almost unfurnished flat and end up retreating in it from the world outside - wonderfully quirky and a little bit surreal. The longer story, "Numbers", is a look at a hotel from the point of view of a chambermaid who analyses the guests through the state in which they leave their rooms (note to self to be a bit tidier in hotel rooms in future...!)

Sorry, only just noticed this - yes 'Numbers' appeared in Granta magazine in English a few years ago, the others haven't been done to my knowledge. The bit about the Young Americans reminded me of how I normally leave hotel rooms, sadly. Actually I've just put an interview with her about Bieguni on polishwriting.net

>97 agl1: Thank you! I've passed that on. Thanks for telling me about the interview - I enjoyed reading it.

Country no. 38
Finland

When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen
translated from the Finnish by Douglas Robinson

A young woman sits in a cafe, putting off going to visit her brother in a mental hospital (I said it wasn't light). As she orders coffee after coffee, she starts to remember everything that she's made herself forget, and the novel is a fragmented telling of episodes of her own life, together with that of her parents and her American boyfriend. I was irritated by the appearance of 9/11 in conjunction with the boyfriend's story as it seemed like jumping on the bandwagon at first, but Hirvonen actually worked it in well.
This is Elina Hirvonen's debut novel; I'll be looking out for more.

Country no. 39
Germany

The Murder Farm by Andrea Maria Schenkel
translated from the German by Anthea Bell

I wouldn't have been tempted by this had I not seen that it had been a bestseller and won prizes in Germany (neither of these things would make me buy an English novel, but sometimes I think it's interesting to see what's popular in other languages and in other countries).
No prizes for guessing that it's about a (multiple) murder on a (remote German) farm, but what makes it interesting is the way it's told - not a detective in sight. Instead, commentary from an anonymous narrator is interspersed with first-person testimony (to the police or the newspaper?) and newspaper cuttings (the title of the novel turns out to come from a sensational headline; I have to say that the title really put me off so I'm interested to note from the touchstone that the original German title was Tannod, the name of the village). All of those interested are keen to speculate about what has happened and why, several of them harking back to events in the war, 10 years earlier, giving the story an additional twist.

Country no. 40
Mozambique

A River Called Time by Mia Couto
translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw

University student Mariano returns from his westernised life in a city on the mainland to the island home of his family, on the occasion of his grandfather's death. To his surprise, he discovers on his arrival that his grandfather has appointed him to take over the running of the family affairs (no easy task given the various warring factions; there's a fight between traditionalists who want to protect their island heritage and "progressives" who want to sell off their family home for development as a luxury resort, there are 3 feisty female members of the family all laying claim to the dead man...) Yet more surprising, Mariano discovers that his grandfather isn't actually dead, but is in an in-between state between life and death, having died a "bad death".

This is a wonderful novel full of myths and magic, and the importance of story-telling. Time is a fluid concept, not chronological, and the characters are rooted more in the soil of their island home than in any given moment.
More details to follow in the Africa read - I'm really looking forward to thinking about this book more for that.

Always great to step into your reading, Rach!

>101 avaland: Thanks, Lois!

Argentina again
Purgatorio by Tomas Eloy Martinez (no touchstones)

Purgatorio by Tomas Eloy Martinez (no touchstones)
(not translated into English yet)

This is the Argentine writer Eloy Martinez's most recent novel (2008), and the first of his that I'd read; on the basis of this one, I'll be reading more.

In 1976 Simon Cardoso disappears at the hands of the military junta in Argentina. His wife, Emilia, devotes her life to searching for him, in vain, until she finds him sitting in the next booth in a New Jersey diner in 2008. The novel opens with the scene in the diner and then switches between present and various times in the past - Emilia and Simon as newly-weds, cartographers both, heading off on the mapping trip in the south of Argentina from which Emilia will return alone; Emilia's life back with her parents in Buenos Aires - her father, chief "spin doctor" to the junta, was presumably responsible for Simon's disappearance; the years spent by Emilia chasing down phantom sightings of her husband across Latin America; the surreal craziness of life under the generals; the loneliness of exile in the USA.

Simon, the "disappeared", is at the centre of the novel, yet the book is about Emilia and the hole left in her life rather than about what happened to Simon. How does a wife carry on without knowing whether her husband is alive or dead? And by extension, how does a country carry on without knowing whether thousands of its citizens are alive or dead?

Eloy Martinez himself appears in the novel as the narrator of some of the contemporary sections, those most concerned with life in exile.

Iran revisited

The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer

It was probably a mistake to read this on the heels of the Eloy Martinez book; there it was the Argentine generals, here it's the Revolutionary Guards that are arresting people on a whim and detaining them without trial. Sofer's first novel isn't bad, but it suffers in comparison and left me feeling unsatisfied.
Interesting angle on the Islamic Revolution, though - the main character, Isaac Amin, a wealthy jeweller arrested by the Guards on page 1, is Jewish; he feels completely Iranian because that's what he is, but realises that his country is going in a direction in which he cannot follow.
Sofer's writing is beautiful at times, but struck me as trying too hard at others - does every sentence really have to contain a simile or a metaphor?
I've just had a look at the reviews on LT and see that almost everyone gives this 4 or 5 stars. Maybe I'm feeling churlish this weekend, or maybe it really is the comparison with the last book I read, but I can't rave about this novel. As I said, it ain't bad, but I don't think it's anything special.

Country number 41: Egypt

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi
translated from the Arabic by Sherif Hetata

This little book has been working its way up to the top of my mental TBR pile for quite some time, and finally its moment came the other day. Based on the author's interviews with female prisoners in Egyptian jails in her capacity as a psychiatrist, it tells the story of Firdaus, who has been sentenced to death for murder. The story is simply told, but the simplicity is deceptive; this is a thought-provoking book about a society which has different rules and standards for men and women, and is sometimes disturbing to read. I liked the matter-of-factness of it; it would have been easy for Firdaus to see herself as a victim of the system, but there is no self-pity. Rather, there is pride, pride in her treasured school-leaving certificate, pride that she gets to the stage of having a room of her own, pride that if she returns to prostitution it is having reached the conclusion that she is more free as a well-paid whore than as a struggling clerical worker - and even pride in going to her death holding her head high, having refused the opportunity to repent and receive a presidential pardon.

I read Woman at Point Zero while doing till shifts at the Oxfam shop where I work. Usually the books I read this way do not stick in my head, because I read in 5-10 minute gaps with lots of distractions. Saadawi's book blew me away. I suspect a few customers gave up trying to buy stuff because I refused to look up from it.

Wow that sounds great. I've added it to the wishlist...

>105 GlebtheDancer: depressaholic, I can believe it. I started it the other night, thinking I'd read just a couple of pages before going to sleep, and before I knew it I'd read two-thirds of it; I ended up setting the alarm early so I could finish it before work the next morning.

>106 nancyewhite: nancyewhite, it's worth looking out for.

Country number 42: Portugal

Blindness by José Saramago
translated from the Portuguese by Giovanni Pontiero

Thanks to deebee for recommending this as a good introduction to Saramago; she wasn't wrong.

A plague of blindness sweeps through an unnamed city in an unnamed country, throwing society into chaos. The panicking authorities intern the first few hundred victims in a fomer mental hospital, and it is in this closed space that the first half of the novel takes place. Like Cortazar's The Winners, which I read last year, Blindness is strongly reminiscent of Camus's La Peste in its examination of how an isolated group of loosely-linked individuals comes to term with extreme conditions, and how our vices and virtues come to the fore under this kind of pressure. Blindness in a way takes this one step further - is there any point in virtue when there is nobody to see it?

Saramago uses a very particular style - paragraphs go on for pages and pages, punctuation is sparse, dialogue is part of the main body of the text, without speech marks or anything to indicate that it is speech - and yet I was won over by it right away. It could have been a disaster in other hands, but in Saramago's it is quite simply brilliantly effective, removing the distance between reader and characters.
Another feature of Saramago's style is the lack of names - not just the town and the country, but all the characters. They are referred to throughout the book as "the man with the black eye patch", "the girl with the dark glasses", "the boy with the squint"; Saramago has a wry sense of humour, which is perhaps what saves this book from being unremittingly grim, and it's surely no coincidence that many of the "names" refer to the characters' eyes (even "the doctor" is an opthalmologist, after all).

In a nutshell: uncomfortable, disturbing, nightmarish, some of it made me flinch and cringe - and also impossible to put down, brilliantly written (and translated), very highly recommended.

(I couldn't overlook Portugal's leading contemporary writer in my literary travels, but as the setting of Blindness is universal there is little that is Portuguese here (apart from the type of sausage eaten by the doctor's wife at one point), so I'm going to try to revisit Portugal with something more local in flavour - any suggestions out there?)

rachel, i'm happy that you enjoyed Blindness! there's plenty more of Saramago to discover...

in Blindness, there is something else, aside from the sausage that is very Portuguese --- the reaction of the government! :-) Blindness is, of course, more than just a dystopian novel..above all, Saramago's modern fables are political satire and philosophical reflection. this is more obvious in the sequel Seeing (which, incidentally, i'm now reading), a biting criticism of the institutions of political power. you might want to read this too -- i think you will enjoy it.

for more of his that are local in flavour, there are a few:

there's History of the Siege of Lisbon -- you cannot get more local than that! but for this, rach, best to accompany the read with a visit -- you need to go yourself through those steep and narrow passages in the Jewish quarter, and along the castle walls with a view of Tagus, to get the most out of the book! :-)

also Baltasar and Blimunda -- set in the Middle Ages during the construction of the biggest monastery in the country (the Portuguese title is Memorial do Convento) built to fulfill a king's promise. a beautiful story...it's one of my favorite novels.

there's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and of course Journey to Portugal, a travelogue.

as far as i know, these are his only books translated into English that refer to Portugal --- the rest mostly involve nameless places and characters. unless u want to try to read his other works in Portuguese...:-) learning the language should be a breeze for you.

another very good novelist whose stories are set in Portugal and sometimes refer to its history, is Antonio Lobo Antunes. less accessible to read than Saramago (this guy is a psychiatrist, and it shows -- there is no easy way to read him), he writes long, complex novels -- his is the dark, gritty side of Lisbon and its people. if there is a next Portuguese contender for the Nobel, he is it. i'm now actually reading what is considered to be his masterpiece Fado Alexandrino, the story of 5 soldiers, veterans of the war in Mozambique, who 10 years after, got together for a night in Lisbon, whose meeting ended in a murder.

just some suggestions you might want to consider... and don't forget, we're having Portugal as theme later this year, so there will more ideas you can pick up then!

Thanks, deebee! I almost bought Seeing yesterday but I managed to resist (on the basis that there's no point paying above the odds for things in Belgium when I can get them cheaper elsewhere). I'm looking forward to reading some of your recommendations, maybe for the Portugal read which, yes, I'd forgotten about.
As for the reaction of the government, that was precisely one of the elements that I thought made Blindness universal!

deebee and rachbxl, there's also Saramago's travelogue, Journey to Portugal. I recently bought it but haven't read it yet.

Oh no, another one for the list! Thanks, kidzdoc.

Country number 43: Kyrgyzstan

Djamilia by Tchinghiz Aitmatov
translated into French from the Kyrgyz by A. Dimitrieva and Louis Aragon

This is definitely a first; I'm quite sure I've never read anything from Kyrgyzstan before. Nor was I planning to read anything right now, but I happened upon this the other day and it seemed too good to leave in the shop. (It proved to be 2 euros well spent).

The French writer Louis Aragon, one of the 2 people responsible for the French translation which I read, called this short novel "the most beautiful love story in the world". I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, but there's certainly something very special about it. It's the story of the forbidden love of a headstrong young woman, Djamilia, and Daniiar, arrived recently in the village after a nomadic childhood on the steppes, as narrated by the young brother of Djamilia's husband, away fighting in the war.

I found the setting of the story as fascinating as the story itself. The villagers have only recently abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and it is still important to them collectively. At the time of the story, several years into World War II, they are adjusting to life under the Soviets, and the collective farms, for example, contrast starkly with their traditional life on the steppes. From what I can work out, Aitmatov was working in Moscow when he wrote Djamilia, and that shows in the poignancy with which he describes his homeland (I found myself longing for something I've never seen). I found the combination of the evocation of the steppes and the understated love story to be very powerful. It's easy to say "it's very romantic", but the scene where Daniiar sings as they drive their grain carts home in the moonlight really is one of the most romantic things I've ever read (perhaps because it's all suggestion, not fulfilment).

My one gripe is that I'd have appreciated a glossary of the many terms which were left in Kyrgyz or Russian in the French text. There were footnotes for some, but not all, of them - and sometimes the footnotes only gave a synonym, also in Kyrgyz!

Country no 44: Lebanon

I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops by Hanan al-Shaykh
translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham

I've been reading a lot of short stories recently and these certainly weren't the best of what I've read, but it's an interesting collection nevertheless. Al-Shaykh was born and raised in Lebanon and now lives in London, which gives her a good eye for cultural differences between the West and the Arab world which are the at the centre of several of her stories. (One of these which I particularly enjoyed was "The Land of Dreams", about Ingrid, a young Danish missionary in a Yemeni village).

These stories are all about female characters (there's even one story without any men in it at all, as they have all gone to make money in Saudi Arabia and come back to their women once a year), and what's interesting is the way al-Shaykh challenges the traditional role of women in the societies she writes about (I don't know about this book, but I know that some of her work is banned in the Gulf States because of this).

I'm not sure just how much "Lebanon" there was in this collection because many stories were set in unnamed parts of the Arab world, but in any case it was an excellent window through which to see that world, if not specifically Lebanon. I have other Lebanon reads lined up which might be more local.

A return visit to Argentina:

La aventura de un fotografo en La Plata by Adolfo Bioy Casares
(English translation available: The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata)

Comments may follow...

And Egypt revisited:

Blue Aubergine by Miral al-Tahawy
translated from the Arabic by Anthony Calderbank

Miral al-Tahawy has been on the edge of my consciousness for a couple of years now; I was prompted to go ahead and order one of her novels by Avaland's musings about who the next generation of women writing in Arabic might be - those who follow on from Assia Djebar, Nawal el-Sadaawi, et al.

According to the cover blurb, 'Miral al-Tahawy was born in 1968 in Sharqiya in the Egyptian Delta into a Bedouin family of the al-Hanadi tribe. She earned her MA in Arabic literature from Cairo University in 1995. She has been described by the Washington Post as "the first novelist to present Egyptian Bedouin life beyond stereotypes and to illustrate the crises of Bedouin women and their urge to break free"'.

This novel is the story of Nada, or 'Blue Aubergine', as her family call her, because that is what she looked like when she was born prematurely in 1967, the year of Egypt's defeat by Israel. There are three distinct sections to the novel - Nada's childhood, her first degree in Cairo, and her doctorate - but al-Tahawi doesn't use time in a linear way; there are no clear demarcations between Nada the child and Nada the adult, and experiences from one part of her life pop up in the narrative about earlier or later parts. This was disconcerting at times as it wasn't always easy to follow, but I decided not to worry about it too much - a decision which paid off, because by the end it all made sense. Similarly, it was sometimes difficult to work out who was being talked about because of the lack of proper nouns and abundance of pronouns, but I took the advice given by the translator in his introduction: If you're not sure which of the previous two 'she's the third 'she' refers to, I invite you to invoke your narrative feel and sense it.

The main theme of the novel is the influence our childhood, our parents and the society in which they reared us have on our lives; Nada is crippled by the restrictive values imposed on her by her elders, and which she is unable to shake off. A paragraph from the end of the books sums it up:

My mother used to tell me how her father kept the windows closed, and turned the radio off if a love song came on. She had me convinced that if I lived my life afraid to do anything, then I was 'polite and well-mannered' , and that if I stopped seeing my friend who chewed gum, that she had 'brought me up well'. But when her stories no longer scared me, and I decided to dance with the gypsies in the street, my mother lowered her head and cursed the day she'd given birth to me.

The whole novel is an account of Nada's attempts to find love and affection (and in particular to relate to men) in a way which her society won't condemn; unfortunately, as soon as she deviates from the set path and 'dances with the gypsies' she is lost, because her upbringing has left her almost criminally naive.

I enjoyed reading this very much (I suggest reading it in one or two sittings, or else it would be even more confusing than it is), but I found it very bleak. It was clear from early on that there wasn't going to be a happy ending for Nada, that her search was going to be in vain. Woman at Point Zero, for example, doesn't end happily, but is nevertheless uplifting; I'm unable to find anything uplifting here. Maybe we will have to wait for the NEXT generation of Arabic women writers for that...

Country number 45: El Salvador

Insensatez by Horacio Castellanos Moya
(English translation available: Senselessness)

Wow, what can I say? This is one of the most brilliant books I've read in a long time, but also one of the most disturbing. The anonymous narrator, a journalist, has had to flee his own Central American country because of an article to which the president took offence. A friend of his who works for the catholic church offers him work in a neighbouring country, proof-reading a 1,100-page report being put together under the auspices of the church on the atrocities committed against the indigenous communities by the military during the civil war.

I think it has to be understood that the narrator hasn't suddenly been pitched from a sheltered life into shattering reports of atrocities; he's a jaded Central Amercian journalist who has seen it all before, or so he thinks, and at the outset this is just another job; he has to make ends meet, after all. This is why, to me, the extent to which the report takes over his life is all the more striking. From the start he is captivated by odd quotes from the report, verbatim accounts from indigenous people who witnessed or survived the atrocities:

The people we were frightened of, they were people, just like us.
We all know who the murderers are.

He copies these phrases into his notebook, and they go round and round in his head like a tune he can't get rid of; he blurts them out to other people at inappropriate times and without providing any context. The further into the report he gets, the more the rest of the world recedes; he identifies by turns with both the victims and the torturers in long passages punctuated by phrases from his notebook. At the same time he becomes increasingly paranoid about his own safety.

To combat the grimness, the narrator retreats into the arms of two Spanish NGO workers, one repressed, the other anything but, in what I interpreted as desperate attempts to have contact with life and the living.

So far so ugly - but what I haven't said yet is that this is a very funny novel. In fact, it's this wonderful macabre humour which makes it readable, as without it it would just be too grim. The humour also puts the atrocities into stark contrast, I think - on the one hand we have the narrator fumbling around in his relations with others (his unexpected discourse on the heroic struggle of the Basque people, for example, and even more unexpected segue into what it means to appear in the pages of Hola, when he becomes convinced that the waitress is a government informer spying on him and the Basque psychiatrist responsible for much of the report - I thought this passage was hilarious), and on the other we have the narrator trying to come to terms with what he has to read. The humour comes to an end, I think, once there is no longer any distinction between the narrator's own life and the report, when the report has taken over his life altogether.

A word on the location. Whilst the novel is clearly set in Central America, there are a couple of little pointers which indicate that the exact setting is Guatemala. I think that it isn't more firmly rooted in one particular state because the events could relate to many more places. The same goes for timing; mention of Prince Felipe of Spain's Norwegian girlfriend sets the action at the end of the 1990's, but it could be many places at many different times.

Country number 46: Tanzania

By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Thanks to Akeela and Avaland for recommending this one.

What a beautiful book! It was the perfect, soothing antithesis to Insensatez, and I didn't want it to end. A refugee from Zanzibar arrives in the UK, unusually old for an asylum seeker, and looks back on what has brought him to this point. His stories cross generations and continents, and they are spell-binding. There's something magical about this book, and in particular about the descriptions of Zanzibar, one of the spice islands and an important stopping-point for Arab traders brought there on the trade winds. I could smell the spices, the incense, the wood of the beautiful furniture sold by the narrator before his fortunes turned. Equally tangible is the melancholy with which the novel is infused, the sense of loss and nostalgia - yet Gurnah is skilful enough to stop short of wallowing and to keep the stories moving.

The novel is set at the time of Zanzibar's independence from the British; enough details are given for the reader to follow without prior knowledge, I think, but it made me curious and I looked up the history of Zanzibar. (This is partly the point of my round-the-world trip, after all). I was particularly interested in the comments in the novel about the role of Omanis in Zanzibar, and I discovered that Zanzibar was part of the Omani empire from 1698 until 1856 - hence the resentment towards Omanis at the time of the events in the novel.

Highly recommended.

So glad you enjoyed it, rach.

Back to Haiti

Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
non-fiction

When Edwige Danticat was a very small child, her father left Haiti in the hope of finding a better life in New York, followed later by her mother. Danticat and her brother Bob were left behind as they were not permitted to travel, and it was almost 10 years until there were able to join their parents in the USA, during which time they saw them only once. Years later, Danticat discovers on the same day that she is expecting a child, and that her father is dying, both of which prompt her to look back at her family's history. Brother, I'm Dying is the story of the Danticat family; in particular it is a tribute to the author's "two fathers", her real father, Mira, and her uncle Joseph, who brought her and Bob up as his own in Haiti. It is a very moving tale about family ties, family love, exile, absence and loss, and about life and death, inseparable from an account of the last 100 years of Haitian history.

This could have been a real tear-jerker on the one hand, and strident in its outrage at the way the outside world (including the UN forces present in the country) left Haiti to its fate during its recent civil war on the other, but nothing is overdone; Danticat stands back and lets her story speak for itse

Another visit to Iran:

My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad
translated from the Persian by Dick Davis

Published in 1973, this is apparently one of the best-loved Persian novels of all time. In the early 1940s, in Teheran, the teenage narrator falls in love with his cousin Layli, daughter of the paranoid patriarch of the family, known to all (behind his back) as "Dear Uncle Napoleon" because of his unswerving admiration for Napoleon, with whom he compares himself as a military tactician against the common enemy, the dreaded English.
The narrator recounts the story of his touchingly innocent and ultimately frustrated love for Layli, whilst around them the life of their extended family descends into farce thanks to the endless attempts of the narrator's father and Uncle Napoleon to get one up on each other in increasingly far-fetched ways. Farce? In 1940's Iran? Translated into English? I really wasn't expecting much - but this book is really, really funny, and gave me a completely different picture of Iran and its people, everything else I have read from Iran having been written for a foreign audience about the Revolution and its legacy (in the afterword Pezeshkzad quotes a review which says, "My Uncle Napoleon may do more to improve US-Iranian relations than a generation of shuttle diplomats and national apologies"). The chapter in which Deputy Taymur Khan "interrogates" the family using his "international system of surprise attack" is one of the funniest things I've read for ages.
Almost all the action takes place in the walled compound in which the extended family lives in 3 different houses, with a complicated cast of distant relatives and local characters dropping in regularly. This gave me the feeling that I was a spectator in the garden compound, watching the farce unfold before my eyes. Hats off to the translator for managing to render so successfully the characters' verbal tics - even the minor characters came alive for me.
My attention was wandering by the last 100 pages or so (of 500), but that may have been because I put the book down and picked it up again so many times in the course of reading it (not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because life got in the way). Had I read it more smoothly I might not have felt it was a touch too long.

France again:

Le rendez-vous by Justine Lévy
available in English as The Rendezvous

Despite the title, there is no meeting in this novella; it's all about the wait for a meeting that's never going to happen. Louise, the 18-year old narrator, has been summoned to a Paris café by her mother Alice, Alice's first sign of life in a year. As Louise sits and waits, she looks back over her life with her mother, and it quickly becomes apparent to the reader (as it is presumably apparent to Louise from the outset, although she clings to her hope) that Alice will be letting her daughter down once again.
As with Lévy's second novel Rien de grave, there's a lot here that is based on her own life (although one hopes that Alice isn't based on her real mother) - for example, the adult child trying to find her place in the world away from the shadow of her famous parents (Lévy is the daughter of French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy; Louise's father is a successful conductor and composer, her mother a former model). Lévy wrote this novel when she was only 20, and in some ways it shows; could Alice really have been so negligent? The drugs, the shoplifting, the prison sentence, lesbian lovers, male lovers, leaving her pills around for Louise to overdose on - not to mention plain old neglect. Some of them, yes, but piling them one on top of the other made it all less credible.
What I did like, though, was the dialogue - witty, zesty, succint, a forerunner of the dialogue in Rien de grave (Nothing Serious).

Touchstones not working - will edit later.

Back to Mozambique

Mar Me Quer by Mia Couto
(possibly not translated into English)

I was entranced by Mia Couto's style when I read A River Called Time earlier this year and I became curious about what he would be like in the original. A full-length novel would have been pushing it a bit, but when I found this novella in the library I couldn't resist. This is a magical little tale about 2 neighbours and the stories they tell each other - as in A River Called Time story-telling is used to bind people together and to give them roots.
A Portuguese friend told me the other day that Couto "invents and re-invents" the Portuguese language, and I was able to get some feel of that in the beautiful flow - it carried me along with it. (However, I'll still be reliant on translations for anything longer than these 60 pages!)

More Japan

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
translated from the Japanese (it's gone back to the library now and I'm afraid I didn't make a note of the translator, cardinal sin in my book...)

I love books like this - gentle, quiet books that creep up on you without you noticing, until you realise that the characters are always with you and that you can't wait to get back to them.
In a nutshell, a housekeeper with a 10-year old son is sent to work for a maths professor whom an accident has left with an 80-minute memory, meaning that they have to build up their relationship from scratch every day. The professor uses numbers to cope with the world, and he and the little boy are big baseball fans. Like all good books, though, it's much more than the sum of its parts, and it's a beautiful story about people and how we entwine ourselves around each other. There's a lot of quite complicated maths in there, and a lot about baseball - two subjects I'd have said I'm not at all interested in, yet Yoko Ogawa makes them fascinating.
I've ordered a copy for my mathematician (and keen reader) mum - I think she'll love it. (This is the first time I've come anywhere near appreciating her obsession with numbers. Language is my thing, and this is the first inkling I've had that numbers are a kind of language of their own).

Country no. 47: Croatia

The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic
translated from the Croatian by Michael Henry Heim

Although I haven't listed it here, I recently read an excellent non-fiction work by Clea Koff called The Bone Woman, about anthropological investigations into the mass graves in former Yugoslavia, amongst other places. Not that I did it on purpose, but The Ministry of Pain was the perfect follow-up. Koff uncovers the horror inflicted on those who remained in former Yugoslavia; Ugresic uses her novel to show how fleeing the war was no easy option either.
Tanja Ludic, an academic from Zagreb, ends up in Amsterdam by chance (and the residence permit lottery), teaching Serbo-Croat literature at the university to a handful of her fellow "ex-Yugos" who have also washed up there. Rather than studying literature, Tanja embarks with them upon a journey into "Yugonostalgia" as they try to make sense of their displacement and the fragmentation of their country. They cling to each other out of desperation, yet where one moment there is comradeship and support and they are all "our people", the next an invisible line has been crossed and they are suddenly divided into Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, only for a fragile unity to be re-established out of need.

Another happy coincidence is that Ugresic is speaking in London on Sunday at the World Literature Weekend organised by the London Review of Books; I'm looking forward to hearing her.

Country no. 48: The Netherlands

Back to the Coast by Saskia Noort
translated from the Dutch by Laura Vroomen

I should say at the outset that this isn't my kind of book; I knew that when I bought it but I'd never knowingly read anything from the Netherlands before so I was curious, and as I'm actively seeking out books by women from obscure (in terms of my reading) places, I was doubly curious. It says on the cover that it's a "literary thriller" but I'd suggest that there's more thriller than literature here.

Struggling singer Maria has just separated from her depressive boyfriend, father of the second of her two children, when she discovers that she is pregnant with his child. She decides to terminate the pregnancy - and immediately starts to receive threatening letters. Fearing for her safety and that of her children, she flees with them to her sister's house, their old family home on the coast - but the threats follow her...

If you like thrillers, it probably isn't bad, but it just ain't my cup of tea (although I did read quite a lot of Nicci French and the like a couple of years ago when my dad was seriously ill as I found that it distracted me without requiring any input from me). The cover blurb likens Saskia Noort to Patricia Highsmith, but although it's years since I read any of the latter I remember it being much more subtle and therefore more disturbing (or maybe I was just younger and more impressionable). Here there are attempts to create psychological tension (sudden reappearance of the father of Maria's first child after years abroad, reports from the neighbour of a stranger looking for her in the street - a panoply of possible culprits, so Maria starts to suspect everyone and cracks under the pressure) but they are clumsily done and I could see the author pulling the strings. As for the ending, it stretched the bounds of credibility so far that it was almost funny.

I also had a few quibbles with the translation; I couldn't ever forget that I wasn't reading the original as often the English wasn't quite natural. For example, the police "exacavate" a body - surely they exhume it?

On the good side, it was a quick, undemanding read which fitted perfectly into my Eurostar trip back to Brussels on Sunday night!

Country no. 49: Botswana

The Heavens May Fall by Unity Dow

Unity Dow is Botswana's first female High Court judge and author of several novels, although this is the first I've read. It's a cross between that elusive "African chick lit" that some of us have been so curious about and something that wants to be much more than that - consequently I'm not sure it succeeds on either front. The narrator is a feisty 30-something female lawyer who's not afraid to be feminine. She can talk about clothes and nail varnish one minute, court rulings the next - yet I found the juxtaposition of girly nonsense and some quite technical legal stuff (Dow has a legal background, after all) quite unnatural, as if it couldn't decide whether it was a serious book about case law in Botswana or something much frothier. Similiary, I felt it couldn't quite make up its mind who its audience was - was it written for Africans or outsiders? At times I felt I was being lectured about "Africa" - look! we have an independent judiciary in Botswana! look! beautiful African women can be hot-shot lawyers too! - yet the cultural refererences I was really interested in weren't explained.

@ 126, what you say about Saskia Noort is true for almost all Dutch "literary thrillers". It is an invented term a couple of years ago for thrillers written by women, at least that is the idea I have. Easy reads, but not close to literature (which doesn't matter, but don't call it like that...).

Dutch literature has much more, the problem is I never know what is translated... Two recommendations:
The discovery of heaven by Harry Mulisch and Beyond sleep by W.F. Hermans

Back to Morocco with Tahar Ben Jelloun's Sur ma mère
(not yet translated into English)

This is the literary equivalent of something we used to do in art class at school - take a tiny cutting of a picture out of a magazine, stick it in the middle of a piece of paper and imagine how the picture grows. Ben Jelloun takes as his "cutting" the confused memories of his mother during her last years, combined with what he already knows - and he imagines the rest. The result is a magically evocative picture of his mother's early life in Fez, and a poignant account of his mother's final illness and death.

>128 boekenwijs: Thanks for the recommendations, boekenwijs - I'll look out for those. I'm sure that there's lots of wonderful Dutch literature out there; the problem is the lack of translations, as you say.

Reviews to follow for

Country no. 50: Greece
I'd Like by Amanda Michalopoulou (touchstones not working)

Country no. 51: Nigeria
Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta

Time for an updated map:


create your own visited country map
or check our Venice travel guide

It shows 52 countries because it counts the Palestinian Authority as one (whereas I'm going by the member states of the UN, where the PA has observer status).

>129 rachbxl: I want to read that one! Will have to wait for the English translation, though.

Rach, your map is very impressive! No Indian reads?! I think I hear The Inheritance of Loss calling :)

>132 akeela: I don't have anything in particular lined up for India - I've read a fair bit from there in the past and according to my rules it'll have to be an author I've not read before. I haven't been tempted by The Inheritance of Loss, having picked it up and rejected it in several bookshops, but since we so often agree on books, if you recommend it maybe I should re-think that! Not yet though, because there are other parts of the world I'm more interested in at the moment. I don't plan; I just go where my fancy takes me.

Count me in the group of people who didn't like The Inheritance of Loss; I found it very disappointing although there were some parts I enjoyed. There are so many wonderful Indian authors, I'm sure you'll find one that you haven't read and would enjoy.

I haven't read it yet! Since I haven't been able to get to it for the longest time, I thought you might read it and let me know :)

I agree with Rebecca, there are indeed many extraordinary Indian authors.

I know you weren't soliciting for Indian recommends, but can I just throw in a mention for All About H. Hatterr. It is one of the oroginal novels to be written in the very lyrical 'Hinglish' that many Indian writers (writing in English) use. It has been re-released by the NYRB, so no longer cots a fortune.

btw Congratulations on your half century

#136: That book sounds lovely; I'll be on the lookout for it.

I'm among those who didn't like The Inheritance of Loss. All About H. Hatterr sounds very good, as does the Jelloun book, which I too will have to wait to read in translation.

You've been doing some very interesting reading.

Rebecca, aruba, thanks for fuelling my suspicion that The Inheritance of Loss is not for me!

>136 GlebtheDancer: I wasn't, but thanks - it looks good and I'd never heard of it.

Country no. 52: Romania

Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu

Train to Trieste by Domnica Radulescu

Although I'm not sure this would ever have been a great novel, I suspect there's a half-decent 200-page novel lurking in the 400 pages of this one. On the positive side, it gives a vivid view of both the unpleasantness and difficulty of life in Ceausescu's Romania - and of how there was still pleasure to be found in small things.

I'm guilty of having picked this up entirely because it was from Romania; it's not a great basis for book selection (see how the Dutch one backfired on me, too), yet I'm loathe to give it up entirely as it's also turned up some unexpected treasures for me. I suppose the duds are the price to pay for the gems.

Train to Trieste sounds like a middle rated novel. However, I do like novels that describe train trips well, and I wonder if that is the case with this one. I am employed in public transport, so I am interested in these kinds of things.

Hi, I am new to this site, this forum and the challenge of reading around the world. I am excited to get started and have already read some of the books mentioned. While I had some probs with Mohsin Hamid's book: (his speech, the relationship end with his gf, the guest's perceived responses), I liked it more the second time that I read it and there is an interview on the BBC which helps. If we are talking about India/Pakistan, though: "Train to Pakistan," and "Ice Candyman" (later renamed "Cracking India)" are good books to help you understand India/Pakistan in the 1940-1950's. even though they are set in the 1947 era (much like Salman Rushdie's "midnight's children," they draw you in with their vivid descriptions. Oh, "Ice Candy man," is by Bapsi Sidwa and "Train to Pakistan," is by Khushwin Singh (hpe that I spelled it right).

I've read Harlen Cobin and ... ... he was just ok. I am not a big fan of detective stories: like the biographies and down to earth people stories and I could guess the ending of Cobin's books. But, I only read two: "Tell no one ," and ... . I can't even remember the other.

I don't think that I could disagree strongly enough about Saramago's "blindness."
It was sensational in its depiction of characters and frankly, even as an alegory, I found it wanting.
It was lacking in imagination and any profound prospective or epiphany by the characters was lost in the interminable bordom of the narration. . If his point was to show how the world could melt into chaos with the loss of controls, he manipulated parts of the story until they fit his drawn conclusion, but subtracted from the story's plausibility. I found it boring, over-rated and unbelieveable: He compromised too much of the story, its characters, happenings and such just to understand the overwhelming assertion of the book.
JMHO.
.

Jamily, I'm sorry, I haven't been here for a while - so a very belated thanks for your visit and your comments. Are you going to start a thread of your own? I look forward to following it if so...

more Poland:
Halo, Wikta! by Katarzyna Pisarzewska

Random choice in a Polish bookshop (chosen for its brevity, like most of the books I buy in Polish, as well as for the fact that it won an award for contemporary women's fiction). Anyway, a fun little novel which I believe to be about a 30-something woman in Warsaw who wakes up with amnesia and discovers to her horror that the reason she lives in such luxury is that her husband is a gangster...as was her father. It was all quite surreal but I'm not sure if that was the author or my not-quite-reliable grip on the language.

Rach,

I just spent some time catching up with your thread and am impressed, as always. You have more courage than I do to work with novels in the original language. (Czech and Slovak are of course my mother tongues, so they do not count for courage.) I was reading French novels in French while I was in France, and picked up a lot of others, ambitiously thinking I would read them later, but probably never will. And of course it would help my rusty German if I started making the effort to read in it, but again, pretty slim chance of that.

As I am trying to make out your map, am I seeing correctly that you have not yet done Czech Republic and Slovakia? I just may be able to come up with some recommendations. LOL

Oy, Rachel, just catching up here. The Jelloun sounds wonderful! I've read two Jelloun novels and I think I have another two in the house. . . A nice companion read is the Laila Lalami novel - the 1st - I haven't read the new one yet.

>147 polutropos: Andrew, thanks for your comment. I feel a bit of a fraud that you're impressed by what you call my courage - after all, I get paid to understand these languages and your average novel is much easier to understand (and infinitely more enjoyable) than a lot of what I get at work!
You're absolutely right, I haven't made it to the Czech Republic or Slovakia. Yes, I'd love to have some suggestions from you...

>148 avaland: Lois, the Ben Jelloun is indeed wonderful. It was my second Ben Jelloun, I think, and like you I think I have a further 2 at home. I've had my eye on the Leila Lalami for a while now - now you've said that I'll just have to get it, won't I?

My global travels haven't been taking me very far in recent months; I'm stuck, both physically and in the literary sense, in Poland. However, that wicked temptress avaland distracted me from the Polish path with:

Country no. 53: India

Separate Journeys ed. Geeta Dharmarajan

She forced me to read it it for Issue 3 of Belletrista (Jan/Feb) so I'll add a link to my review later. What I will say here though, referring back to the India discussion in posts 132-139, is that this is the kind of India book I was holding out for (collection of short stories by contemporary Indian women, some in English, others translated from a handful of different Indian languages).

I was also sent back to China:

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

Again, this is for Issue 3 of Belletrista so I'll provide a link later.

I take that 'wicked' as a compliment! ;-)

Country no. 54: Hungary

Fateless by Imre Kertész
Translated from the Hungarian by Tim Wilkinson

I think this is what they call a "necessary" book, an "important" book - which doesn't necessarily make it an easy-to-read or even an enjoyable book, although I think it's very good. It is narrated by 14-year-old Gyuri, a Hungarian Jew who is detained one day en route to the workplace to which he has been assigned; he is sent first to Auschwitz and then on to Buchenwald. Coming from a non-religious family, Gyuri has never been particularly aware of his Jewishness and struggles to understand how it is that something by which he has never defined himself has come to be seen as his only defining feature. He is unable to identify with his fellow Jewish prisoners and consequently describes concentration camp life with chilling, yet very moving, detachment. Perhaps most moving, though, are the final pages, in which the camps have been liberated; struggling to come to terms with life back "outside", Gyuri finds himself nostalgic for the simple life of the camp.

I had a little problem at times with the narrator's voice. Particularly at the start of the book the narrator assumes a knowingly humorous style which I think is quite typical of a teenage boy - but some of the things he said struck a bit of a false note with me. I suspect it may be the best the translator could do with the colloquial language used by Budapest teenagers in the 1940's. In any case it didn't last, as the narrator's dwindling sense of humour is an indication of how he is being crushed psychologically as well as physically.

Wow, Rachel, that one sounds really interesting!

I didn't expect to be clocking up any more reading miles this year, but without planning it I've added

Country no. 55: Mauritius

Le dernier frere by Nathacha Appanah
(English translation coming out Feb. 2010, The Last Brother)

This novel sums up why I don't want to stop selecting books simply because they're from a country I've not covered on my literary trip. As several of us have discussed, it's true that this approach does turn up some complete stinkers - but as long as there are books like this out there waiting to be discovered it's worth it. This is certainly the best book I've read this year; probably one of the best books I've read in a long, long time. I'd never even heard of Appanah and pulled the book off the shelf only because I was curious about her name (she's from Mauritius, now lives in Paris, writes in French).

In a nutshell it's about an old man looking back on a childhood friendship between himself, Raj, the only surviving child in a family almost destroyed by the death of his two brothers in a landslide, and the orphaned David, one of a shipload of Jews interned on Mauritius for several years during the second world war. Appanah's writing is so beautiful that I felt that I had a living thing in my hands, and the emotional force left me almost physically winded.

This happens so rarely - you pick up a book about which you know absolutely nothing, and it turns out to be a treasure. The best Christmas present imaginable.

glad to know that you found an unexpected gem! i haven't heard of Appanah, but now you can be sure that i'll be on the lookout for her books -- thanks, rachel.

What a great way to end the reading year, Rachel! I'll be looking out for her, too.

This is her fourth novel, published in 2007, and it's her first to be translated into English (the translation comes out in the UK in February next year). Her earlier novels (Les Rochers de Poudre d'Or, Blue Bay Palace and La Noce d'Anna) all received prizes of one kind or another. The cover blurb compares her to Arundhati Roy and Coetzee but Le dernier frere reminded me more of Edwidge Danticat and Roma Tearne.

I've been neglecting this thread! That's in part because real-life travelling has been getting in the way of my literary travelling, but I've decided to make the most of it and tie my reading in with my travelling, which has been all to Spain (because Spain holds the rotating presidency of the EU during the first half of this year) - so I've decided to read all those Spanish books that have been piling up on my shelves ever since I finished my degree (Spanish and French literature).

So far I've failed miserably to make much of a dent in my TBR pile as 2 of the 3 Spanish novels I've read I bought in the last couple of weeks. Never mind. The three I've read are:

Nada by Carmen Laforet

Right after the Spanish Civil War eighteen-year-old orphan Andrea arrives in Barcelona to live with her mother's family while she attends university, eager to break free of the restraints of the small village in which she has been living with another relative, and of the convent in which she spent the war. She yearns for freedom but is immediately plunged into the oppressive atmosphere which reigns in the family home, where poverty and the scars of war feed the fraticidal hatred between Andrea's two uncles, Juan and Ramon, whose sisters have all managed to escape the family home - the last remaining one, the austere, uptight Angustias, leaves home for a convent shortly after Andrea's arrival.
Andrea tries to rise above her sordid home life at university, and the world she enters there is epitomised in her best friend Ena - beautiful, rich Ena and her beautiful, rich, "normal" family, which of course turns out to have its own skeletons in the cupboard. Andrea strives to keep the two worlds separate but can't keep Ena out, and the two inevitably collide.
On one level, Nada is a perfectly enjoyable female bildungsroman (and one with a great female voice) - but it's also a lot more. The family home represents post-war Spain, the warring brothers an image for a nation in which brothers and friends have turned against each other; the war may have ended, but the wounds haven't healed. The once-bourgeouis family now forced to sell its furniture bit by bit to the rag-and-bone man to survive, hunger as a constant theme - this is not just a family but a nation on its knees. I picture Andrea feeling her way through this maze as if blind-folded, unable to find the right way - because there is no right way, there's just nothing - nada.
Without there being any resolution at the end (the reader continues to picture Andrea feeling her way along, just in a different place), the novel ends on a note of hope in the form of Ena's letter and the change it brings to Andrea's life.

A great start to my Spanish trip; this is a novel I'd been meaning to read for years, ever since reading Carmen Laforet's book of short stories La Llamada when I was still at school (the first book I ever read in Spanish).

El Salón de Ámbar by Matilde Asensi
(no English translation?)

The novel's title means "The Amber Room", referring to a chamber decorated with amber and gold panels in the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg. So beautiful that some called it "the eighth wonder of the world", it was looted by the Nazis and has never reappeared...so it's just asking to have this kind of novel written about its fate!

The novel's narrator, 33-year old Ana, is the owner of an antique shop in the Spanish town of Avila...and the Spanish member of the "chess club", an infamous international gang of art thieves. Ana's suspicions are aroused when she is commissioned to steal a second-rate work for a huge sum of money, and her sleuthing leads to the discovery of the Amber Room, hidden beneath the sewers of Weimar in Germany.

I've been looking forward to reading Asensi for some time, and decided to start with this, her first novel. It wasn't the greatest book I've read but it was far from being the worst, and it was an engaging way to pass a flight back from Spain last week. I'm curious to read more of her work as I found things here that are forgiveable in a first novel but might not be in subsequent work. For example, I confess to almost entire ignorance about how international art thieves work, so I was willing to suspend disbelief on that score, and for all I know Asensi's spot on, but - and I don't think I'm giving anything away here - the discovery of the bodies in the bunkers was unnecessarily sensational, I thought, as though she had got completey carried away. Anyway, I enjoyed this first novel enough to want to see if her style develops, and if all her books are as readable as this I'll certainly be taking more on trips with me.

Citas en Manhattan by Emma Reverter
(I doubt that it'll ever be translated into English, but trust me, you can live without it).

When I said I was going to read more Spanish literature over these 6 months, admittedly this wasn't quite the kind of thing I had in mind - but I bought this in San Sebastián earlier this week, in desperate need of something light and frothy, which it certainly was.

The writer is a Spanish journalist based at the UN in New York; she has written books on (from memory) Darfur and Guantánamo, so this novel is something of a departure for her. It takes the form of imaginary columns written by a Spanish journalist based at the UN in NY (and yes, she's written books on Darfur and...you get the picture) who is told by her Barcelona-based paper to produce something light and frothy for the daily August supplement - so she decides to investigate the New York dating scene. It was mildly amusing, and it least it was well-written. The end.

I've also read another Polish novel recently, although it was entirely set in Africa:

Za Głosem Sangomy by Agnieszka Podolecka

I won't include all the comments I put on my Club Read thread, as I try to keep this Reading Globally thread for books which tell me something about the writer's culture. I will say, though, that it was preposterous nonsense - and hugely enjoyable!

Interesting reading, Rach.

I went to Ekaterinhof a few years ago. It is one of the most hideous places I have seen, but in an interesting way. Imagine asking a six year old girl to design a palace. It looks like a giant wedding cake coloured pink and sky blue. Anyway, they have a replica amber room there now. It isn't pretty. It is a monument to the sometimes skewed relationship between money and taste. Amber (or whatever they used to replicate it) looks orange/gold where it is brightest and dirty brown everywhere else, which make the walls look like someone has been ill all over them (and from the nasty end, as well).

That aside, very interesting reading Rach. I am once again jealous of your multilingual skills. You are clearly reading stuff that us monolinguists will never have access to. I think that is great, even if the books aren't always the best. Spain is a black hole for me. I have only read Cervantes and Rosa Chacel (enjoyed both, especially the Chacel). Perhaps one of these years I will have a jag in Spain, but not for a while.

Rosa Chacel, of course! I knew you'd enjoyed something by a female Spanish writer recently, but I couldn't for the life of me remember her name in the bookshop the other day. I'll try to remember that for my next trip to Spain (which is next week).

Yes, I googled the replica at Ekaterinhof, and if it was gaudy on my little laptop I dread to think what it's like for real!

More Iceland

The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indriđason
Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder

I was intending to read Indriđason's Reykjavík Murder Mystery series in order, but gave up waiting for Tainted Blood to fall into my hands. I don't think it mattered.

The discovery of a skeleton weighed down with Cold War-era listening equipment in a lake which is drying up prompts a police investigation involving the likeable detective Erlendur (he makes Wallander look talkative and sociable, but like him he's very human) and his colleagues. Interspersed with details of the investigation are the reminiscences of the murderer (the identity of the murderer is never in doubt, at least not to the reader; the enigma is the identity of the victim, which is revealed with a satisfying little twist in the final pages).

I enjoyed this and I thought it was really well done. The reminiscences take us back to Cold War Leipzig, where a group of Icelandic students, specially chosen for the dubious honour by the Icelandic communist party, attend university. Their youthful socialist ideals soon clash with the harsh reality of life in a surveillance society, and the novel becomes a tale of espionage and counter-espionage in all its grubby sordidness. Yet ultimately this is a very personal story about lives wrecked by the communist regime, with the murderer eliciting compassion and pity rather than condemnation.

And Hungary again:

The Door by Magda Szabó
Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

Why has it taken me so long to read this? (Several months). It's not long (260 pages), nor is it difficult or innaccessible. Objectively I admire it as a novel, but it rarely grabbed me - yet every time I abandoned it I had to go back because I kept thinking about it. I still don't know what to make of it.

A young writer hires an older neighbour, Emerence, as her housekeeper, and the novel is the story of their relationship over the next several decades. The old woman is a unique character. She works tirelessly at her countless jobs, binding the neighbourhood together. Despite knowing the secrets of all those she works for, she is fiercely protective of her own privacy and very little is known about her; over the years the younger woman gradually becomes the only person Emerence lets into her life, but then only on one-sided terms. I really appreciated the parts about Emerence's relationship with the writer's dog, whom Emerence insists on calling Viola (he's male), which were both funny and touching. Yet a lot of the rest left me cold, even when I suspected I should be affected. I don't know if it's the translation, or the voice of the narrator (the writer), but something kept me from caring at all about what was happening; I felt I was seeing everything from a great distance.

Shame. I can't help feeling I've missed something here. I'd be interested to hear what anyone else thinks...