Ukraine - A Spring for the Thirsty

Ukraine: A Spring for the Thirsty / ed. by Arthur Thompson
Dupond, c2022.
252 p.

Ukraine has been on my mind even more as we head up to the 2 year mark of the Russian invasion. I have been looking for some more Ukrainian reading, and came across this collection of interviews with five publishers and four translators, all talking about the actuality of translating work from Ukrainian (mostly to English). I am interested in having more Ukrainian fiction translated, and I am interested in translation itself, so I thought I might like this. I wasn't prepared for how fascinating I found it! 

It covers a lot of ground, although it was published in 2022, so a lot of it was researched and written prior to the full scale invasion, which has changed a lot -- including how many people are now aware of Ukraine. However, there were a few mentions of it in some of the conversations. 

The book interviews four translators - Uilleam Blacker, Mark Andryczyk, Michael M. Naydan, and one of my favourites, Nina Murray. They each talk about how they got into translating Ukrainian literature, and some of their ideas about future projects. There's also discussion of the details of translating, from the actual work to finding publishers for books they'd like to translate. 

The publishers interviewed start with Osnovy Publishing in Kyiv - a long-time publisher of Ukrainian language books and classics & non-fiction. When the current owner took it over from her parents a decade ago, she found that that formula wasn't working, and has moved to kids books, photo books and mainly English language publishing. It's a fascinating discussion of the way the book scene has changed, and what they do to keep Ukrainian literature flowing. 

Then we meet Lost Horse Press, a Seattle based poetry publisher. They have a Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, in which most collections are published in a dual-language format. Their series editor is an academic specializing in Slavic studies, who also does translations from Ukrainian and Russian. This conversation covers a lot about the independent publishing scene in the US and what it's like to publish poetry as a small press. Also about how bigger houses don't want to take as many risks on 'unknown' literatures like Ukrainian. Really interesting overall, and now I have a list of poetry books to read. 

Next up is Glagoslav Publications, which publishes only in digital format (my library has many of their ebooks, which is a great help to me!) They operate from Ukraine, England and the Netherlands, and publish Ukrainian works as well as Russian, Belorusian, Georgian and the like, books from the wider region. They say they prefer classics as many of those have not been shared with the English speaking world, but at the time of the interview, they noted that there isn't the support for Ukrainian translations (ie: grants and government support) as for others like Polish literature. Hopefully that is now changing! This is a long-standing publisher so it was intriguing to see how they develop and what they focus on. 

Then we have Jantar Press, based in the UK and focused on publishing English translations of Central and Eastern European literature. They have one Ukrainian translation that I'm aware of, Andriy Lyubka's Carbide. It's interesting how the same issues come up in every interview - scarcity of translators from Ukrainian, few grants or governmental push to spread Ukrainian literature. 

And finally there is Deep Vellum, based in Dallas, and much better known already than it was just a few years ago. They've published a few excellent Ukrainian books so far, by big names like Serhiy Zhadan and Andriy Kurkov. The interview goes over some of their titles and the translators they've worked with, and also talks about the mechanics of running a small press interested in translations. 

Anyhow, these are not short interviews -- they are all lengthy and interesting and bring up different perspectives and ideas. I was so enthused by the idea of new translations by the end that I certainly hope the translators that were interviewed are getting more work now! 

And one more unmissable bit of this book is the Bibliography at the end. Absolutely invaluable. As they say, there are so few translations from Ukrainian that it is actually possible to make a list of them all -- they do note that their list can't be guaranteed to be comprehensive, but it's pretty close. It lists all Ukrainian fiction that has been translated into English between 1890-2022. There will be a bunch more to add since 2022 and continuing forward, probably more than the last ten years together. But this is a fantastic resource and a great reading list for anyone aiming to read more Ukrainian literature. They also mention the small excerpts of translations that can be found in journals like Apofenie or World Literature Today, or Ukrainian Literature: a Journal of Translations. Great places to check out. 

So you can see from my very wordy review of this book that I found it so good, so thorough, so intriguing. I hope that people interested in translation in general will find this one as it gives such a good look at publishing translations from a less trendy literature. So much to think about, and also a fabulous reading list included to get you started. Highly recommended. 

Two Lands, New Visions: Stories from Canada and Ukraine

 

Two Lands, New Visions / eds. Janice Kulyk Keefer & Solomea Pavlychenko
Translated from the Ukrainian by Marco Carynnyk & Marta Horban
Regina: Coteau, c1998.
312 p.

I've been continuing to read Ukrainian fiction even though #WITMonth is over. There are many other books by male authors and by a mix of authors that I want to share as well. 

This one is a collection of stories, 10 each from Ukrainian writers and from Ukrainian Canadian writers. It's from the late 90s, so the chosen stories really highlight the themes and style popular in fiction at the time. 

It's quite startling to see the differences; the Ukrainian writers are fabulists, with stories featuring lots of imagination and odd occurrences. They're also looking ahead, and using dark humour, folklore, and a cynical edge to comment on what's happening in their country in oblique ways. The Ukrainian Canadian stories, on the other hand, focus more on the past, looking at family history and how it affects life today. There's a noticeable focus on memory and identity in these stories. 

The stories were collected by two editors: Janice Kulyk Keefer collected the Canadian stories while Solomea Pavlychko chose the Ukrainian ones. Introductory essays by both editors are very helpful to place these stories in context. The translator's notes at the end are also really interesting, looking at local phrases that are specific to a story but hard to translate, and also discussing questions of spelling when moving from the Ukrainian Cyrillic to the English Roman alphabet. 

Two of my favourite authors are included here, Oksana Zabuzhko (Ukr) & Marusya Bociurkiw (Can). And I found a few other stories particularly compelling. I really enjoyed Cold Medicine by Svitlana Kasianova (from Ukraine) which features young seamstresses at a new factory job; the characters were well done and there wasn't too much fabulism in this one. I found that reading so many stories back to back was kind of an overload -- must remember Mavis Gallant's advice to read stories with breaks in between them! 

There were also a couple of Canadian stories that I really enjoyed, one by an author I knew and another by one totally new to me. I've read some work by Mary Borsky, and her story Myna in this collection was really interesting. New to me, and a wonderfully written look at a mother's character is The First Lady by Lida Somchynsky. Both have great writing and are so memorable.

I like collections like this because they give you leads to new authors you may not have known, and show a variety of styles and themes in a certain period of writing. This one was a pretty solid collection, even if it is a bit older, and both the introductory essays and translator's notes added a lot to the reading  experience. 

The Bridge of Beyond

The Bridge of Beyond / Simone Schwarz-Bart
trans. from the French by Barbara Bray
NY: NYRB Classics, 2013, c1972.
246 p.

Another book in French, but this time we're on the island of Guadeloupe, in this Caribbean classic by Simone Schwarz-Bart. It's a dreamy life story, told in snippets across the lifetime of Telumée as she grows from child to elder in her own right. 

This strong character also takes us through the history of Guadeloupe -- its colonial past and the reverberations, gender relations, even the landscape itself is an integral part of the narrative. Telumee's mother has two children; Telumee and her stepsister Regina. But when a new man comes into her life, she sends Telumee to her grandmother in the hills, and that's pretty much the last Telumee sees of her original family. 

Her grandmother raises her, and she's a bright pretty young girl who works hard and has a good outlook on life despite poverty and limited options. She's friends with a neighbour boy and it seems likely they will marry when they are old enough. But Telumee goes off to work as a servant in a big house over the Bridge of Beyond. She is a capable and dependable domestic but after the master of the house makes advances, she simply leaves, and walks home to her grandmother. The neighbour boy is still there waiting, and they marry as expected, but the marriage turns bad quite quickly. 

After going through that trauma, she is restored to herself thanks to the efforts of the old women in the community. And then after her grandmother dies, she moves up to an even more remote hill settlement and suffers more setbacks. 

Her life seems to be a dreary, miserable one in many ways, but she keeps her spirits, and shows a resilience that comes of having no other choice. As her grandmother tells her early on in life, "Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it." This book seems to illustrate that maxim thoroughly. 

While there are depressing elements to Telumee's life and this narrative, there is also a heart of something solid, content, joyful, that comes out as well. It's a beautifully told story, with unforgettable imagery and characters who are complex and drive the action, such as it is. It's a classic for good reason. There is a poetry to it, and it is definitely a memorable read. 

Fresh Water for Flowers

Fresh Water for Flowers / Valérie Perrin;

trans. from the French by Hildegarde Serle

NY: Europa, c2020

476 p.

Europa always puts out such lovely books; when I saw this one arrive at my library I knew I had to read it. It's been getting a lot of attention from readers, too, and almost all comments that I've seen are overwhelmingly positive.

Sadly, I was not overwhelmed by this book. I thought it was far too long - the middle was really saggy. But there were bright moments that I really loved as well. 

In brief: Violette Toussaint is a caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. She has a small lodge there, and both visitors and her coworkers often drop in for a chat, a drink, some uplift, and of course, information. She seems quite happy with this routine. Then Julien Sole arrives; he's a detective but is there to ask if he can fulfill his mother's last wish to have her ashes interred with someone he doesn't know. There's a story there.

Violette and Julien both have parts of their past that they don't talk about, but as the story progresses more of those secrets come out. Not necessarily to one another, but to the reader at least. The problem is that the reader then can see what's coming for a long time, which is why I found the middle part of the book was a bit dragged out.  

The tone of the book is very French, lots of detail about the dysfunctional relationships of their pasts, particularly Violette's, and she is the typical doormat who puts up with a lot of crap for "love". Terrible things happen; she finds solace from her grinding job as a railway crossing attendant in this new cemetery job. One of the other issues I had with this story was that reading Violette at the beginning, in her tired voice, at her remote cemetery lodge, she comes across as an older woman, quite worn down. I was picturing her in her late 50s or early 60s. She's actually much younger and it discombobulated me as I learned more - I had to keep changing my image of the character to match up.

I would've liked a leaner story with less about Violette's past and the traumatic incident that eventually comes out. It was so horrific, and I found it terrible to keep going back to. The elements in the present day, at the cemetery, interacting with the people around her, were nicely done; interesting characters, funny or meaningful dialogue, the beauty Violette finds in the quietness of life there and her tiny garden. I appreciated that she was able to move on to something more stable and hopefully positive, in her own quirky way. 

Translation Thursday

 It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:

Currently Reading:

Winter in Sokcho / Elisa Shua Dusapin
trans. from the French by Aneesa Higgins

To Read:

No One Writes Back /Jang Eun-Jin
trans. from the Korean by Jung Yewon

I'll Be Right There / Kyung-Sook Shin
trans. from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

Bluebeard's First Wife / Ha Seong-Nan
trans. from the Korean by Janet Hong

Naondel

Naondel / Maria Turtschaninoff
trans. from the Finnish by Annie Prime
NY: Abrams, 2018, c2016.
376 p.

I couldn't wait to read this after reading Maresi, the first in the Red Abbey Chronicles. This one is a prequel, giving us the back story of how the Red Abbey came into existence. It's equally feminist and steeped in myth and folklore as the first one, but it's even more wide-ranging, gathering a cast of women from places around the world. 

This is full of stories of spousal abuse, rape, violence, murder, and more, so be prepared. It's much darker than Maresi in this sense, and it's also focused on adult women, not the children and teens of Maresi, so the themes are more adult. 

Despite that, it's imaginative and evocative, with some spectacular characters who have an inner strength and ability to envision a different future for themselves. It begins in a small kingdom where a girl has a connection to their local goddess through her sacred spring. She is being courted by a prince who seems to want to fit himself into her ruling family and their customs. Alas, once she is married, she is isolated as he becomes more and more controlling, and when her sister and parents all die suddenly he holds full power. But that's not enough for him, he needs to rip the goddess power away from her and claim that too. 

He's a terrible man, and in his many travels he subjugates women of all kinds, bringing captives home when someone catches his eye because of her abilities. He wants to capture and control every kind of power and magic he sees. These women are very different, from a wide range of places, and with varying skills - magic, healing, wisdom, building, and more. They distrust one another immensely, but through being forced together they come to realize that every one of them wants escape, and to accomplish this, they must work together. 

They become the First Sisters who found the Red Abbey, a place of escape and safety for women suffering from the violence of the world. But in order to get there, they have to share their stories, make a plan, and carry out a harrowing and desperate escape. It's a nerve wracking adrenaline rush in those pages, and you really, really want to see these women succeed. Knowing their back stories makes the arc of the book so powerful -- each one is damaged but pushing past it to reach her own desires. 

The creation of each woman's story, and the descriptions of their own specific countries, has such variety and individual detail. It's a beautiful structure, with the diversity of the world highlighted. Some of the countries and locations come to life so strongly I feel like I'd been there. There is a vague correspondence to some places in real life but there's such a strong fantasy overlay that the places stand on their own without trying to match them up to real cultures.

It's another strong story of women who've essentially been enslaved by patriarchal society, and fight their way out. The feminist viewpoint is again pitiless and has no time for excuses. I love Turtschaninoff's writing style, spare and not overwritten, it adds to the resonance of the stories. Definitely a satisfying and important read. 

Maresi

 

Maresi / Maria Turtschaninoff;
trans. from the Finnish by Annie Prime
NY: Abrams, 2017, c2014.
246 p.

Now for another, quite different novel! In a creative feminist fantasy, this takes an island abbey of women as its setting. We have young teens as the protagonists, and a sense of the dark/middle ages as a time period at the beginning, shading over into a Cretan myth as the story progresses.

Maresi is a young girl brought to the island by her father during the hungry years. He doesn't want to see his daughter go, but it's her best chance at survival. After some rocky adjustment, she settles into life at the Red Abbey, learning history, plant lore, magic, life skills of all kinds, and how to make friendships and live with others. Then a young girl appears on the island, ragged and with a scarred back. She's escaping from men who will not give up on trying to get her back. 

Maresi befriends her, and we slowly learn her horrific backstory, full of patriarchal abuse and the murder of her sister, which pushed her to escape. Meanwhile, Maresi is feeling the call of one of the goddesses to pursue her learning in a particular direction, one which she doesn't really want. Her struggle to reconcile her own calling with what she thinks she wants is powerful and relatable.  

The conclusion of the story is harrowing, with drama, violence and a full visitation of the triple goddess, who wants her Abbey to survive. This is an innovative story, full of female experiences and no time for patriarchal excuses. It's a wonderfully drawn narrative, with strong and complex characters, plenty of myth and magic in its fabulous setting, and a driving plot that seems inescapable. 

With strong women running this show, there are lots of characters to engage with, and many serious issues to think about. Part One in a trilogy, this starts strong and makes you want book 2 asap! A translation from Finnish, this is a great discovery.

The Cat Who Came in Off the Roof

The Cat Who Came In off the Roof / Annie M.G. Schmidt
trans. from the Dutch by David Colmer
NY: Yearling, 2017, c1970.
149 p.

I picked up this charming little book from my library late last year, when I was looking for translated children's books for a list I was sharing. It's adorable and I loved it! 

I hadn't known of Annie M.G. Schmidt previously, but was informed that she is a classic Dutch author, like the Astrid Lindgren of the Netherlands. This book was first published in 1970 so it has some bits that might seem a little unusual now, especially when it comes to mothering skills, but overall it holds up extremely well. 

Mr. Tibble is a meek journalist who is in danger of losing his job because most of his stories are about cats. His editor tells him to write something a little more hard-hitting, but he's not sure how. Then he rescues Miss Minou, a young woman who has dashed up a tree to avoid some dogs and can't get down. 

Miss Minou has a strange connection to the various cats in Mr. Tibble's neighbourhood, and since cats are everywhere and hear everything, she finds juicy gossip to pass on to him as payback for his allowing her to stay in his apartment. His career as a journalist is on the rise! 

You will not be surprised to hear that Miss Minou has a deep, dark secret, and that Mr. Tibble's love for cats is a Very Good Thing here. There is a fair mix of humour here, both light and darker, and great set pieces highlighting various characters, whether human or feline. I wouldn't recommend it for really young children, but as an older middle grade novel it's fine, and definitely has much to be appreciated by adult readers. 

If you're also a cat lover and looking for a brief, entertaining read in translation, see if you can get your hands on this one. Charm, humour, cats, and a bit of snark. Fun reading experience!

The Godmother

The Godmother / Hannelore Cayre
trans. from the French by Stephanie Smee
Toronto: ECW Press, 2019, c2017.
184 p.

I'm finishing up my #WITMonth reads with this crime novel from France. I really enjoyed it!

Patience Portefeux is a translator, Arabic to French, for the judicial system in France. She's 53, and becoming an "invisible woman". She's underpaid, living in a small apartment, and not very close to her two daughters. 

She's also the daughter of two outsiders who lived on the edges of French society when their own original countries were no longer there for them to return to. They made their living on the edges of legality, well, quite far over at various points. So she knows the routine, even though she's become respectable in her own life, for her own daughters. 

But then something happens. A crime family transporting hash to France, whom she's been following via her police translations, has a crisis. Patience is connected with them in another unexpected way, when she discovers that one of them works in her own mother's old age home. So she warns them. And then has insider knowledge that she suddenly decides to make use of. 

Patience becomes The Godmother, a mysterious drug dealer who appears out of nowhere and confounds the police, including her own sometime boyfriend, a cop himself. And what she does and how she does it is a clever reflection of societal expectations and prejudices, and the social stratification in France. 

Throughout this crime book (and don't worry, if you're like me and don't like dark gory crime, this is for you) there are statements about the corruption of the state -- how some Arabic drug dealers are arrested with great pomp and publicity, but others, including the police who profit from the same drug trade, are left to do as they please. How some people are punished for crimes that others profit by, how some people make a lot of money, but begrudge anyone else a cent. How judgments are made, both social and judicial, with a very uneven hand. This adds a strong flavour of social critique to the book, which, while it doesn't necessarily excuse some of the action, does give it more context. 

And the conclusion was satisfying, to me at least. To see Patience's decisions, to see how she reads the situation and adapts instantly, how she provides for her daughters first and then takes what she needs -- it all adds to her character. 

I really liked this one. Patience was an unusual and very believable character, and this novel has a sense of modernity and expands on a woman's role in all levels of contemporary life. Lots of issues are brought in, in a natural and fitting way, but it still reads like a crime novel and is full of interest and suspense. A great genre read to finish off this month with! 

Bitter Rose

Bitter Rose / Martine Delvaux
trans. from the French by David Homel
Montreal: Linda Leith, 2015, c2009.
105 p.

This little book is really more of a novella; it's very short. And impressionistic too, in short chapters examining years of the narrator's childhood. Although Delvaux is a Quebecoise writer, this book feels a bit France-French as well. 

A young French girl moves to a Francophone community in rural Ontario; it's awful, dreary, depressing. Her friends have names like Manon-just-Manon and are generally neglected or outcasts. And girls go missing from this town, too. The years in this village are described with calm detachment, although it's clear she wants out of this dead-end place. 

When one girl too many disappears her mother decides it's time to leave, and they move to a shiny new suburb of Ottawa. The house, the other girls nearby and the lifestyle are described in much the same tone as the earlier part of the book. And after she leaves home to strike out on her own, she discovers that one of the girls she befriended there has also gone missing. 

This is a strange little story. Not much plot, just the slightly rambling discussion of childhood to adolescence to early maturity. The years fly by with a couple of impressions pinning them down. There doesn't seem to a real point to it, and the tone is so detached that I didn't really connect with it. It's a very cool French narrative, but I felt that this theme is one that's a bit overdone, and the style didn't really catch me either, despite the writing itself being very smooth and careful and well done. 

It's like a mix of Quebec Gothic and prairie realism, but unfortunately it left me a bit cold in the end.

Translation Thursday

It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:

Currently Reading:

Confessions / Kanae Minato
trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

To Read:

Breasts and Eggs / Mieko Kawakami
trans. from the Japanese by Sam Bett & David Boyd

Strange Weather in Tokyo / Hiromi Kawakami
trans. from the Japanese by Allison Markin Powell

Tokyo Ueno Station / Yu Miri
trans. from the Japanese by Morgan Giles

Desire for Chocolate

Desire for Chocolate / Care Santos
trans. from the Catalan by Julie Wark
Richmond, Surrey, UK: Alma Books, 2015, c2014.
448 p.

I enjoyed this book, another told in three parts. I started it in July to prepare for the #WITMonth proceedings but I did find it slow going at first -- the first story was the least compelling for me, so I had to keep going and find my pace in the book. I did get there, and the next two parts were delightful. 

The book is loosely based around a chocolate pot, just big enough for three cups.The book begins with the chocolate pot being knocked off a table and broken into pieces, and Max trying to fix it, and we follow this fateful pot to its origins through the stories to come.  We are first introduced to it in a contemporary story of Barcelona, a love triangle of sorts featuring Sara, daughter of a chocolate making family, her husband Max and their friend (and Sara's sometime lover) Oriol -- they met in a chocolatier class as young people. It's told in the third person and is very modern and edgy. I wasn't taken with this story, and the affairs, and the sexual content, and the fixations of the various characters, so I did nearly put this down shortly after starting. But there was enough promise that I picked it up again and kept reading. 

The second section goes back to the 19th C. where we meet Aurora, daughter of a maidservant who has a very unexpected life ahead of her. When her mistress runs off with another man, Aurora is cast out of the house under suspicion of aiding her -- untrue, and in her anger, Aurora takes with her the chocolate pot that she'd had to prepare for that feckless mistress each morning (and was fond of scooping the dregs out for herself later.) She guiltily tries to return it for years but no luck. Her new position is as housemaid to an eccentric doctor, and over the years they develop their own charming relationship, intellectual and emotional as well. I liked this story; interestingly, it's told in the second person, a hard thing to do, but it mostly works here. 

And then the finale of the book takes us back to 17th C. Barcelona where Mariana, the wife of a famous chocolate manufacturer and official purveyor to the French court, is struggling to keep her business going in her husband's absence (pretty final absence though she is hiding that). A French delegation has come to Barcelona to find out the secret of the new chocolate mill that she has invented, carrying with them the gift of a chocolate pot made by a French princess. One of the delegates falls in love with Mariana despite himself, and this is the romance we follow. And of course, it's told in the first person. This story was swashbuckling, colourful, engaging, and lots of fun. It finishes with the moment of creation of our trusty chocolate pot, an object that now holds much more interest for the reader.

It was a risky choice to write this book in reverse chronology. The further back it went, the more interesting it got -- but I nearly didn't get there because the opening did not draw me in in the same way at all. I admired the concept though, and the decision to change the narrative perspective, too. Once I got into it, I enjoyed this book a lot, especially the second and third stories, and loved the overall arc of the narrative following an object. I did find that I had a craving for hot chocolate even in the heat wave that was occurring while I was reading this though, so beware!

I do recommend it, as it is clever, with lots of great detail, and a good concept. You might also like one story more than the others, but do give them all a chance, and you'll find they work together neatly. 

The City and the House

The City & The House / Natalia Ginzburg
trans. from the Italian by Dick Davis
NY: Arcade, 2019, c1984.
312 p.

I read Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon last year, and was quite taken with it. So when I saw this book I snapped it up without even realizing that it is an epistolary novel, one of my favourite forms.

There are a group of friends writing to one another here; Guiseppe is moving to America to live with his brother, it's not like he really wants to go but he doesn't want to stay either. So the book begins with goodbyes. 

And throughout the letters there are continual goodbyes -- to homes, relationships, friendships, understandings -- there is loss and disaffection permeating these blunt and honest letters. The circle of friends is centred around Lucrezia and Piero, who own Le Margherite, a rambling country house outside Rome where they go to spend weekends in the freewheeling atmosphere of a house overrun with Lucrezia's badly behaved children, and to talk and eat and interact. Even the furniture becomes vital to them. 

Guiseppe's leaving is the first crack in this circle, which then begins to crumble. Le Margherite is sold, and the friends are set adrift, losing their connections, shifting allegiances and leaving the circle altogether. They write to one another furiously, terrible sad things happen, and there is no reconciliation or return to the past. 

This is simultaneously enthralling and very sad. The style, all those letters, works beautifully to tell this story. But because it is only letters there are also those loose ends that are never fully described or explored -- you don't do that in a letter. Thus it felt like there was space around and behind what we are reading; what is going on in the time that the character isn't writing? And how do the characters truly feel about some of the dreadful things that overtake them?

This evokes a certain time in Rome, and you get a sense of these characters going about their lives from the intimacy of their voices in their letters. The sadness, the attempts to save face or put the best spin on things, the honesty when despairing, the manner in which new ways of living absorb the characters and create new distance between them. 

I was absorbed in this one, waiting to hear from one character or another, hoping to hear that things were making a turn for the better. It's a gem, with strong characterizations and pithy writing, and an atmosphere all of its own. 

Three Apples Fell From the Sky

Three Apples Fell From the Sky / Narine Abgaryan
trans. from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden
London: Oneworld, 2020, c2015.
256 p.

This charming book, translated by Lisa C. Hayden of Lizok's Bookshelf, was a wonderful discovery. Set in a tiny Armenian village high in the mountains, it tells the story of the village inhabitants in three parts.

The title comes from the Armenian folk saying "And three apples fell from heaven: One for the storyteller, One for the listener, And one for the eavesdropper." This is also reflected in the three part structure, and it works wonderfully.

The village of Maran is isolated, up a winding road that is difficult to navigate. The village has slowly dwindled over the years until it's now a group of elderly residents staying put. But when two of them find a second romance, the spark of unexpected romance lights up the village with unexpected joy.

The story is told in long detours of memory, giving the backstory of many of the main characters and families. There's a feel of folktale, as in the appearance of a white peacock that lives on the porch of one couple and is mysteriously the guardian of their grandson. Or the appearance of deceased members of the village passing on messages, or the young brother of one of the main characters who could foresee disasters. 

But even through war, famine, natural disasters and the slow decline of the village, there is a beautiful sense of individuals and community. There is an overarching peace to the story, and a very satisfying conclusion with notes of hope and joy. 

Anatolia Sevoyants is 58 when the story opens, and convinced she has a fatal illness she prepares herself to die. But she doesn't die, instead she promises to marry the village smith, just so she can get him out of her house so she can die in peace -- but finds herself married instead of dead. 

From this startling beginning, her story winds backward into her family history and into the families and lives of the village of Maran. And the finale of the book also focuses on Anatolia and her new husband Vasily's miraculous marriage and its results. 

I really liked Anatolia's story a lot; suddenly in the middle of the story she becomes the village librarian, as someone who can read. This was a surprise and a delightful element too; she decorates the little used library until it has a "coziness and lightness...reminiscent of a reading room in a well-tended conservatory". And she reads and reads. 

The characters in this book are just wonderful, realistic and individual. The relationships are so finely explored, the setting is brought to such realism that I feel like I could find my way around Maran if I happened to be there, the structure of the book is so finely balanced, and the writing is full of fresh imagery and a sense that someone is really just telling you a story. I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone looking for a read that will leave you feeling better than when you started. 

The Housekeeper and the Professor

The Housekeeper & the Professor / Yoko Ogawa
trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

NY: Picador, 2009, c2003.

180 p.

I usually really enjoy Japanese fiction, and I love math, and quirky novels too. So I really expected to love this highly praised novel from a few years ago. 

But... I didn't. I liked it, I found quite a bit to admire in it, but I never really felt drawn in by the concept, the characters or the ideas. 

The Housekeeper is a single mother working for an agency who assigns her to the Professor, a brilliant math instructor who lost his memory in a terrible car accident in 1975. He only remembers things for 80 minutes at a time since then. She finds this a strange and unsettling job at first, but begins to connect with the Professor as he talks about math and equations and the connections between numbers like her birth date or shoe size and mathematical concepts. 

Then she introduces her young son to the Professor, who immediately nicknames him "Root" due to the square shape of his head, resembling the square root sign. The Professor inexplicably feels drawn to protect Root, although we never find out why. 

There is a lot of quiet Japanese detail and lots of discussion of the Housekeeper's life and her growing admiration for math. She was hard for me to engage with, however, as I didn't feel she was completely convincing. Plus she was continually abasing herself to make sure that both Root and the Professor had everything they wanted, even when it made things more difficult and resulted in less for herself. I found that characteristic irritating. 

I wanted to love the math in this but found it just too abstract and like it was trying to be meaningful, rather than intrinsically being so. It came across as a little dull, actually. Also, there is a strong line going through the book of their obsession with baseball, and one player in particular who the Professor remembers. I really couldn't care less about baseball, and this attempt to slot it into this story made it feel like a Murakami book rather than the kind of book I generally prefer. 

So, I didn't love this one after all. It felt dull and like it just petered out for me; not the right book at the right time for this reader, anyhow. 

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children Until They Moved Back In

There Once Lived A Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya   Trans. from the Russian by Anna Summers
NY: Penguin, 2014, c2002.
181 p.

Bleak. Hopeless. Misery, existential ennui, lack of money and love. If you're looking for stories full of these elements, you've found the mother lode.

I read another collection by this author last year, and really liked it. There was black humour and a lot of shorter stories so maybe that's why I found it less overwhelming. Or perhaps it's just 2020, and its burdens, that made this book feel so dark and dreary, without any light in it at all.

This one has three novellas, one longer than the others. They all focus on families, and the completely dysfunctional parent/child relationships that continue across generations. The first has a woman who dotes on her criminal son, who is involved with bad company and shakes down his mother for her few rubles each month. Meanwhile she's taking care of a grandson, her daughter's child who has been abandoned to his grandmother while the daughter goes off with a new man and has yet another child. There is no money, people treat her terribly, and her own mother is in an asylum and is yet another burden on her. There's no happy ending here or elsewhere. 

The other two stories are much the same; the final one is terrifying in its cold hearted and violent decisions, all made for the benefit of a grandchild. I felt that there was a lot of despair in these ones, and no redeeming "resilience" but the truth of how the Soviet system ground down regular people into disconnection and survival mode. 

If you are already feeling down or hopeless, I don't recommend adding this book to your pile at this point. Unless it is as a warning of what could be if we continue down the path of looking out for number one and letting totalitarian politicians thrive.

Translation Thursday

It's Translation Thursday! Each Thursday this month I'm going to share the translation I'm currently reading plus a few more on my reading list. Here's today's list:

Currently Reading:

The City & the House / Natalia Ginzburg
trans. from the Italian by Dick Davis
NY: Arcade, 2019, c1984.
312 p.

To Read:

Beyond Babylon / Igiaba Scego
trans. from Italian by Aaron Robertson
Two Lines Press, 2019.
464 p.

A Girl Returned / Donatella Di Pietrantonio
trans. from Italian by Ann Goldstein
NY: Europa, 2019.
160 p.

70% Acrylic 30% Wool / Viola Di Grado
trans. from Italian by Michael Reynolds
NY: Europa, 2012, c2011.
192 p.

The Slynx

The Slynx / Tatyana Tolstaya
trans. from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell
NY: NYRB, 2007, c2000.
299 p.

Another strange Russian science fiction novel today. This one takes place 200 years after "the Blast", obviously a nuclear war which has caused radiation contamination and various mutations among people, wildlife and flora of all kinds. 

These Consequences are unpredictable; one character has fleshy cockscombs all over her body, one has a tail, others have talons instead of toes. But for the Oldeners, those few who survived the Blast, the Consequence is that they seem to live forever. This is not necessarily a delight. 

This new society is based in small groups gathered around villages named after the Murza in charge. The story's main character is the hapless Benedikt, son of an Oldener who has died from eating bad Firelings. Benedikt has a job transcribing fragments of writing shared by their Murza, Fyodor Kuzmich, Glory-Be. There are a handful of other transcriptionists in his unit, one a beautiful young woman with no apparent Consequences, Olenka. Another is a poor woman covered in waving cockscombs; she's so terrible to look at that nobody pays attention to the fact that she's the smartest one among them. 

Benedikt isn't the brightest but he is handsome and healthy. This despite the general lifestyle of eating mice, beating and maiming one another for fun, and plenty of endurance and misery. Villagers try very hard to avoid any sign of Freethinking; god forbid they draw the attention of the Saniturions who punish anyone with ideas of a better, non-serfdom kind of life, or those who read secret Oldener books. 

And worst of all, to fall under the eye of the Slynx, the mythical creature who lives in the woods and yowls, causing fear and trembling, and will leap from behind and tear out your spine so that you wander as a zombie of sorts until you die. 

But in a sudden upset of his circumstances, Benedikt finds himself a newbie Saniturion himself, with access to hundreds of books. He reads and reads, for escapism from the terrible life they all live, but he never seems to learn anything from his reading. Once he's read something, he doesn't understand that you can read it again, and he can't distinguish between literature and a volume of knitting instruction.

All this reading doesn't improve him, doesn't bring out the light of civilization in his heart; he remains the same simpleton he always was, just with more power. And others who claim to want to defend Art are just the same. 

Tolstaya has a lot to say about "What is Art?", just like her great grand-uncle Leo Tolstoy. Her take on it all is a bit different however. She creates an absurdist setting that is both heavily Russian and a return to the dark ages, in which remnants of the old world exist but are not understood by the new generations. Books, language, art, memory, civilization itself, are all questioned as to their value and their staying power. 

The language in the book is slightly off; Benedikt recalls his mother mourning for the days of "deportment stores" or "bootiks". I don't envy the translator her job with this one! The book just keeps moving from one surreal setting to the next, and Benedikt never seems to learn anything, even with the attempted guidance of Oldener Nikita, the Stoker (who provides fire to the village). 

And the Slynx itself? Benedikt believes that he feels the eye of the Slynx on him from time to time; he tries to describe the feeling in clumsy words but it's basically when an existential crisis is threatening, something he won't let develop but instead does something violent to avoid. I think the Slynx is that existential fear, which the Murzas have personified to terrorize those who might be tempted to think about any meaning in life or how things might be made better for the peasants. It's a society that depends on most of the population being miserable toilers in order to benefit a few at the top; it seems humanity never changes, even when they are sprouting mutations and Consequences! 

This was a super weird book, but one I like a lot for its frantic, topsy-turvy style. I was surprised by the sudden emphasis on books halfway through, but found so much humour, intellectual & literary references, and inventiveness in it. It's violent and terrible but also uncanny and unsettling with very black humour to leaven it all. Definitely an odd but memorable read. 

Vita Nostra

Vita Nostra / Marina & Sergey Dyachenko
trans. from Russian by Julia Meitov Hersey
NY: Harper Voyager, c2018
416 p.

Today's read is by a duo of authors, a wife and husband team -- Marina & Sergey Dyachenko. They have written quite a number of books together, but Marina noted in an interview that this one might be her favourite.

I'm so glad it was translated because it was a great read. It started out like a YA novel, with a teenage girl as the main character, encountering a strange man while on vacation who tells her she is special. I was dubious. But I kept on and by about chapter three I was hooked.

Sasha Samokhina must perform incomprehensible tasks given to her by Farit Kozhennikov -- to swim naked in sea exactly at the same time every day, or to take a daily run in the park on schedule once she's returned home. For every day that she completes her task correctly, she receives a strange gold coin, via throwing it up later. The tasks are testing her discipline, obedience and stamina. 

And when she finishes her high school studies and is applying to colleges, Farit Kozhennikov tells her that her gold coins are the entrance to the Institute of Special Technologies, a distant college in a nowhere town, where she will be studying. This is not a suggestion.

This is where the book really picks up. Sasha heads out to Torpa to attend school, against her mother and stepfather's wishes -- it's so far away! They don't know anything about it! How will she make the right connections to get a job there! But she's determined. One of the reasons for this is that the instructors at Torpa, Farit Kozhennikov included, rule by fear -- if you fail or don't do as expected in your studies or tasks, someone in your family suffers. It's dark, twisted and confusing. 

The whole book is the same; confusing, but in the way that you feel that in just a few pages you'll understand...even though just like Sasha you're fumbling your way through incomprehensible assignments, laid out in intense intellectual and philosophical phrases and images. 

In one way the story is slow moving, not very plot driven -- the action is all in the mind. In this book, it's the ideas that drive it, and the slow expansion of what a reader might think the world is.

This is kind-of fantasy, although solidly based in an already surreal post-Soviet reality. There's magic, in the sense of telekinesis, learning to fly, and shifting realities -- but there is also just a lot of esoteric thought and conversation that makes you wonder about the theology of creation, or the reality of the world we perceive, or the power of language to shape our understanding. It feels like a more intense, fantastical experience of the world-expanding feeling of intense study when you attend university for the first time. 

This is dark in parts, with some violence and a very Soviet feel to many interactions. There is an atmosphere of fear and mistrust throughout. But Sasha applies herself to her studies, she takes on harder and harder tasks, and finds that she begins to crave learning more and more. And in the end, she overcomes Fear and surpasses even her teachers.  

This is a hard book to describe or summarize, but it was compelling even with its focus on the mind and what's happening to someone on the interior rather than flashy outer action. Unexpected and unusual, it was a very different reading experience.

An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good

An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good / Helene Tursten
trans. from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy
NY: Soho Crime, 2019, c2018
173 p.

I picked this one up for some light relief last week. It's a collection of short stories by Swedish crime writer Helene Tursten, featuring a little old lady who isn't quite what she seems. 

Maud likes a quiet life, without too much bother. She still lives in the apartment she grew up in, which thanks to a little quirk in the lease after her father died, is rent free for life. Each of the stories is centred on Maud encountering a problem of some kind, and solving it in a permanent manner. 

There are 5 short stories included:

• An elderly lady has accommodation problems
• An elderly lady on her travels
• An elderly lady seeks peace at Christmas time
• The antique dealer's death
• An elderly lady is faced with a difficult dilemma

I really enjoyed the first three; the last two were different angles on one situation, and I didn't think that both were necessary - just the last one with the same formula in the title would have been fine. 

Maud sticks to herself, even though she travels a lot. She likes to keep her life problem free, but still exhibits a bit of sentiment at times. In the first story, a new tenant in her building has her eye on Maud's large apartment, so Maud quickly takes care of that. In the second and third stories, she sees others encountering problematic issues -- both around marriages -- and so carefully manages to solve those too, on behalf of the injured parties.

The final story/stories were a bit gorier than the first ones, still not terrible but a bit ickier. I really enjoyed Maud's character, though -- she puts on a confused weak demeanour when it serves her, taking advantage of stereotypes. She's stubborn and doesn't abide fools. She is intelligent, thoughtful, and great at making rapid decisions in the face of difficult issues. The wry, dark humour in these stories made this a very entertaining read. I really enjoyed the break from more serious reading.