Brian by Jeremy Cooper

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Brian by Jeremy Coper

British fiction

Source – Library books

One thing I do is let my Fitzcarraldo subscription lapse from time to time. They may be best getting a reminder sent to folks like me. One of the main things I have from my dyspraxia is forgetting everyday stuff, like a subscription. I didn’t email them one last time when I remembered the subscription I had may be running low. So that was a way to say this was a book I had missed between renewals. I think Jacqui was one of the first reviewers I saw of this book, and a recent mention in a YouTube video made me just get a copy from the library. I had been waiting to either buy it new or secondhand. Jeremy Cooper, an art historian, has appeared on the Antiques Roadshow and on Radio 4. I read the Guardian interview where he had been in love with the BFI cinema and the various films and how many you could see in one day, and Brian came from that seeing a regular group in the foyer.

One of Brian’s favourite film moments – from a cast of dozens, admittedly – was in Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road, the scene where a vehicle drew up in a deserted landscape somewhere near the East German border and Rüdiger Vogler walked off twenty yards from the road to take a shit. The camera focused low down to film from behind a long dark sausage turd drop slowly from a pale arse.

In black and white.

Brian admired the shot and always wondered if it was Vogler’s bum or a stunt man’s.

At what time of day was it filmed?

One of the early films from Wim one of his road movies

I think what grabbed me most about Brian is how I connect to him as a person, a quiet man with a simple, solitary life, a small world of lunch in the same cafe, and nights at his small flat in Kentish Town. But what happens when he goes to see a Clint Eastwood film at the BFI? He is drawn into a world of films and becomes one of those figures who meet in the foyer, as we see him make friends with Jack and the other BFI regulars . Added to this is his childhood in Northern Ireland and how that impacted his adult life. As My father is from Northern Ireland and my grandparents are I can see how this world made Brainthe man he is. Then there are the films along the way for me now. I, of course, loved the mention of Wim Wenders, but also the talk of a documentary of Einsturzende Neubauten, the German industrial band I have loved since finding out their singer was Nick Cave’s guitarist over 35 years ago. Then films like Tokyo Story, the late films of Derek Jarman, and this is a book about one man falling in love with the world of cinema.

Two days later Jack called by, looking drastically out of place in the sterile white ward, tiptoeing in his battered trainers gingerly across the polished green linoleum to the side of his friend’s bed. Brian was thrilled to see him and to be filled in on the best of the movies he had missed. Jack had been totally taken, he said, by a documentary on the experimental rock group Einstürzende Neubauten and their leader Blixa Bargeld, ace manipulator of the jackhammer in motorway under-passes. Brian laughed in pleasure at the band’s name and the titles of their songs, admitting that he had never heard of them before. At which Jack came out with one of those definitive phrases for which he was celebrated amongst his fellow buffs: ‘After Einstürzende Neubauten everything is silence.’

The singer’s actual name, Jack said, was Christian Emmerich, branding himself Blixa Bargeld when he left his parents’ home in West Berlin to make music, blixa a make of blue felt-tip pen and bargeld a German street term for cash

Einstruzende Neubauten a band i love

I read reviews of this, and it seems people either love it or hate it. For me, I loved it. Part of it sang to a lost part of me. I love world cinema, but I have seen myself watch less and less over the last few years. I’m not sure if this is, in part, a loss of attention span due to smartphone use. But this is the one thing I loved in this book. Brian’s passion reminded me of the first decade of this blog, when I felt confident in my opinions before the world’s noise became too loud. Obsession is a great way to discover things. Part of me thinks Brian is neurodivergent, I would’t say just autistic, just the traits for deep diving and one passion I know I have. But there is also a lament in me for the time I would record whatever channel four would show late at night, small town life meant that was my window into world cinema, that the film show and long lost shows like the late show, when arts were taken seriously to have Ekow Eshun and Tom Paulin talk arts is something much missed. Anyway, you love film? This novel is for you if you’ve seen the documentary Cinemania. This is a refined English version of that obsession with film, but also the small group of people in that world, a dying world. It could be model aircraft, model railways, stamp collecting, and so on. Jeremy Cooper is capturing a man in a world that will, maybe, in twenty years seem alien! I have made a promise to try to watch a few more films from around the world this year. I have a Sight and Sound subscription and got the Bela Tarr box set for Christmas. Two places to start.

 

Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

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Wedding Worries by Stig Dagerman

Swedish fiction

Original title –Bröllopsbesvär

Translators -Paul Norlen and Lo Dagerman

Source – Personal

I think we all have a canon of writers we have yet to read and review any reader worth anything or like me should I say spends a lot of times down rabbitholes absorbing the writers of the world some I forget a few days after I have read about them but others are on that list that little black book of writers you know for sure youy will get to one day something about them clicks that light in the room of your head where you have the library lof those writers you love well Dagerman has been that list for a long tiome I wait sometimes for years to I see the book in the wild and then when I see a book on a shelf I am like a hawk fast and confident i have found my prey sorry book I mean. Well, Dagerman is often mentioned alongside the likes of Joyce and Faulkner, a difficult writer, a modernist, the sort of writer I love to challenge myself as a reader. Now it is easy to see the comparison in this, his last novel, which is set over the course of one day. At a country wedding in the swedish village of  Älvkarleby

But when he comes back to the bridal bed, there has been no change. Siri is sitting like before, crying. And a fly is hovering in the corner. Then he notices that something has indeed changed: Frida is back hanging on her place on the wall. Holding herself firmly in the chair. Holding her place on the wall. Heat rises to Westlund’s head, a little fire-devil.

He grabs hold of his daughter by her slender shoulders, one in each large hand, and lifts her up toward his anger. But he encounters a fire no smaller than his. A bigger fire, actually.

He looks into a pair of eyes, a pair of eyes that he knows. That he usually closes his own eyes to. The eyes have a voice, and the voice is saying: Thus says the law, Westlund. If you had been living then they would have beheaded you. And that’s how it is with the dead, you cant look into their eyes. Just close your own.

Over the day we learn all sorts from the family members

The first thing I loved about this book was the list of characters. Now, as someone who is neurodivergent, I sometimes lose track of characters, and having a list to refer back to at the start of the book helps me greatly. The book is set on a wedding day as Hildur, the youngest daughter of the Palm family, is due to marry the local, much older Village Butcher, Hilmer. Now we get to see the day and the events that have led up to this young girl marrying a man twice her age and an alcoholic, but when she is with child and the farm hand that got her pregnant, a drunk is more appealing than being like her unwed sister who has a child. As the day goes on, secret affairs are being found out. The farm Hand Martin reappears as the day sways between a normal, nervy wedding day and heading to the abyss and oblivion, at times, where will it all be at the end when the feast happens?

“Since you’re getting married tomorrow maybe you’re in need of some trinkets, I say. Straight from the jeweler in Gävle, I say. Trinket me here and trinket me there, says West-Lund, but bring the case on over here so we can take a look.

Til be a monkey’s uncle, Westlund says looking. This here is fancy. He takes a brooch and places it on the plate. Oh my, now I know a bride who’ll be happy. Give me four, and I’ll be done, he says. One for Hildur and one for Siri. That will be six crowns even, I say. Best to take out my pouch then, Westlund says.”

All the village is caught up in the wedding and trying to be part of it

I loved this book; it had so many boxes for me as a reader. I love. Village anypone that has spent any time reading this blog know I am a huge fan of books set in villages, the microcosm of life hapopoens and this book is a perfect example as the day unfolds, we hear from a multitude of voices this remined me of the cacophony of voices we get in Faulkners AsI lay dting this is more as I head to a wedding or do I !. Secrets is another trope I love in fiction. A good secret can make a book and break a plot up into many pieces, like it does here. Love, hate, passion, and desire are all here as well. Truth and lies as well. Also that time frame one day 24 hours so much can happen I think of Ulysess but even of somehting like the Ron Howard fil where over the course of one day a story changes like this one does leaving you the reader not quite knowning how it will all end. Man, I so wish he hadn’t died. This was his final novel, written when he was 30. God, this is a masterpiece. What would he have done next?

Have you read Dagerman ?

 

 

Mysterious setting by Kazushige Abe

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Mysterious Saetting by Kazushige Abe

Japanese fiction

Original title – Misuteriasu Settingu  -ミステリアス・セッティング

Translator Muchel Emmerich

Source – Personal copy

I’m back I had a week where life caught up with book reviewing and so I add another book for the Jpaanese Literature challenge and one from the many books that Pushkin Press have brought out in there Novella se4ries of novels from japan with there bright covers and often eye catching cover art they highlight some of the best writing from recent years in Japan this iss one of two books they have published from Kazushige Abe. A writer who started off studying film and wanted to be a film director, and then, whilst studying film, friends introduced him to writers like Kenzaburo Oe, Richard Bach, William Burroughs and Philip K Dixck, and he decided he wanted to be a writer. He has won several major writing prizes in Japan. This book, published in 2006, is a retelling of the Little Match Girl story set in contemporary Japan.

Nozomi asked why, if she was prepared to share her

poems, she didn’t write them down.

This was a good question, and Shiori was unsure how to

answer. She didn’t know why.

Nozomi was merciless at moments like this.

“Things just spin further out of control when you try to cover up one lie with another, Shiori. Why not admit you can’t write poetry? You’d like to be a poet, but you aren’t one, and, if you ask me, the odds you’ll succeed in becoming a troubadour’ seem pretty slim. They say everyone has the right to dream, but inflicting a ‘right’like that on people seems cruel to me. Just look at you, shooting off lies so transparent even I can see through them, acting like this dumb dream’ of yours is your greatest treasure and you’ll never let it go.

I’ve never heard anything so stupid in my life.”

Her sister is her harshest critic

I love the way this story starts off as something normal. We meet Shirori, a teenager with a singular dream, but the only problem is that she is tone-deaf. She is often reminded of this fact, very harshly, by her sister. But she has read off the old-fashioned Troubadours that used to travel telling tales in songs, and is caught up in this dream. But in the latter part of the book, the girl meets the world as she heads to Tokyo to follow her dream and study music. But like many girls like her with dreams and no real sense of how the world works ., she falls foul of those underclass of people that take people’s dreams and twist them so she meets people online that take on her and this seems to be the way the book is heading then we get something that changes her whole future out of leftfield and the book is dark and comic at the same time.

Suzuki-kun was seized with righteous indignation when he heard about all this. He told Shiori he would talk to Nozomi, make her stop. But Shiori defended her sister.

Nozomi had been angry, it was a sort of fit, she told him.

You shouldn’t blame her—it was really my fault for breaking my promise. Besides, Nozomi had said she was sorry at breakfast, so everything was OK now. In reality, Nozomi had never apologized for anything in her life, but in this case a little white lie seemed appropriate.

Shiori was so overjoyed to see Suzuki-kun this con-cerned-he was angry on her behalf!-that she wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. At the same time, she didn’t want him butting into a matter that was really between her and her sister.

More about her and the sister !

I think this is one of those books from Japan that has a nod toward traditional stories like the Little Match Girl, but it was also first released as a novel on the phone when it came out. There is a sense of many little things happening that draw the story forward. But then there is also the leftfield turns we get here and there throughout the book. That was a nod to figures like Burroughs and Dick, writers he likes, the urban jungle and cityscapes, both common in their works, and to surreal turns, a thing Burroughs was known for. Dick’s often from the few books I read years ago, like playing with identity and setting, like in Blade Runner, which is, of course, set in a modern city but has light, dark, and comedy at times, and also shifts in reality. But at the heart of this book is isolation inj the big city, one girl’s dream, but also those that will prey on that, all tied up in the book, which is also about Tokyo and going there for a dream like many a teen does in Japan and always will. Nut, maybe not as surreal as this darkly comic book does.

Have you any books that take a surreal turn at times like this book ?

Vaim by Jon Fosse

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Vaim by Jon Fosse

Norwegian fiction

Original title – Vaim

Translator – Damion Searls

Source – Subscription edition

It is always fun to get a new book from Jon Fosse. He is one of those writers in recent years whom I have come to love. His books are beautifully written, with recurring themes like duality, mirrors, existential themes, and motifs. This is his first book since he won the Nobel, and one always feels that one of two things can happen when a writer wins a prize as big as the Nobel. That’s why they struggle to match up to the earlier books, or they carry on, and I wondered which way Fosse would go. I don’t know why I was worried; this is another slice of what we have all come to like about his books, and the first in a new trilogy.

I can’t remember how many years, and of course it was a stupid idea to name the boat after Eline, but I’d probably heard that a boat should have a female name, and since the name Eline was the one that was constantly spinning around in my head, yes, the boat got named Eline, Eline the person had already been on my mind for several years, often to the point where it was hard to stop thinking about her, yes, and so that’s how the boat got named Eline, and there was a lot of talk going around about that name, yes, that’s what Elias told me, yes, apparently it was so bad that some people called me Eline instead of Jatgeir, there’s Eline, they said when they saw me, and when Elias told me that yes well I didn’t ask any more questions, that was just the way it was going to be on that subject, there was nothing I could do about it anyway, that’s how it was, and well it was nice that Elias dropped by to see me every now and then, he was the only person who did, and he was the only person I ever dropped by and visited either and now I can already see the bay there at Sund,

Elias and how Jatgeir called his boat after the girl he loved at a distance

This book is divided into three parts the first is about an older man Jatgeir we not told how old he is other than he has no family and his beard is greying and he has a boat called the Eline after a girl he had loved all his life and now in what from the way he talks is his lster life he has gone on a yearly trip to a city Bjorgvin from his small fishing village of Vaim. He has no real reason other than to fetch a spool of black thread and a needle to fix a button back on a shirt. When he ends up getting stung by the shopkeeper and her son over the thread, he goes back to his boat, then, after paying 250 krona for the thread, he heads out. This is where the story starts to get strange. He tells of the only other person to use the boat with him, Elias, and that he is now heading to Sund and to a smaller port for the night. He again visits the shop, purchases a second needle and thread, and is shocked to pay the same price. So that night, he hears a voice, and it is Eline, the girl he likes but never told, talking to him, and they elope as she has missed Vaim, his home, and where she grew up. Then, in part, we hear from Jatgeir’s friend Elais after Jatgeir has come back with Eline, and the two friends who often spent time together have not been together for a year and a day. This is a phrase Eline uses in the first part of the story. Then he is visited by a ghost, but who is the ghost? The third story loops back to Frank Eline’s husband on Sund and his story, but as ever, there are loops of names and phrases and boats with similar names in this tale, and it is very strange in the end

She called me Frank, from the first time we met she called me Frank – hi Frank, nice to see you, she said to me, or something like that, it was in Bjørgvin, it was at the restaurant called The Fowl where I’d gone with the two guys I fished with on the Elinor, the three of us did all kinds of fishing on that ship back then, and then it would sometimes happen that if we’d had a good catch and got a good price for the fish that we’d take a little trip to Bjørgvin, dock at one of the quays on The Wharf, spend a night there usually, getting in sometime in the afternoon and leaving at dawn or sometime the next morning

Frank or Olaf as he is meeting Eline for the first time in the third part of the book

This book is like a Möbius loop, as you have the feeling ELine is going around and around with these two men, like a moon orbiting two planets: as one pulls, she goes from Jatgeir to Frank, or is it Olaf who was Frank? Is he Olaf? Add to this: boats with similar names; both men have boats called Eline, and the other boat has a similar-sounding name as well. Then we have the recurrent mention of a year and a day in the book; it keeps cropping up, but at other times, time is fluid, and the events seem to have happened over a year, while in other passages, it is this year and a day that is said. Friendship love moen that are very quiet and a woman that likes to get her own way lead to a novella that twists in on itself and at times seems to repeat events and places in the first and last story, like the two men are ghosts that could have met at some point . This is a classic piece of Fosse, and I can’t wait to see where he takes this story, how many more twists and turns we get from the folk on Vaim.This is the best books I have read this year so far.

The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

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The Christmas Clue by Nicola Upson

English Fiction

Source – Personal copy

I brought this in the run-up to Christmas. I feel I’m starting a new reading tradition for myself: finishing the year off with a couple of crime books. I think what grabbed me about this book is the fact that it uses the couple that invented the board game Cluedo, which is written by Nicola Upson whom I have seen talking a lot about golden age of crime writing and this book is set in the time well middle of world war two when people had to make there own entertainment the coupole at the heart of the boo comes up with the game. But what Nicola Upson imagines is that the pair had run a murder game in the house they eventually used as the template for the Cluedo board.

They pressed on, passing through familiar villages in good time and picking up the Rottingdean road just as the light was beginning to fade. It’s hard to believe that we’re almost at the coast, Elva said, peering through the windscreen at the pretty cottages and village greens that were synonymous with rural England. ‘You’d never know that all the drama of the sea was barely a mile away. I think that’s what I love most about this place. You get the best of both worlds, so you never tire of either of them?

‘Murder at the Vicarage and Rebecca all rolled into one?Anthony said, and laughed as she raised her eyes to the heavens.Dean Court Road is the next turning on the left?She nodded but didn’t slow down, and Anthony repeated the direction. ‘Well, it was the next left, he said, staring back over his shoulder. Now you’ll have to go round the pond and come back?

As the head off to set up there murder weekend in high spirits

The book follows Anthony and Elva Pratt, a couple who, in 1943, arranged for a small hotel in the village of Rottingdean to host a murder-mystery weekend. They have the fake weapons for the murder weekend and have chosen the Tudor house as the setting for the weekend. Anthony had played the piano at the hotel before the war.  But when they arrive and call at a local shop and find the shopkeeper dead, their murder mystery weekend becomes all too real, especially when it turns out the sister of the dead woman happens to work at the Tudor house hotel. What follows is that the death is connected tpo the collection of guests in the hotel, and the dean sets out to solve the actual crime. But the hotel guests are, in a way, the templates for the Cluedo game: a single woman, a military man, the hotel manager, and the sister. Miss Silver, the cook, may know more about why the shopkeeper has died.

‘My money would be on last-minute chocolates for his wife? Elva pulled into the space that the other car had just vacated, a neat dark rectangle amid the covering of white.

‘At least Miss Silver’s not staying open just for us?

The shop was one of a terrace of small cottages, identical to its neighbours except for the colourful array of sweets and novelties in the window and a discreet sign above the door: Miss E. Silver, Tobacconist and Confec-tioner, est. 1929. ‘You could trace my whole childhood in those jars, Anthony said, looking wistfully at the gob-stoppers, humbugs and sugar mice. ‘It must be a lovely thing to own a sweet shop, don’t you think? You’d only ever have happy customers?

They visit the shop but get more than chocolates there !

I loved how she worked the real life inventors of Cluedo intpo a classic slice of Golden age criome in a way the classic country house or in the case hotel a collection of people gathered together sterotypes like in the game but also in a lot of christie novels the characters all fit a type a single woman a vixen of sort a mitltary man, stasff and a couple of mysterious figures. We have all here, plus nods to the classic game they invented based on this hotel, a cast of characters, and, like in the car, a lot of ways to kill someone on hand. Then to set it all at Christmas is just so clever. I can see this being a Christmas read for years for fans of classic golden-age crime fiction, as well as books that take real-life people on a Journey. I also think it has a TV drama written all over it as well!

 

 

The Coffee House by Naguib Mahfouz

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The Coffee House by Naguib Mahfouz

Egyptian Fiction

Original title – قشتمر (رواية)

Translator – Raymond Stock

Source – Personal copy

I have read a few other books by Mahfouz over the years. He is a writer whose books are widely available in English and are also widely translated. He is best known for the Cairo trilogy, which I intend to read early in 2027 if anyone is interested in joining me in reading the epic novel that earned him the Nobel Prize. With Mookse and Gripes doing an episode on him in 2027, I have time try and read as many as I can. This is a book from later in his career. It was his last novel, but not the last book he wrote. So far, from the other books I have read by him, he always captures the vibe of his country so well, and he has great insight into relationships. Also, here, I felt this is a microcosm of the country for the five young boys who grow to be men in this book.

Sadiq Safwan lived in a house blessed with love, harmony, and a stable marital life. As an only child, he was favored with every sort of care but his adolescent awakening was considered a secret that must be avoided. At puberty, with neither a teacher nor a helper, he abandoned his piety.

“Marriage is the only cure for this,” he once told us. “But

when will that come?”

Sadiq loved his parents he was not afraid of them: Tahir Ubayd was like him in this. Safwan Effendi al-Nadi began to escort his son to Friday prayers at the Sidi al-Kurdi mosque.

“Didn’t your father’s mustache poke those praying on either side of him in the eye?” Tahir teased Sadiq after we’d waited for his return.

Sadig’s father never stopped pushing him to work hard and settle into the right position, for only that would save him from a future of poverty.

Sadig gets out of his poor background

The title refers to a local coffee house near where the five main characters in the book all went to school. They all came to the school from different places in Cairo. So when they grow up, they are, in ways, on opposite sides at times, but still have regular meetups at the coffee house. Ismel is very clever and, maybe in a way, a disappointment in his life, but devout and works in publishing. Opposite to this is Tahir, a man from a low-class background, but not religious, who loves poetry.  Hamada is a lawyer when he grows up. Sadig is a middle-of-the-road person who runs a factory and is married. Then there is our narrator, and we have very few clues about him. For me, he was maybe Mahfouz himself; he spent time in coffee houses. What happens is the events of the middle years of the twentieth century, from World War II to the rise of the muslim brotherhood. I loved how it showed how these five boys who met as seven-year-olds and managed to stick together through adulthood, each having their own paths and views.

Ismail Qadri was more or less our leader. That was his right due to his academic excellence, an undeniable distinction. He had a special status among the teachers, not to mention an air of excitement due to his sexual caprices. Since his reaching puberty, his mother had kept a special watch on him, so he lost the opportunities that the roof terrace had offered. Thus he transferred his instinct to the forest of fig trees, into which he lured the daughters of street vendors. Nonetheless, he persisted in his piety like Sadig Safwan, stuffing his storehouse of information with many things he learned from his mother on the afterlife and the torture of the grave. He sustained his fervor by picturing the image of God.

Ismail is the most well written character i felt he must been some Mahfouz knew well

I was so happy when I found this last year, as I had read a Mahfouz last year and had only a couple on my TBR pile, so this is his final novel for me, and it’s a personal book. I see the narrator as Mahfouz and the other characters as people he has known. I am not quite sure if each character is one person or various friends from the many traditional coffee houses he used to go to.One in particular is the model for the cafe in the book, and it is still kept as it was in Mahfouz’s time for people to visit. He has also shown how turbulent the years have been for Egypt and how the locals have coped with it. Have you read any books by Mahfouz? If so, do you have a favourite? If you are after a Proust-like book about Cairo in the mid century, this is the book for you

Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

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Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

Japanese Non-Fiction

Original title – 職業としての小説家, Shokugyō to shite no Shōsetsuka

Translators – Phillip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

Source – Personal copy

I move on to Haruki Murakami for my second book for the Japanese Literature Challenge 26. This is the eighth book I have reviewed since the blog began; it has been three years since I last reviewed a book by him. I had this on the shelves for a while and was looking forward to it because I’m a fan of what I talk about when I talk about running, and this collection about him as a writer appealed to me. I always admire how writers work, and I’m curious about how their lives as writers have come about, and maybe Murakami’s generation of writers is the last to be able to live as full-time writers. The first half of the collection was published in parts in a Japanese magazine.

WRITING NOVELS IS, to my way of thinking, basically a very uncool enterprise. I see hardly anything chic or stylish about it. Novelists sit cloistered in their rooms, intently fiddling with words, batting around one possibility after another. They may scratch their heads an entire day to improve the quality of a single line by a tiny bit. No one applauds, or says “Well done,” or pats them on the back. Sitting there alone, they look over what they’ve accomplished and quietly nod to themselves. It may be that later, when the novel comes out, not a single reader will notice the improvement they made that day. That is what novel writing is really all about. It is time-consuming, tedious work.

The lonely life of a writer

I suppose the best essay for me was the second one, about how it is almost by accident that we have Murakami. He had written his first book, Hear the Wind Sing, whilst working in a Jazz bar, and sent it to a Literary magazine competition, not expecting anything, then won the prize. Of course, the rest is history. He also talked in that bit about Agota Kristof and how she had written her novels. Elsewhere, he gives speeches in schools about how to be a writer. There is another essay in which he discusses his later books. It starts by discussing how he has come across the characters in his book and how he used to admire Somerset Maugham’s use of them. Then he moves on to later works of his, which I have wondered about. I have struggled with some of his later novels. I may go back after reading this and look at them again later. He also talks about prizes, where he is coy and uses other writers’ words on the Nobel prize winning, of course, he has been on the list as a potential winner for years.

Hear the wind sing is a short novel, less than two hundred manuscript pages long. Yet it took many months and much effort to complete. Part of the reason, of course, was the limited time I had to work on it, but the real problem was that I hadn’t a clue how to write a novel. To tell the truth, although I had been absorbed in reading all kinds of stuff my favorites being translations of Russian novels and English-language paperbacks-1 had never read modern Japanese novels (of the “serious” variety) in any concerted way. Thus I had no idea what kind of Japanese literature was being read at the time or how I should write fiction in the Japanese language.

Hear the wind sing is one of my favourite books by him

I enjoyed this collection less than What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I feel I may have grown out of Murakami as a reader in recent years. Looking back, it was in 2014 that I last reviewed a novel by him. Perhaps it is the fact I hadn’t connect with his later books and loved some of his earlier books but also in hindsight wonder if they would still be as good as they were when I read them twenty years ago. I still have a hope he may write that Magnus opus that he hasn’t quite written, if that makes sense. He wrote great books, but not one super book. If you are a fan, it is an insight into his mind as a writer, his views on character prizes and other things. But for me, I loved the humour and the more personal insights he shared in the book. What I talk about is a more personal memoir; this is more about his craft as a writer and the writer’s world than Murakami the man. Of course, the piece on Literary prizes. Will he be republished if he wins the Nobel Prize in the coming years? Have you read this book?

Killing the Nerve by Anna Pazos

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Killing the Nerve by Anne Pazos

Catalan Non-fiction

Original title – Matar El Nervi

Translators -Laura McGloughlin and Charlotte Coombe

Source – Subscription edition

I have said before that one of my favourite publishers that have appeared in recent years is Foundry editions of all the books that they have published I haven’t disliked a single one I have read, and this is a piece of Auto Journalism from  Catalan writer Anna Pavos, it follows her twentiers where she did what a lot of young peiople did and take on the digiatl nomads world of working around the world. How people run away to escape their own world is something I can relate to. I also worked abroad in my youth. But not as many places as Anna does. Anna Pazos captures several moments and also what it is like to feel rootless at times.

For a while I was one of those people who talked about Thessaloniki with that fanatical glint. I defended and praised the city as if it were a lost Arcadia. In my case, the deception was particularly perverse because I knew deep down that I’d been unhappy there, with an overwhelming, rootless misery like I’d never known. But my urge to be the kind of person who enjoys and reveres Thessaloniki was more powerful than the memory of my failure. The reasons for the defeat were concrete and shameful, and they had to be masked by an objective knowledge of the history and particular circumstances of the city. I tried, unsuccessfully, to protect myself with a biblio-graphie shield to deal with my failure, as we so often do in life.

Her time in Greece

The book begins when she has the chance to study in Thessaloniki as an Erasmus student. AS the book opens, she recounts that this was the last time she had a fever years before the pandemic in a cheap room she rented. What comes across is a typical late teen experience of drinking, trying to avoid falling pregnant, as she mixed with the other students. Through them, she has her eyes open as they come from around Europe. The n because she can write, she ends up in Israel, where she views the conflict and gains insight, but, like many, finds the whole thing maybe too much at times. She then wanders Europe for a while. She then gets a boat to America and arrives just as the MeToo movement is gaining momentum. Eventually end back home viewing her home of Barcelona differently than she did as Covid is about to hit. All this, and she looks back at her family life along the way.

Rumour has it that Roiphe is writing an incendiary essay for Harper’s Magazine. In it, she not only questions the strange energy taking over the #MeToo era, she also reveals the name of the woman who created a spreadsheet for female workers in the media world to anonymously report their male co-workers.

The spreadsheet, which has been circulating for a while now, gathers details of various types of aggression, from a disagreeable encounter over drinks to inappropriate touching at work or sexual harassment. Once the accused’s name is added to the list, his offence is on the same level as all the others. It’s all now perceived as part of a continuum, outpourings of the same unbridled misogyny we’ve agreed to call “rape culture”

Anna was there when the Metoo movement broke

There is a reason we want to run. That is at the heart of Outrun and books like Wild. Part of this is explained in the book why Anna feels trapped in Barcelona. I get it, I had family problems and a drive to escape where I was from, and when that door opened, I took it and lived in Germany for a few years. But she also captures the nomadic nature of a lot of young lives. There is a way that many young people can have access to more places and opportunities to see them than before. That is what she has caught the new digital nomad world from Greece, partly through Israel and the US, and back home. I’m not sure why this has been seen less than the other Foundry books. For me, this is the other side of some of the fiction books I have reviewed in the last year. Perfection or a Little Dinner both deal with the modern world of the 21st century, and this is a 21st-century account of one woman’s travels and views. Have you read this book? Or a non-fiction work that captures the digital nomad life of travelling here and there!

 

 

Library for the war wounded by Monika Helfer

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Library for the War Wounded by Monika Helfer

Austrian Fiction

Original title – Vati

Translator Gillian Davidson

Source – Library book

I brought this from the library for German lit month, read it, but didn’t review it, which I should have. I loved this book, it is by the Austrian writer Monika Helfer and is a piece of autofiction around her own father. The book itself was shortlisted for the German Book Prize, which is the German equivalent of the Booker Prize. What we get in this is a daughter piecing together the fragments of a father she never really knew. I love the English title, but wonder why Father is the Austrian title. .

We called her Mutti, not Mama. Our father wanted it that way. Because he thought it sounded modern.

Modern our mother was not. She came from the remotest backwoods, her brothers were a wild bunch.

When their parents died, the oldest, Uncle Heinrich, was just seventeen or eighteen. The children had to fend for themselves. No one helped them. They didn’t have faith in the Church nor in Hitler. Well, Aunt Irma did have faith in Hitler. For her, he was modern.

Uncle Lorenz said she shouldn’t put her hopes in him. She never had anyway, she said after the war.

Our father was convinced that people living in such circumstances were better somehow, deep down.

Like him. He also came from a sort of down-and-out family. He used to quote Rilke: ‘For poverty is a great glow from within?

Vati and Muti are names used for parents.

The book focuses on a character in the present trying to piece together her father’s life. Josef lived a man born in relative poverty and only learnt to read when the local gentry wanted to help him. When the Nazis take over, he is sent to the Eastern Front and loses his leg. From this point is where she remembers her father. He is given the job in the mountains at a home for the war-wounded. As they have a massive collection of books, this is where the title comes from. He loves to read books and has shown signs of developing from his love of reading. Still, when he start to make changes oiut how the recovery centre is run the bosses appear he rushes to bury the books these are all fragments she piece together of what Josef was like a man she never really know and in a way he is maybe a litle like Godot in a way as he isn’t front and centre in the book but more a ghost a person remembered.

I am tired. I close my laptop, stretch, it is only early afternoon. It is not the writing that makes me tired, nor is it the remembering. I want to be tired. I use tiredness as a professional tool. I need to get closer to the dreams, not quite asleep but no longer totally awake, remembering comes more easily this way, that’s my experience, I want to make use of this phenomenon. I am conjuring. What a lovely expres-sion! I conjure up the sound of our mother coming up the stairs, taking off her dress and giving her skin a scratch. I used to love hearing that, then I knew: now she’s putting on her fresh white nightshirt, which has been carefully pressed, and before she goes into the main bedroom, she’ll cuddle up with us girls for a quarter of an hour. Did we even know the phrase

‘cuddle up?

In the present as she looks into the past

I have chosen a short review for this book, it is one of those books that is great to read and lingers with you, this ghost of a man, a father, but one of those that always seems distant. I think this is common with mid century parents they worked kids where kids in their world, and the two rarely crossed, so Josef remained an enigma to the writer of the book his daughter as I say he is there but spoken about and not front stage in the book we what he does often vthrough others a patchwork of memories and those tales that drift dowwn through the years.If you are a fan of Robert Seethaler’s work, this is the same world of the Austrian Alps and family. I also see a bit of Ian McEwan in this book, Secrets in the Past. Have you read this or her other book?

My Annihilation by Fuminori Nakamura

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My Annihilation by Fuminori Nakamura

Japanese crime fiction

Original title – Watashi no Shōmetsu (私の消滅)

Translator – Samm Bett

Source – Review copy

I am a terrible reviewer of my review copies. I sometimes just get in my own groove, and books get put aside and forgotten. I am such a mood reader and always want to be me as a reader. I have been sent books and have not got to them, but with this being Japanese challenge month, I found this and remembered I really enjoyed Cult X by the same writer when I reviewed it. Nakamura is one of those crime writers who is as much a literary writer as a crime writer. In Japan, this is reflected in the fact that he has won a couple of major book prizes for his earlier works, and some of his books have also been made into films. His books defy genre, really, and this book is one such book.

I guess it started with the tuneral.

A girl who lived nearby was kidnapped and discovered dead. The younger sister of one of my

classmates. People sweating through their black funeral clothes milled awkwardly about. I was in the third grade, and watched these strangers dressed in black surround my classmate. His parents stood nearby, holding a portrait of the lost girl.

They had apprehended an unemployed man in his thirties, who went on to testity to having lured the girl into his car and murdered her when she began to kick and scream. The

man had a hulky build and wore ratty basketball shoes. I had seen him wandering around

town several times, leaning a little forward as he walked.

As he reads the diary in the opening chapter and a death

My Annihilation is a book made of one man’s diary, in part, as we meet a man in a remote mountain lodge as he reads this diary of a serial killer, Royadi Kozuka, the man who has written this dark diary of the events and killings he may have committed. But this book is one of those that folds on itself as the man who is reading ther diary is trying to be the man in the diary and as we get further into the book he is held at a mental institution as th pyschatrist try to untangle to identity of the man and the writer of the dirasy and how these all fit together wutha woman that has died called Yukari and we see her desperate past life. AS the multiple threads unfold, the story and tale are revealed, but there are also gaps in the narrative, with black pages between the chapters. As I said, this is a writer who loves to play with the style of writing but also the way a story is told.

He was a quiet kid, easy to miss. The adult couples in his family were at odds with one another, and sometimes his grandfather beat his grandmother and his father beat his mother.

Because his parents were both busy working, he was looked after by a man named Taka, who had

an emotional disorder and was unable to use both his legs. After Taka went away and Miyazaki’s grandfather died, a noticeable change came over him. He began inflicting violence on his parents and on animals while obsessively collecting anime and manga.

Children can become unstable with thedeath of a parent or close relative, but by the time his grandfather had died Miyazaki was already twenty-five years old and inordinately distraught. When he saw a little girl on her own, he told himself “I’m gonna catch that kid” and said something to her. Of particular interest was his perception of himself during that moment.

What makes a kiler ?

 

I wish I had got to this earlier, as it is not only one of the most inventive crime books I have read, with many layers like peeling an onion back, even to the tears of the horrific crimes we see along the way. But the use of past, present, and identity all collide at times. Who is who, why has x and y happened all unfold, but not always as you think they will, the truth always seems to shine through. This has the darkness, at times, you find in a writer like Bolano, that feeling of not quite knowing what is going on, that you draw from Kafka’s works. But also the brutal nature of mental health treatment that brought me back at times to one flew over the cuckoo’s nest with its mention of electrotherapy, etc. I was also reminded of Pamuk’s crime books by another clever writer. I could see this making a great mini series, with the various threads, since it would suit a mini-series format, since we know each part slowly comes together like a complex jigsaw puzzle. One for Kafka fans, fans of clever crime books that keep you thinking about who is who and about identity and revenge! I’m sure I have said this before, but Soho Press does some of the most inventive book covers. Have you read any books by Fuminori Nakamura?

Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper by Donald Henderson

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Mr Bowling Buys  a Newspaper by Donald Henderson

English Crime Fiction

Source – Library

Don’t Panic, what I’ve started the year off with a book that isn’t a translation. Well, this book was on Jacquiwines’ end-of-year book list, and I wanted a couple of crime-like books to round off the year’s reading. I was amazed that my library had an edition which I collected just before Christmas. What grabbed me in Jacqui’s description was the feeling that the book was in the same world of back streets, and those down on their luck as Patrick Hamilton’s are, with a crime thrown in for free. Plus, the book is set during the Second World War, and at the back end of last year I watched the Foyle’s War series again, which also drew me as a reader to the book.

‘My dear, she laughed, ‘you just don’t know him! He’s as honest and open as the day. According to his lights! Which is more than one can say for some—I don’t mean you, you old pencil! She often called him an old pencil, because of his work at the M.O.I. She teased him about being a pencil and a bit of paper. “Try and be nice to him, won’t you, darling. He’s had a tough break. Married too young. No cash. This time he must try and marry a bit of money, it’s the only thing for a man of his temperament. There’s no shame in it, it’s logic, and he’s got music in him?

‘He’s not very good looking, is he?

‘Hark at him! And nor are you! You old pencil!?

I mean, he always looks as it… as if he’s acting a part. As if he’s out of his sphere?

He is out of sphere. The poor lamb. He ought to live on his country estate. Or somebody ought to leave him some dough and a title. He’d probably do wonders for charity and write a symphony or something?

This captures the problem in his life somewhat

 

The book follows a serial killer called Mr Bowling, who kills people, and he likes to buy a paper tpo see if the crime has been reported. This is all because he doesn’t want to live. The book opens with why this is he has failed in a lot he has done in hism life and has seemed like someone that maybe has had to settle for second best this includes his annoying wife, He is a failed musician making ends met selling insurances so when he kills the wife Ivy during a bombing raid thius gives him two opportunities the first is to have money as it is assumed she died due to the bombing and the other is the abuility to carry out more killings. He isn’t the cleverest killer; he wants to be caught in a way. He sees this as a release from a life that along the way. Has had so many bad moments. He can’t bring himself to kill himself, but can kill others, for someone to kill him in the end, that is the final idea.

Mr Bowling said Winthrop often came in for a chat, and had actually been in only yesterday morning to invite him to bridge on the Thursday next, and he’d accepted.

When the copper went off to question somebody else, Joan slipped in again with some ridiculous talk about wondering if the police thought she’d murdered Mr Winthrop.

“You? he said.

She was scared and she said:

Well, they think it’s murder. Personally, I should think it was a housebreaker or someone. I can’t imagine Mr Gunter doing it, or anyone else here? And Alice says they think he was killed last night about eleven or so, that was just when I came into your room and you were… or I thought you were having a bath? She stared vacantly. “Where were you?”

He can be quite funny at times there is a dark satire under riding the book

I said this was a crime novel; it’s really more of a thriller, and it’s about human psychology, more like those great dramas we had in the eighties from Ruth Rendell’s thrillers. A book about one man’s life and drive, or lack of it, is a bad luck story. I get the Hamilton connection. This is a man who has had everything go wrong in his life. It’s killing him, instead of falling into the bottle in a way. It also pokes at the rigid class system of the country at the time. How Bowling is trapped in a way by this, but for me it is also a piece of existentialist fiction, is Bowling not from the samew cut of cloth as Giovanni Drogo, a man stuck in a place and time alone in a desert, then Bowling alone in himself in a city of millions as bombs fall all around. If you are a fan of the inverted crime genre and psychological books by the likes of Rendell, Highsmith, or Du Maurier, but with the urban grit of Patrick Hamilton, dark wartime London streets, as we follow a killer trying to get caught, what will the paper say when he next buys it?

Stu the readers 10 for 2025

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I have picked ten books that have stuck with me as we near the end of the year. I won’t be doing another review, a mix of old and new titles in no particular order.

Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki

A look at the darker side of Japanese life through the crystal of a mother-daughter relationship was part of my Japanese reading in January, and I felt this would been on the Booker international list. I like the autofiction feel mof it and to get a female perspectibve of the same streets Murakami used to write about.

2 Solenoid Mircea Cǎrtǎescu

This Labyrinth of a novel, with its twists and turns, the grim reality of communist-era Romania, and often surreal side stories, is a book I put off reviewing, not feeling worthy of it, and still don’t. But I like a challenging book, this is one I look forward to reading, Blinding at some point. if you are a fan of Pynchon or Nadas, you should try this

3. Celebration by Damir Karakaš

Now, there were two books I read from the Balkans that hit me hard, this interlocking collection of stories from Croatia from the 1920s through to the end of World War II, following one man’s Journey into Fascism. This is one for fans of short fiction that hit the reader like a tequila shot

4. The Palm Wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola

The oldest book on this list reminds me I need to read more Books from around the various countries in Africa. This classic mix of tribal myths with a man’s hunt for a new person to make his palm wine. This appeals to people wanting to read one of the first writers to be published from Nigeria, and people who like slightly surreal stories

5. In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević

I said two books from the Balkans had hit me hard this year. This Bosnian book follows a little girl from her peaceful Valley and a rural existence, to the horror of war, and memories of the summer mix with the violence that unfolds. I remember the Balkan war and working alongside a Couple of people who had escaped the violence. If you like a story that mixes rural beauty and the horror of war, this is for you

6. The river by  Laura Vinogradova

Open letter did a tryptich of books from Latvia; all of them could have been on this list, but it was this tale of a daughter finding out about a father she didn’t know, who had stuck with me. If you are a fan of books that slowly unfurl as the daughter learns more about her father, whom she never knew, then you will love this.

7. Attila by Javier Serena

Another from Open Letter Books: this is a pair of books released under the same title. This book is called Attilia and is about the man who wrote the other book of the same title, Alioscha Coll, that captures this man’s life as he quits being a doctor to write and descends into his own world of books and literature in Paris. This is the sort of Anti of Human Bondage, another write, ar century apart, but both struggling to write and on the edge of madness one falls down the hole the other doesn’t |!

8. Just a little dinner by CécileTlili

I haven’t put any of the Booker International books on this list. But for me, this book is betterthan one of the longlist books. Perfection, for me, captures the ins and outs of the modern world and life so well in a dinner party and in its fallout. An Abigails party of the 21st century in Paris

9. The Splendor of Portugal by António Lobo Antunes

I think I have had an Antunes in my end-of-year list when I have read a book by him. This one, like his other books, deals with the dark colonial past of his Homeland in Africa, and, more than the others I have read by him, it also looks at the wider conflicts of the era in southern Africa through the prism of one family. If you like Faulkner, you will like Atunes.

10. Sad tiger by Neige Sinno

This brutal piece of auto fiction covers the years she spent with her stepfather, who sexually abused her, but the man himsellf remind me of my stepfather, a brooding man like this man that casts a shadow over a family. For fans of Annie Ernaux or Édouard Louis

Bonus book: The Ship by Hans Henny Jahn

A difficult book about a couple who are on the girlfriend’s father’s ships as they sail with a mysterious cargo, and the boat is almost a living thing in this quirky, unusual piece of German fiction of a vessel that seems to grow over time and a constant feeling of unease as you read the book. Fans of weird fantasy that should be better known

 

 

Loooking forward a state of the blog and 2026 Plans

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I have decided to draw a line under the reviews for this year. I just ran out of steam the last month. Part of me is thinking I am actually so excited about next year on the blog and just wanting to say fuck off to 2025, as the queen once said it has been my Annus Horribilis with Amandas heartattack and the changes that have brought to our lives. But I have also felt lost as a reader over the last six months. I think there is so much noise these days that I have felt like I have been doomscrolling for the last while, and my concentration is a lot less than it used to be, and this has impacted my love of reading, I feel. Simon Savidge talks a lot about what he reads. I never used to get it, but now I do. The noise of the book world is louder, but also, for me, feels like a massive cave now where I interact very little with folks. One-to-many pointing out grammatical errors makes me question every tweet these days, so I end up making more errors. (I SPOT my own mistakes so often, but i am used to them, so just forget them )I do wonder how these folks who, over the years, would cope with grammar in my brain, which is full of noise and constant overthinking, and just a lack of self-belief. This has even started to impact me, as I think about why this noise is constantly in my head. So this last month I have turned to Chat gpt to firstly try and work out a few thiunbgs like a weekly routine to blog too which from the new year i will be doing I used to do my weekly planner religously as I need to know how my week looks or it ends up being me just sat watch old crimefilms and you tube and ragin at the state of the country Mr Trump and just so many other things.The impact of what happened to my beloved has had a ripple effect and made me want to kick-start the blog and celebrate my love of reading

Don’t get me started on book creators and having to pay to join folks’ book clubs. So the first part of next year will be building the routine back up. I have a new hourly planner. Then I have set up a Discord, which, if folks want to join, is a place to chat about books, similar to how we did back in the Twitter days. NBo book club, no paying for this and that. I have a blog that has reviewed over 120 countries. I have a depth of reviews I feel is a real achievement. But as I have heard say, there is no standing still; time moves on constantly. I have flirted with the idea of YouTube for the last couple of years,s but I  can’t see myself ever doing it. The blog is where my passion lies: improving as a writer and reader, constantly moving forward, discovering new countries, and continuously adding depth to the places I have read from, building the ultimate world canon. Still, to do this, I need to try and read a little more, get back to a blogging routine, and figure out how to do that well. One of my all-time favourite books about reading is Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, where Nina Sankovich read a book a day after the death of her sister. I know point blank I can’t read a book a day, just beyond me. I averaged 120 books a year and reviewed between 90 and 100 on average. So my plan is to read between 180 and 200 books next year to get off doomscrolling and kick-start my blogging.I said that before but I think it is a loss of routine and the noise of the world these days I love turn the clock back ten year or so but I can’t

I want to play with review styles over the year, try longer posts, shorter posts, different ways of putting over many voices, which I feel I have not so much held back but lost confidence in. Maybe I thought I met people. I am very overenthusiastic about books. In hindsight, this is my neurodivergent mind, which is also the reason I lack confidence in my voice at times, as I am from a generation where being neurodivergent wasn’t picked up on as much. So if you want the Discord, let me know. Another thing I will be doing is trying to tie the blog in with my Instagram and use both more in sync. I will be doing the Japanese literature challenge, then my Hungarian Lit month in February, which I am really looking forward to. I am also swapping the image of Winston slowly to me well a ai painted image of me on the blog and elsewhere and using the name Stu the reader just in case you have seen me and think it is someone else

I am being ambitious next year, but I just want a routine back to the blog when I post what I read and get them in sync, and also be a better member of the blogging community. A lot, but as I said, I have been using the last few weeks as planning for next year and setting things up with plans and also getting things like books for next month, sort of, the new planner, a new guide for how I want to review, sorting a Discord. The latest image on the avitars all building for 2026 and project 200. What are your plans for 2026 ?

The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

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The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

Uruguayan fiction

Original title –El astillero

Translator – Nick Caistor

Source – Personal copy

I haven’t focused this year much on Latin American fiction as I have in other years. But I had read this book a few months ago. I have wanted to read Onetti for a while, a high school dropout who worked for a newspaper after he published his first novel. He was a friend of the Argentine writer Robert Arlt, a writer I need to get to next year. Onetti was also imprisoned for six months, but a campaign was held by a number of the leading Latin American writers of the day, Marquez, Lhosa and Benedetti. After this, he relocated and spent the rest of his life in Spain.

Larsen again gauged the hostility and mockery on the immobile faces of the two waiting men. To challenge and repay hatred might give his life a meaning, a habit, some pleasure; almost anything would be better than this roof with its leaky sheet iron, these dusty, lopsided desks, the heaps of files and folders stacked against the walls, the thorny vines winding themselves round the iron bars of the gaping window, the exasperating, hysterical farce of work, enterprise, and prosperity that the furniture spoke of (though now it was vanquished by use and moths, rushing towards its destiny as firewood); the documents made filthy by rain, sun and footprints, the rolls of blueprints stacked in pyramids all torn and tattered on the walls.

Further on the despaier is there a little more

The book is set in the fictional town of Santa Maria, a setting where Onetti set much of his fiction. The book follows a man returning to the city after five years in Exile, brought back to try and get the failing shipyard back into action. The man, Larsen, heads into the yard full of ideas. Still, as he works through the yard and the blueprints of old ships and past glories, there is a deep sense of how this is a place that has gone beyond the point of no return. The decay of an industrial place can be as fast as the lack of work and bleakness is caught in the various other people we glimpse in the book.As we see how this all hits Larsen

So Larsen was already under the spell, his fate decided, when he went into Belgrano’s the next day to have lunch with Galvez and Kunz. It was never entirely clear whether he chose to head the monthly wages list with five or six thousand pesos. In fact, his choice of one or the other figure could only have mattered to Galvez, who typed out several copies on the 25th of each month, stopping every now and then to furiously rub his bald patch. Every 25th of the month, he once again discovered, was forced to recognise, the repeated, permanent absurdity he was in the grip of. This realisation made him break off, stand up, and pace about the huge deserted office, hands behind his back, his brown scarf wrapped round his neck, pausing at the drawing board where Kunz was always ready with his hollow, silent, exasperated laugh.

I loved the style of this book. I was reminded of the Hilbig books. Similar to his book, there is a sense of a place on the edge of decay, a man with a hopeless task, which brought back memories of the main character in Dino Buzzati’s Tartar Steppe. On a personal front, I was reminded of a friend of my father who was in charge of a shipyard in the Tyne, which, like here, was in steep decline. How hard ot can be to turn back an operation like a shipyard when the decay is already there. What remains all these weeks after is how futile Larsen’s job is and the despair that it can bring to one man. Have you read this book or any others by Onetti? If so, which one to try next?

For Fans of –

Wolfgang Hilbig, I have reviewed two books by him

Also, The Tartar Steppes by Dino Buzzati