Back Reviews Reel: March 2017

My reads of three years ago were diverse as ever and comprised three contemporary and two classical works of literature from the pens of female and male writers from Europe and the Americas. The first two were The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey and The Pope’s Daughter by en-Nobel-ed writer Dario Fo, namely biographical novels bringing to life Austrian fin-de-siècle painter Gustav Klimt and the much defamed beauty Lucrezia Borgia from Renaissance Italy respectively. The short-story collection The Country Road by forgotten writer Regina Ullmann took me on a trip across rural Switzerland of the 1920s, while The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary, an award-winning French classic from the 1950s set in Africa, advocated the protection of wild life and more generally of the environment. Finally, I got absorbed in a fictitious Brazilian painter’s arbitrary train of thoughts running through the pages of non-narrative Água Viva by Clarice Lispector.

Back Reviews Reel: February 2017

The literary form of the epistolary novel was in my review focus this month three years ago. In So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ a Senegalese woman writes to her friend abroad about the grief when her husband took a second wife after over twenty years of marriage and then died. The correspondence of a divorced couple trying to lead their rebel son back in the right way in 1970s Israel builds the story of Black Box by Amos Oz. The Letters to Felician by Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann reveal the heart of a young woman who after the horrors of World War II yields to her romantic phantasies about an imagined lover. And finally, the mail of an English businessman and the diary of his brother preparing to become a Hindu monk reveal their views of each other and lead near Culcutta of the 1960s to A Meeting by the River by Christopher Isherwood.

Back Reviews Reel: January 2017

Regarding reviewed books, the first month of 2017 was extremely varied as prove my archives. Between the covers of two contemporary and two classical novels, I found people trying to understand their surroundings. There was the Austrian woman in Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap who reconstructed her late parents’ lives before, during and after World War II to fathom their true characters. A young Spanish restorer of paintings discovered a century-old chess riddle in The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and found herself drawn into a murderous search of the truth. The Japanese boy in The River With No Bridge by Sumii Sué learnt in the years before World War I that his family origins alone sufficed to make others hate and discriminate him. And finally, a German architect looked back on his own, his family’s and his country’s past in Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Böll.

Back Reviews Reel: December 2016

Reviews of three classical and two contemporary novels closed my Double Alphabet of Writers in December 2016. First, I entered The Hive by en-Nobel-ed Camilo José Cela to witness people’s daily struggles in Madrid of 1943. From Spain I jumped to modern-day Japan where The Lake by Yoshimoto Banana disclosed the traumatic past of the narrator’s lover. Back to Europe, namely to France and England, I joined the amateur literary scholar from Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes in his study of Gustave Flaubert’s character. Then I moved on to late nineteenth-century Vienna and marvelled at the inventive account of The Secret of an Empress by Countess Zanardi Landi, a woman striving for recognition as concealed daughter of Emperor Francis-Joseph of Austria and his beautiful wife Elisabeth. And finally, I leaped to 1960s Japan to follow the psychological changes of the disfigured narrator of The Face of Another by Abe Kōbō.

Back Reviews Reel: November 2016

After a one-novel stay in the Far East a three-book tour of Europe was on my review schedule of this month three years ago. My point of departure was seventeenth-century Japan where I joined a Catholic missionary from Portugal whose faith was put to an atrocious test in the classical novel Silence by Endō Shūsaku. From there I travelled to Ancient Greece, or rather to Anatolia, to witness the cruel fate of Cassandra by contemporary German writer Christa Wolf who couldn’t save Troy with her prophecies. In modern-day Ireland I met The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle when she learnt that her violent husband had been killed by the police and she was finally free to start a new life with their children. At last, I plunged into a French classic only loosely set in place and time that revolves around The Fig Tree by Françoise Xénakis.

Back Reviews Reel: October 2016

Leafing back three years in my blogging calendar, there are two classical and two contemporary novels on my review list of October. I started with a less widely read work by the English recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Literature, namely The Dark Flower by John Galsworthy, showing a sculptor of animals passionately in love three times in three decades. Then I moved on to the red-light district of modern-day Antwerp in Belgium with four Nigerian prostitutes stuck On Black Sisters’ Street by Chika Unigwe with no way out. In Montauk by Max Frisch I went back to the 1970s to join an ageing Swiss writer on a week-end trip to Long Island in the USA with his young lover. And finally, I travelled Victorian England and Italy with a mother who sacrifices herself for her daughter, the child prodigy and one of the The Devourers by Annie Vivanti.

Back Reviews Reel: September 2016

With the reviews of five books, three classics and two contemporary works, I filled my blog this month three years ago. I started my tour in Barcelona of the 1930s with the coming-of-age of a recently married girl In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda. Then Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji took me to Hiroshima to see what the Atomic bomb did to the city and its people after 6 August 1945. Afterwards, I travelled to Europe to join an Austrian girl of the 1970s who can’t bear her comfortable life as stay-at-home wife in Why Is There Salt In the Sea? by Austrian writer Brigitte Schwaiger and to observe the changes that the Muslim Brotherhood introduces in France of the 2020s as Submission by Michel Houellebecq imagines them. And finally, I returned to Japan between 1928 and the 1950s with the committed primary teacher of Twenty-four Eyes by Tsuboi Sakae.

Back Reviews Reel: August 2016

Except for the dystopian fantasy from the Habsburg monarchy before the first Great War, all books that I presented at this time of summer three years ago dealt with World War II and with some of its effects on later generations respectively. I started the month’s tour on The Train by Vera Panova, a forgotten Stalinist classic about people working on a hospital train behind the front lines of Eastern Europe. After a nightmarish detour to The Other Side with Austrian writer and graphic artist Alfred Kubin that evoked a walled-up “Dream Kingdom” somewhere in the mountains of Central Asia in the 1960s, I returned to war-time Soviet Union and accompanied The Conductor by Sarah Quigley during the siege of Leningrad. And finally I joined The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson who is the son of Jewish immigrants in Manchester and relives his adolescence as a gifted table tennis player.

Back Reviews Reel: July 2016

On the five Fridays of July 2016, I presented three contemporary works, two of them genre fiction from Japan and a holocaust novel from Italy, along with two classics from 1920s France and Wilhelmian Germany respectively. I started with the Japanese noir The Thief by Nakamura Fuminori about a pickpocket who gets mixed up in a murder. Then I moved back in time to Paris in the early 1920s to follow the daily activities of Five Women on a Galley by Suzanne Normand and on to a small German Duchy on the verge of bankruptcy at the fin-de-siècle to accompany the Royal Highness by Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann. In the remote Japanese mountain village of The Restaurant of Love Regained by Ogawa Ito an exceptional young cook serves almost magical dishes. And If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi evokes the hardships of Jews fighting in the Polish resistance.

Back Reviews Reel: April 2016

Five reviews of contemporary and classical novels from Europe and the Americas were on my review schedule this month three years ago. The Italian novel The City and the House by Natalia Ginzburg from the 1980s follows the correspondence of a nostalgic Italian living in the USA and his kin back home in Rome. In Serpent’s Child by contemporary writer Peter Truschner a typical Austrian childhood and youth come back to life. On the other hand, both the classical English novel South Riding by Winifred Holtby and Satan in Goray by en-NOBEL-ed Isaac Bashevis Singer focus on the inhabitants of a fictional place living hard times in Yorkshire of the 1930s and in Poland of the mid-seventeenth century respectively. The Argentinean historical novel Tierra del Fuego by Sylvia Iparraguirre traces the life of an Indian taken from his native islands to live in England among “civilised” people.

Back Reviews Reel: March 2016

This month three years ago, it was the turn of the letters E, F, U and V in my double alphabet of writers. I started with the fictionalised memoir A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux that evokes the author’s father raising her in a small town in post-war Normandy, France. Then I moved on to Germany with the comical novel Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes about Adolf Hitler who one day miraculously regains consciousness in present-day Berlin instead of on the sofa in his Führerbunker beside his newly-wed wife Eva in 1945 as he last remembers. Another fictionalised childhood, this time from New Zealand, is at the centre of the 1957 autobiographical satire Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame. My final read of March 2016 was the classical collection Abel Sanchez and Other Stories by Miguel de Unamuno containing three tales revolving each around a protagonist caught in suffering.

Back Reviews Reel: January 2016

The reviews of three classics and two contemporary works rang in 2016. On New Year’s Day I presented the classical Italian satire The Man Who Searched for Love by Pitigrilli surrounding a judge who gives up his job and becomes a clown. After this I set out to fill A Double Alphabet of Writers for Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks. The 1988 Canadian novel Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood about a renowned painter whose visit to the city where she grew up evokes unpleasant childhood memories started the female alphabet followed by The Diary of a Lost Girl by Margarete Böhme, a forgotten German classic that tells the story of an unmarried teenager of the fin-de-siècle who gets pregnant. For the retrograde male alphabet I reviewed Softcore by Tirdad Zolghadr, a novel from 2007 set in Tehran, and the Japanese historical fiction classic The Heiké Story by Yoshikawa Eiji.

Back Reviews Reel: December 2015

My blogging year 2015 closed with reviews of four rather un-Christmassy books. In the classical spy novel The Angry Hills by Leon Uris set in World War II, a writer from San Francisco gets stuck in Greece with a sealed envelope to take to London, but German GESTAPO is after its contents. The theme of the contemporary novel Lake of Heaven by Ishimure Michiko are the long-term environmental and social effects of a hydroelectric power plant that relocated an entire Japanese village. Questions and material about a forgotten acquaintance force the writer protagonist of the contemporary novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood by Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, to face long-repressed memories of his childhood in France of the early 1950s. And the classic The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand centres on an American architect whose work is too innovative for his time.

Share-a-Tea 2018 Reading Challenge

The Summary

click on the image to go to the
challenge post on Becky's Book Reviews

1 January – 31 December 2018

My Teatime Reads of the Year

December has arrived and there isn’t much left of 2018. Since these happen to be the busiest days of the year, I reckon that I won’t be able to add any more books to this list for Becky’s Share-a-Tea 2018 Reading Challenge before we start the new cycle of months. It’s true that every day I’m having tea – kukicha from Japan, Longjing from China, occasionally infusions of rooibos, of fruit blends, or of medicinal herbs to treat some ailment –, but now I prefer to experience it with all my senses much in the zen way. A book would only be a distraction, however much I use to enjoy reading in general.

In the end, I compiled the following list of twelve books that I read for the greater part with a pot of hot tea or infusion on the table by my side. I discussed most of them here on Edith’s Miscellany during the course of the year, but I also put on my list a novel by my Italian writer friend Marina Di Domenico, an Austrian classic that I’d like to present one day, and the French classic by Voltaire that served David Allan Cates as model for X Out of Wonderland that I reviewed.

• Maria Àngels Anglada: The Auschwitz Violin (1994), original Catalan title: El violí d’Auschwitz
• Marina Di Domenico: La bibliotecaria (2018)
• Jeannie Ebner: Der Königstiger (1959)
• Jenny Erpenbeck: Go, Went, Gone (2015), original German title: Gehen, ging, gegangen
• Elisabeth von Heyking: The Letters Which Never Reached Him (1903), original German title: Briefe, die ihn nicht erreichten
• Rolf Lappert: The Islands of the Dying Light (2010), original German title: Auf den Inseln des letzten Lichts
• Robert Ludlum: The Road to Gandolfo (1975)
• François Mauriac: Vipers’ Tangle (1932), original French title: Le Nœud de vipères
• Nicholas Monsarrat: The Kappillan of Malta (1973)
• Mazo de la Roche: Jalna (1927)
• Rabindranath Tagore: The Home and the World (1916), original Bengali title: ঘরে বাইরে
• Voltaire: Candide ou l’optimisme (1759)

Back Reviews Reel: November 2015

Three years ago I reviewed four very different books. November being a month of commemoration, I started with the classical novella The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh that is love story as well as satire on the funeral business in California of the late 1940s. Moving from the radiant American west coast to a poor Afro-American community in Ohio some years earlier, The Bluest Eye by en-Nobel-ed Toni Morrison drew me into the dire life of a teenager from a dysfunctional family who despises herself for being ugly. The scene of The Guest Cat by Hiraide Takashi is an old Tōkyō neighbourhood about forty years later where a childless married couple grows attached to a furry visitor belonging to their neighbours. And finally, I followed the true story of the rise of a French silk merchant’s daughter to the Queen of Sweden fictionalised in Désirée by Austro-Danish author Annemarie Selinko.

Back Reviews Reel: July 2015

For My Reading Summer of Nordic White Nights I read in July 2015 five more books set in countries with Arctic territories. The contemporary German novel The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny allowed me to accompany a fictionalised version of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin, before meeting the impoverished working-class family from the French-Canadian classic The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy in Montréal in February 1940. Then I time-travelled to the year 1700 to join a poor farmer sentenced to be beheaded in the classical novel Iceland’s Bell by Halldór K. Laxness, the Nobel laureate in literature of 1955. At my next destination, modern-day Greenland, a series of suicides serves as backbone of the Anatomy of a Night by Austro-Korean writer Anna Kim first released in 2012. From there I half rounded the planet for A Wild Sheep Chase in Northern Japan in the late 1970s with Haruki Murakami.

Back Reviews Reel: June 2015

In the month of June of three years ago I started My Reading Summer of Nordic White Nights that led me around the Arctic Circle making a literary stop in each country with territory that far north. The contemporary novel Eight White Nights by André Aciman brought me to the USA, though to a Christmassy New York City instead of Alaska during a Midsummer’s night simply because the title caught my attention. In the following, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean to land in Scandinavia with two twentieth-century classics, first Norwegian Alberta and Jacob by Cora Sandel and then Finnish People in the Summer Night by Frans Eemil Sillanpää, laureate of the 1939 Nobel Prize in Literature. For my final stop I returned to the American continent, more precisely to Canada with the modern short-story collection Dear Life by Alice Munro who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.

Back Reviews Reel: May 2015

My reads of this month three years ago were an intriguing time travel into the past, notably the 1920s and 1930s. The Swiss classic Lyric Novella by Annemarie Schwarzenbach took me to Berlin in the 1930s with a young man in love with a cabaret singer who takes advantage of him. The suffocating atmosphere of Lisbon in 1938 when Salazar’s fascist terror regime was in power filled the contemporary Italian novel Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi. The passionate dancers of the contemporary Spanish novel Heart of Tango by Elia Barceló stumbled across a crime committed in Buenos Aires during the 1920s. The French satirical classic Penguin Island by Nobel laureate Anatole France unfolded the history of a fictitious country from legendary times through the future. And finally the classical Austrian novel in five scenes Yellow Street by Veza Canetti brought to life a whole neighbourhood in Vienna of the 1930s.

Back Reviews Reel: April 2015

The Colonial era and the tumultuous times around its end are the red thread connecting my reads of this month three years ago. I started with a wonderfully satirical novel from 1927 about a Protestant missionary on a remote Pacific island that Sylvia Townsend Warner titled Mr. Fortune’s Maggot. Then I made a detour to Lisbon to watch The Return of the Caravels from Portuguese territories in Asia and Africa after 1974 as António Lobo Antunes described it fourteen years later breaking the boundaries of time. Back to the British Empire, more precisely to India in the 1940s, I witnessed the Clear Light of Day and the country’s way to independence with two dissimilar sisters brought to life by Anita Desai in 1980. And with a 1947 classic from the pen of Naguib Mahfouz, the 1988 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, I visited the people living in Midaq Alley in Cairo in Egypt under British protectorate during World War II.

Back Reviews Reel: March 2015

A tiny island in the Golf of Naples, the buzzing Chinese capital Beijing, London and a legendary mountain watching over six Anatolian villages and the Syrian coast were the scenes of the books that I reviewed here three years ago. My tour started with the Italian classic Arturo’s Island by Elsa Morante containing the (fictitious) memoirs of a childhood and youth before World War II. Then I hurried after the young man from the contemporary Chinese novel Running Through Beijing by Xu Zechen who set his hopes on life in the metropolis. My trip to the British capital in the 1980s brought me into touch with The Good Terrorist by en-NOBEL-ed Doris Lessing who dreamed of changing the world. And finally, the Austrian classic The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel made me share the lives of Eastern Anatolian villagers who refused to surrender to the Ottoman army sent out to drive them away from home in 1915.