I'm a UK-based editor for a major publisher. I'm making it my off-duty duty to experience books, films, art, TV, music and food from every country in the world (where feasible). See drop down menus for my progress.
Yasmina Khadra is the nom de plume used by veteran Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, who now lives in France. He has written several novels that have been translated into English, including this one, The Attack, which has been shortlisted for a number of French literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Femina (judged by an exclusively female jury) and the Prix Renaudot, and which won the Prix des Libraires in 2006 (becoming the first work by an Algerian writer ever to do so). The Attack, published in French in 2005 as L’Attentat, has subsequently been adapted for film and the theatre. It first appeared in English translation in 2006.
The premise is immediately gripping. Dr Amin Jaafie, an Israeli Arab, is a well-respected surgeon whose life comes crashing down around him after a suicide bomb kills 19 people at an eatery in the middle of Tel Aviv. When his wife Sihem is found to be among the dead, with her body showing injuries characteristic of perpetrators of suicide attacks, he is forced to confront the possibility that Sihem has done the unthinkable.
I didn’t really engage with the book, despite its enormous potential. Amin does plenty of anguished soul-searching, and the novel valiantly attempts to unpick what it is that would compel someone to carry out a suicide attack. However, in spite of all this, Amin still seemed fairly two-dimensional, and other characters even more so. I don’t know if this was due to the translation, which in some places seemed quite clunky, and I was itching to edit paragraphs like this for ease of reading:
“We leave the Jewish areas with our eyes straight ahead, as though we were wearing blinders. Don’t think about looking left or right or stopping for any reason at all; the smallest inadvertence could make everything go wrong.”
For a more nuanced and completely unputdownable exploration of somewhat similar themes, I would instead wholeheartedly recommend Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which is a brilliant and powerful read.
Translated from the German by Mary Catherine Lawler
EUROPE
“Great god! this is an awful place!” – Robert Falcon Scott referring to the South Pole
I received this book for my birthday in early February, and suddenly realised that if I was going to include a post about it on the blog I would have to finish it before the end of February for it to have any immediate relevance. Although spring can’t be far away now, it doesn’t yet feel like it here in London, where for two consecutive weekends we’ve been battered by wintry storms.
Winterlust is a fascinating miscellany of wintry facts and historical anecdotes, which has been a joy to dip in and out of over the last week or so, although it probably isn’t a book to sit down with and read from cover to cover. The pleasure of reading the book is enhanced by the fact that it is richly illustrated throughout with paintings and other images depicting winter scenes from throughout history.
I’ve dog-eared loads of pages so I can find some of the best stories and interesting snippets again. (I’m not precious about keeping books pristine, even beautifully produced books like this one. There doesn’t seem much point in owning books if you’re not going to really read them!).
Different chapters describe various different aspects of winter, both modern and historical, environmental and urban, whether as a gruelling test of reserves or a time of cosy indulgence. However, the focus is always on the pleasures, beauty and eccentricities of winter.
I learnt how the monotonous, snowy terrain of the Arctic can bamboozle travellers by messing with their sense of perspective. The explorer Vilhjálmur Stefánsson “was once convinced that a grizzly was lying in wait for him; it turned out to be a marmot“. Meanwhile, in the very cold European winters of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, people sometimes “woke up to realize that the nightcap they were wearing was frozen to the headboard of their bed“.
The book ends with a reminder of a favourite quote of mine by Albert Camus:
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer“.
This had to be my first choice for a film from South Korea, given the huge amount of media attention that has followed its multi-Oscar-winning release. As everyone now knows, the 2020 Oscars have been historic in awarding the Best Picture plaudit to a foreign-language film for the first time. No matter that Bong Joon-ho (who also won Best Director, and who co-wrote the film, which also won Best Screenplay and Best International Feature Film) had previously dismissed the Oscars as “not an international film festival. They’re very local.”
The British BAFTAs had, just days before, awarded Parasite the prize for best film “not in the English language”, while the overall best film prize had gone to British war film 1917. Hot on the heels of BAFTA best actor winner Joaquin Phoenix’s speech calling out the whitewashing of the film industry in the West, I did wonder if the Oscars panel had a bit of an “oh shit” moment, and swiftly scribbled out their first choice for best picture, and wrote in “Parasite” with Sharpie à la US President Donald Trump and his (allegedly, possibly, maybe) doctored weather maps.
So, anyway, is Parasite any good? The short answer is yes. It’s extremely entertaining. As a social satire it is not aiming for subtle, and it is full of Quentin Tarantino-esque levels of violence and chutzpah, as well as dark humour. It has a few plot holes, but you’ll be so swept up in the action they don’t detract from the overall whole. I wouldn’t recommend it to my most squeamish friends though, as it definitely aims for the shock factor, which meant I ended up watching parts of it through my fingers.
The Kims are a family living in a crappy Seoul basement and only just about getting by, living hand to mouth and doing odd jobs. Their fortunes improve, however, when they meet the rich and credulous Parks, but their newfound good fortune is soon challenged by a disturbingly unexpected turn of events.
As an attack on middle class complacency and the depth of social inequalities the film works very well. The Kims’ ups and much more frequent downs notably prompt a searingly fatalistic soliloquy from Song Kang-ho (who plays the family patriarch), when they find themselves, quite literally, at the wrong end of a shitstorm.
The success of Parasite has resulted in widespread announcements of the imminent rise and rise of South Korean culture throughout the Anglophone world, and forecasts of a surge in the popularity of world cinema overall. We can only hope. As Bong Joon-ho himself is quoted as stating: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to many more amazing films”.
At the time of watching, this film was showing on Netflix UK (and, no doubt, elsewhere). Atlantics is a haunting evocation of lost love, exploitation and the experience of migration from the perspective of those left behind. It moves beyond the realism of those issues, however, to include a supernatural element. This otherworldly feel includes a love scene reminiscent of, but much less cringy than, that between Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in 1990 US film Ghost (though to be honest I remember crying buckets at that film, and then forcing a boyfriend to sit through it so I could cry at it again).
Atlantics is set in the Senegalese capital Dakar, and it opens with scenes of men employed to work on the construction of an futuristic monolith, who have yet to receive their wages. In despair, a young man called Souleiman and others make the decision to set sail for Spain, and the prospect of new opportunities.
Beautiful Ada (played with natural magnetism by Mame Bineta Sane – who had apparently never acted before) is in love with Souleiman, and heartbroken by his departure. However, despite pining for her lost paramour, she is pressurised to go ahead with her planned marriage to the rich, arrogant, sunglasses-toting Omar, who plies her with gifts, but who has nothing to offer beyond material comforts. Subsequent events defy rational explanation, and could be intensely silly, but the film’s beautiful and evocative soundtrack and dreamy film work carry the viewer along.
Repeated imagery of the rolling sea and waves, whether lapping or crashing, is gorgeously and widely deployed to suggest both the comforts and dangers of the sea, and the liminal space that it represents.
Released as Atlantique in 2019, the Senegalese filmAtlantics was shortlisted for the Oscars in the category of Best International Feature Film (although it didn’t make the final selection). Mati Diop, the film’s director, who also co-wrote the screenplay, was the first black woman to compete for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, where Atlantics received the Grand Prix.
Some reviews have criticised the slow pace of the film, but I felt this simply added to its atmospheric feel, and the realism underpinning this intensely enjoyable supernatural fable.
This newly published US page-turner, to which the film rights were snapped up a full year before publication, has attracted huge amounts of publicity and not a little controversy. The novel was at the centre of a bidding war by nine rival publishers, which resulted in a seven-figure book deal for author Jeanine Cummins.
The book tells the story of a middle-class Mexican wife, mother and bookstore-owner, Lydia, and her 8-year-old son Luca, who are forced to flee their home town of Acapulco and attempt to seek refuge in the USA after 16 members of their extended family are gunned down by narcos at her niece’s quinceañera. The murders are carried out by local drugs cartel Los Jardineros, following a newspaper article by Lydia’s husband Sebastian, an investigative journalist who has recently profiled the cartel’s boss, the charismatic Javier Crespo.
The book is a vivid and compelling read, and a timely examination of the often treacherous and desperate migrant experience, at the mercy of terrifying journeys and the honesty (or otherwise) of people traffickers, although I feel it is not necessarily the “literary triumph” the book’s publisher claims it to be.
Cummins spent seven years working on the novel, and carried out painstaking research into the plight of migrants. I’m not entirely clueless about the opposing perspectives around illicit migration, but here in the UK I was somehow totally unaware that, with a passenger rail system almost non-existent in Mexico, migrants often feel compelled to ride illegally and dangerously on the top of freight trains or el train de la muerte (the death train) as they make their way north.
The book has sparked debate, as some critics have accused Cummins of appropriating the migrant experience from a position of privilege and for her own gain. The US book tour was even cancelled amid threats to the safety of both booksellers and the author, after charges that the publishers were marketing “trauma porn”.
Cummins herself has anticipated criticism, and in an author’s note at the end of the book writes “I worried that as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants …. But then, I thought, If you’re person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?” I think this is legitimate; the onus is on the reader not to confine themselves to this particular US author, since there are plenty of Latin American perspectives to discover too.
As Kenan Malik has recently written for The Observer: “let us not create gated cultures in which only those of the right identity have permission to use their imaginations.” He also quotes the writer Zadie Smith: “what insults my soul is the idea … that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.”
Despite some implausibilities (in particular, it didn’t ring true to me that Luca was only eight years of age, he seemed much older), and some clumsy writing, American Dirt tells a gripping story. Notably, the book will be relatable for many in its depiction of the very normality of Lydia’s life before the tragedy that destroys her world. And its undeniable accessibility could mean that larger numbers of people find themselves sympathetic to, and better informed about, the human stories behind the impersonal immigration statistics that they hear in the news.
Some critics of American Dirt have said that they do not mind if white, US authors write about Mexican immigrants. What does bother them is when white, US authors write badly about Mexican immigrants. And despite some comparisons with John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, American Dirt isn’t a literary feat, with its at times clunky dialogue and an often ‘by numbers’ plot. What it is, though, is absorbing, informative, thrilling and genuinely moving.
Snow, Dog, Foot is published here in the UK by Peirene Press. I like the USP of Peirene, a “boutique” publisher of contemporary, high-quality European literature. They also offer a subscription service, which provides readers with three novellas a year, on a loose theme. Snow, Dog, Foot forms part of 2020’s “Closed Universe” series (prior to that the theme was “There Be Monsters”, and I have a copy of Virve Sammalkorpi’s Children of the Cave on my heaving shelf of books waiting to be read).
I was new to Claudio Morandini, although Snow, Dog, Foot (originally published in 2015 as Neve, cane, piede) is his sixth novel. The book was a bestseller in Italy, and a recipient of the Procida-Isola di Arturo-Elsa Morante Prize for fiction and poetry.
When I saw that the story involved the somewhat leftfield relationship between an old man and a dog, I was reminded of the premise of the blackly humorous book Timoleon Vieta Comes Homeby Dan Rhodes, which I read many years ago and loved. Nevertheless, I was also immediately primed for the potential for untenable levels of whimsy.
Thankfully, I was pleasantly surprised at how very enjoyable this beautifully translated novel is. The elderly and misanthropic Adelmo Farandola lives alone on an inhospitable Alpine mountainside, and each winter snows himself in with the barest of supplies, while year-round he avoids contact with others except when it is absolutely necessary (for example in order to restock his store of provisions).
The old man’s memory is poor, and his grip on reality fluctuates; maybe he is demented. Inadvertently, and not a little reluctantly, he acquires a stray dog:
“But he’s got attached to the mongrel, and when he goes away it feels as though something inside him has died a little, and time slows down until it seems to stop altogether, and the narrow valley expands until it becomes an immense desert, and he shrinks inside this desert until he’s no bigger than an ant or a worm. A mere dog can reduce him to this. God knows what effect a human being would have. Just imagine, purely hypothetically, what effect a woman would have.“
He begins to talk to the dog, who (more surprisingly) seems to talk back, saying very doggish things, interspersed with the occasional unexpected soliloquy. Meanwhile, a local ranger is displaying an unwelcome interest in Adelmo. The dog often works as a sort of alter ego, reflecting back at Adelmo his determination to survive the harsh winter, and the seasonal routines of the old man’s life acquire a kind of perverse logic as you are drawn into his world. However, as the welcome thaw approaches, Adelmo and the dog discover a human foot, creating a new, seemingly implacable challenge to their peaceful, if life-threateningly harsh, existence.
Snow, Dog, Foot is a book that is difficult to categorise. In one way it is a survival story, and in another a mystery. It is sometimes very dark, and often very witty, while Adelmo’s occasional flashes of youthful memory hint at a normal childhood, and the enduring effects of war-time trauma. The book contains wonderfully evocative descriptive passages about the snow and the natural environment, and the prose is lyrical and elemental and visceral. Overall, Snow, Dog, Foot is a charming, tragi-comic tale that I can recommend unreservedly.
This adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel, written and directed by Armando Iannucci, was just released in the UK and has its US release in May.
I haven’t read the novel, though I do know that David Copperfield is considered to be Dickens’ most autobiographical work (with his protagonist’s initials being his own, reversed).
I went to see the film with my husband and kids for a bit of a birthday treat, although my announcement of how I wanted to spend the evening didn’t go down well with everyone. My son, remembering having watched the trailer when we went to see Jojo Rabbit, muttered “hmm, is it that one with all the olden-timey people in it?” and then announced that he planned to hide on the night in question so he wouldn’t have to go. Our house is fairly small, without a ton of hiding places, so I told him all objections were futile; plus, you have to make concessions to other people’s wants on their birthday, so there.
He was mildly placated when he learnt it was a comedy, and it was proper laugh-out-loud funny in places and the antithesis of a typical Sunday night British costume drama. I like Hugh Laurie in anything, and the same goes for Tilda Swinton. The cast included many other favourites of the British small and big screen too, with a diverse cast that includes Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, Lion) as David Copperfield; Ben Whishaw as the obsequious and creepy Uriah Heep, Peter Capaldi as Mr Micawber; Paul Whitehouse; Anna Maxwell-Martin; Nikki Amuka-Bird; and Morfydd Clark in a dual role as both David Copperfield’s mother and his improbably ringletted, lapdog-toting love interest. (Mummy issues, anyone?)
Iannucci, known for productions such as The Death of Stalin and The Thick of It, has lost his usual cynicism for this film, making it a warm-hearted, family friendly romp. The storyline was often pleasantly surreal, but it all hung together, and the film overall is an enjoyable ode to writing and to the liberation offered by a creative outlet.
Ismail Kadare is Albania’s best known writer internationally, and the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize in 2005 for his body of work. In Albania he seems to be best known for his poetry, but elsewhere he is well-known for his fiction.
Although on this blog I usually discuss only one book by each chosen author, while I was reading Broken April (published in 1978 and translated in 1990) I unexpectedly discovered that Kadare’s most recent book The Doll (originally published in 2015) was being published imminently in English translation and was receiving some early publicity. I thought it would be interesting to read a copy of that book, too, to get a bit of perspective on Kadare before posting a review of both books.
Kadare left Albania in 1990, seeking political asylum in France, amid unsurpassable tensions with the communist regime under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, who was born in Kadare’s home city of Gjirokaster.
Kadare’s work is renowned for examining oppositions: between the traditional and the modern; between knowledge and ignorance; between civilisation and the untamed; and between freedom and power. These enduring themes are evident in both books.
Broken April is probably Kadare’s best-known work. It is a broodingly and beautifully mournful tale exploring and challenging the historic Albanian tradition of the blood feud or vendetta, regulated by the Kanun, or the code of customary law. The novel is entirely of itself, unlike any book I’ve read before, an atmospheric and exciting combination of myth and melodrama.
The novel comprises different sections, initially giving us the fatalistic perspective of Gjorg, a young man caught up in a self-perpetuating cycle of vengeance and counter-vengeance, which sees lives snuffed out because of a tradition that no one can quite unravel. His particular blood feud has been going for 70 years, being precipitated by a random and unfortunate series of events, and then perpetuated for generations.
“He could not put out of his mind that icy morning in January when his father had called him to the great room … the world shone like glass, and with a kind of crystal madness it seemed that it might begin to slip at any moment and shatter into thousands of fragments. It was that sort of morning when his father reminded him of his duty. Gjorg was sitting by the window, listening to his father who spoke to him of blood. The whole world was stained with it. It shone red upon the snow, pools of it spread and stiffened everywhere.”
Meanwhile, a honeymooning couple from Tirana, Bessian (who really loves a good long mansplain) and Diana, are passing through the mountains, observing the people outside their carriage with cosmopolitan amusement. In a way, they are the reader, regarding with a mixture of bemusement and fascination the customs of a seemingly less sophisticated people. But they are also awed by the romance and tragic heroism that such careless sacrifice of young lives represents.
Finally, we have a glimpse into the cynical bureaucracy behind the blood feuds, and the monies raised by such feuds, perpetuated by the mysterious Prince of Osh.
Having read Broken April, having declared Kadare a genius, and having ordered another of his earlier books (The Successor, if you’re interested), reading The Doll immediately afterwards felt like a real let-down, as in this sort-of memoir Kadare can come across as narcissistic (albeit well aware of it), boorish and misogynistic, despite some obscurely humorous moments.
The Doll opens with Kadare’s return to Albania in 1994, when his mother, the “doll” of the title, is mortally ill. Kadare tries to describe his relationship with this fragile and sensitive woman, who married his father at just 17 years of age, in a wedding arranged by the respective families. But he is hindered by “a fog that fell across either her description or my imagination“.
Kadare’s mother seemed to him “a draft mother or an outline sketch“, drifting round their huge, Gothic, labyrinthine, ancestral home (now an Ismail Kadare museum), which even included a dungeon.
From the beginning of her marriage, ‘The Doll’ came into immediate conflict with her mother-in-law, whose family examined her through their lorgnettes. As in Broken April, mysterious customs abound:
“The custom of elderly women not leaving the house was one of the city’s most puzzling traditions. Nobody knew the reason for it, or even its origin or the event that prompted it. A certain lady would announce one day that she would leave the house no more, and nobody would ask why or wherefore.”
Kadare felt that his mother “surrendered the freedom and authority of a mother – in short turned herself into a doll – to give me all possible liberty as a human being, in a world where freedom was so rare and hard to find, like crusts of rationed bread in the time of the Germans, which she broke off from her own small portion and secretly gave to me.”
This sounds to me like a sort of quiet heroism, but Kadare often seems almost disdainful of his mother’s limited understanding of the intellectual world he inhabited as he grew older, of her fears that she might lose her son as he became successful, and of evidence of her quiet self-regard.
The Doll is not the place to begin with Kadare. I’m glad I read the mesmerising Broken April first, and am very much looking forward to getting to grips with more of his early novels.
This was a very enjoyable, quick read. The novel (published in 1990) starts off as an engaging coming of age story about a girl from the West Indies arriving in North America as an au pair, although Lucy’s resentment and anger become increasingly evident as the book progresses.
The book reads in many way as an autobiographical account, and matches many details in the life of Jamaica Kincaid (who was born in Antigua and now lives in the USA), although it is described unequivocally on the cover as a novel.
The teenage protagonist Lucy is direct and sympathetic, and she experiences a total culture shock on arriving in North America, where she helps to care for the four little girls of the wealthy Mariah and Lewis. Lucy’s world is described in sensual but sparse prose, and her bewilderment at the delight Mariah displays in what Lucy sees as the most banal things is evident.
“So Mariah is made to feel alive by some flowers bending in the breeze. How does a person get to be that way?”
Lucy remembers being forced, at the age of 10, to learn a poem about daffodils at school – presumably a reference to Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils – and how she felt a fury that she could not place at being forced to learn stanza after stanza of a poem from another country about a flower that she’s never seen.
“…inside I was making a vow to erase from my mind, line by line, every word of that poem.”
Mariah shows a maternal concern for Lucy, encouraging her interests and buying her membership of a local museum. Lucy, although loved back home, comes from a harsher maternal environment. Her relationship with her mother is more honest in some ways than her relationship with Mariah, but much, nevertheless, has still remained unsaid. Lucy has vowed to cut herself off from her mother, and never to return home, although the nature of her mother’s perceived betrayal is not clear until well into the novel.
Meanwhile, Mariah and Lewis have a relationship that is externally perfect, although it becomes evident that there are seething undercurrents of discord and resentment, encapsulated early on by a particularly disturbing scene involving the death of a rabbit.
Lucy meets bland, entitled, rich people at parties hosted by Mariah and Lewis:
“They had names like Peters, Smith, Jones and Richards – names that were easy on the tongue, names that made the world spin. They had somehow all been to the islands – by that they meant the place where I was from – and had fun there. I decided not to like them just on that basis … somehow it made me ashamed to come from a place where the only thing to be said about it was ‘I had fun when I was there.'”
Describing this book as a post-colonial, feminist novel examining the immigrant experience in North America – a valid description! – might easily make the novel sound both heavy and off-putting. Instead, it is a beautifully constructed, intensely readable account of an girl on the brink of adulthood interrogating her assumptions about the world and, importantly, the assumptions of those around her.
I see this novel as an example of how my project to read work from all over the world is giving me the opportunity to enjoy the pick of the crop of authors world-wide. I would have been hugely unlikely to have come across this book without this project, and even less likely to have picked it up and read it if I did, but having done so I would be more than happy to read more of Jamaica Kincaid’s work.
Dora Maar (born Henrietta Markovitch) is perhaps best known as “Picasso’s girlfriend”. However, what has been too often overlooked is that she also created a large and impressive body of work on her own terms.
From a bourgeois background, Maar attended progressive Parisian art schools and, after moving away from painting, established her first photographic studio in 1932. As well as achieving commercial success in her fashion photography and advertising career, she went on to document social history from a leftist perspective and then made a significant contribution to the surrealist movement, before returning to painting, her first love, in the late 1930s.
You don’t see many men in a knitted one-piece swimsuit these days, do you?
Untitled fashion photograph, 1936
A re-imagining of the classical nude, featuring popular life model Assia Granatouroff (1911-82).
Maar took to the streets to document the economic depression sweeping across Europe in the 1930s. In 1933-34 she travelled to Spain and to the UK, and she also recorded life on the streets of Paris and participated in the anti-fascist Contre-Attaque (Counter-attack) movement.
Untitled (Disabled war veteran begging beside miniature boat), London, 1934
Her political beliefs brought her into close proximity with the burgeoning surrealist movement, which began to influence her work. She produced cropped and disorientating images, in a dramatic contrast to her earlier, realist work, to “evoke the immediacy of the chance encounter so prized by the surrealists” (Tate exhibition booklet). The imagery that particularly appealed to her – of eroticism, the sea, dreams, eyes – was a natural fit with the surrealist movement, and Maar was among a small number of photographers to be included in the major surrealist exhibitions of the 1930s.
Untitled (Villa for sale), 1936
“It’s a real animal but I don’t want to say which one” (Maar, 1994)
(but now thought to be an armadillo foetus)
Portrait of Ubu, 1936
Maar met Picasso when her career was at its peak, during the winter of 1935-6, and she was something of a muse for him, inspiring a period of new creative intensity, after months of inactivity. Picasso also encouraged Maar to take up painting once again. Their relationship endured until 1945, after which she fell into a period of severe depression. However, since, Picasso first met Maar in a Parisian cafe as she “repeatedly stabbed a knife between her black-gloved fingers, occasionally drawing blood“, her mood disorder was unlikely to be solely attributable to her break-up.
Although Maar remained creative throughout her life, with traditional landscape painting as well as a move towards abstraction, for me it is her photographs that hold the most fascination. The quality of the work that came after her relationship with Picasso does not even begin to reach her earlier heights, whether due to her breakdown, or whether she simply preferred to focus (contentedly?) on other areas of creative output.
It is to be hoped that this fascinating exhibition may serve to correct to some degree the imbalance in the artistic reputations of Maar and Picasso.
Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More 