book review – findingtimetowrite

More Student Revolutions: Shin Kyung-Sook

Shin Kyung-Sook: I’ll Be Right There, transl. Sora Kim-Russell, Other Press, 2013

This book came out before the big boom in K-Lit, which began in the second half of the 2010s, but the author was one of the best-known Korean authors of that time, since her book Please Look After Mum won the Man Asian Literary Prize (which no longer exists). I came across it by pure chance and internet, because, after I posted how Han Kang’s Human Acts utterly destroyed my composure, Bella Azam on Twitter happened to mention that this might be a good follow-up so that I can continue crying over revolutionary young people. And what better time to do so than in the run-up to celebrating 35 years since the 1989 revolution in Romania, just after our national holiday on the 1st of December, and in the midst of chaotic presidential and parliamentary elections (to make us all wonder/remember what we fought for back then)?

Unlike Human Acts, this book contains no graphic descriptions of brutal repression or torture. In fact, in what might be seen as an odd authorly decision, most of the big events take place off-stage, and are then narrated or mused over by the main protagonists in retrospect. Romance and friendship take centre stage, and it’s much more of a coming of age story rather than purely political. The sentiment I felt upon reading this book was less heartbreak, more a gentle melancholia, a sadness at the loss of lives and end of friendships and love affairs.

Jung Yoon is the main protagonist, who receives a phone call out of the blue from her college sweetheart, with whom she’d broken up eight years ago. We are instantly struck by the rather incongruous exchange between them: ‘As soon as he said “Hello?’, I asked “Where are you?”, but as the story unfolds, we discover that there is a real poignant meaning to this awkward exchange of greetings. They are brought together by the death of their most loved college professors and this brings forth a bout of reminiscing, as well as extracts from the Brown Notebook, a kind of journal compiled by Yi Myungsuh (the ex-boyfriend), and letters between friends, such as Dahn (Yoon’s childhood friend) and Miru (Myungsuh’s childhood friend).

This is how the author describes the book in the afterword: ‘ a story of young people living in tragic times. It is also the story of people who find themselves separated, despite their love for each other, because they carry wounds that are too deep to overcome, and who struggle to come back together’. Set against a backdrop of regular marches and protests, we see examples of police kettling protestors and throwing their possessions in back alleys, young people suddenly going missing, setting fire to themselves or suffering mysterious ‘accidental’ deaths during military service and the impact that has on their families. Yoon becomes fascinated by the mysterious and attractive couple-who-are-not-a-couple Myungsuh and Miru, who used to live together in the same house, together with Miru’s sister, who is now dead. Miru is mourning the loss of her sister and desperately seeking her sister’s boyfriend. Yoon herself has become closed in and terrified of attending college after the death of her mother. Myungsuh gets caught up in student demonstrations, and finds Yoon at one of these protests, although she happened to be there purely by accident, while taking her endless long walks across the city. Their shared admiration for their professor turns into a deeper sentiment, part confusion, part inspiration, when the professor is forced to stop lecturing for ideological reasons.

Where the book succeeds best is in exploring the solidarity and affection that can arise when fighting against a common enemy, even if that doesn’t help us to overcome individual traumas entirely. Because it is set eight years after the events unfolded, there is also quite a lot in the book about the slippery nature of memory.

The future rushes in and all we can do is take our memories and move forward with them. Memory keeps only what it wants. Images from memories are sprinkled throughout our lives, but that does not mean we must believe that our own or other people’s memories are of things that really happened. When someone stubbornly insists that they saw something with their own eyes, I take it as a statement mixed with wishful thinking. As what they want to believe.

Interesting how the Korean cover seems to show an idyllic rural landscape rather than anything too overtly urban and protest-heavy.

I was also struck by those passages where the young protestors start wondering if all their suffering and demonstrations are in vain. Losing their idealism as they get older but also as the battles they are fighting are not easily or rapidly won. How to keep the courage and optimism flowing when it becomes a war of nerves and attrition?

‘They can’t stand it… and that’s why they form barricades, throw paving bricks, and run away only to get caught and arrested. What they can’t stand is that nothing ever gets better. Nothing has changed since last year. It’s as if time has stopped… It only feels like time is the passing, and only the character change. We are torn apart and chased around. We fight back and get chased some more… We all stare at the walls and complain of loneliness. All we have to do is turn around, but instead we keep our faces to the walls… The streets are quiet now. All of that excitement, like we were going to make something happen, has vanished. Our push for change has come to a standstill. Even our solidarity is now just another phenomenon. The people I once marched with have all scattered and dispersed without having changed anything.

The author is well-versed in Western literature and she quotes poets such as Emily Dickinson (there is even a deaf cat named after her), Rilke, Francis Jammes, Jules Supervielle, as well as referencing Western art and music. This makes the experience feel more universal – these could be students anywhere in the world protesting against tyranny – although I also loved the specificity of certain locations in the book – the Namsan Tower or the second floor of the Gyeonghoeru Pavilion.

This book very successfully blends coming-of-age personal narrative with nostalgia and politics. It’s infused with a more melodramatic feel than Human Acts, and may not always be entirely convincing in romantic conversations, but nevertheless, I connected quite a bit with the mood it conveyed.

#GermanLitMonth: Marlen Haushofer forever!

Yes, I know I’ve written about Marlen Haushofer before and I know that not much of her work is available in English, but I’ll never stop writing about her since I first discovered her via her best-known (and translated) novel The Wall. She has become not just one of my favourite writers, but also the one I’d most like to translate from the German-speaking world, and I’m pleased to say that the work I wanted to translate most, the novella We Kill Stella, will be published in the translation of the wonderful Shaun Whiteside in 2025 by New Directions. I also really rate (and have reviewed) two other short novels Die Mansarde and Die Tapetentür, but even her children’s literature and her short stories are exceptional. I’ve translated two of her short stories and need to be more proactive about sending them to literary magazines after a couple of rejections.

But today I’d like to talk about her very first novel, which is in many respects autobiographical. In fact, the author of the Haushofer biography relied quite a bit on passages from this book to describe her childhood, and is an excellent companion piece to Himmel, der nirgendwo endet.

Marlen Haushofer: Eine Handvoll Leben (A Handful/Fistful of Life), 1955

This book has the same premise as Dürrenmatt’s play The Visit, i.e. a mysterious, wealthy stranger shows up in town and invests in failing businesses for somewhat opaque reasons. It can’t have been influenced by the play, however, because the premiere took place in 1956. The play is also much more sinister, and focuses on revenge.

In the case of Haushofer’s novel, it’s not so much revenge as reminiscing. Mrs Betty Russel comes from abroad and shows interest in purchasing the family home of small-town entrepreneur Anton Pfluger, who died in a car crash. She is invited to stay overnight by Pfluger’s family and she starts rummaging through drawers and finds postcards and pictures neatly arranged in chronological order. This is when we discover that Betty is actually Elisabeth, who grew up in the area and was in fact Anton’s first wife and the mother of his son, now grown up.

We see Elisabeth as a child (known then as Lieserl) roaming around the countryside, then see her struggling to adapt to convent school, follow her first passionate yet conflicted love for a girl, then her marriage, and then a love affair which shakes her to the core, wakes her up from her unquestioning bourgeois existence and makes her run away. The chronology provides some structure for what is in essence a kaleidoscope of experiences, sensations and thoughts, some fleeting, some deeper. The author describes her own process in this passage:

Everything she’d gathered throughout her life was meaningless, a mosaic of tiny life-particles, shimmering in all colours, with great swathes of grey and black, but a meaningless mosaic nevertheless. Maybe an eye from very far away might have been able to discern some kind of pattern or message from this mountain of fragments, but that was no comfort, since she could not figure out the pattern herself, and she never would.

They say some writers already show signs of all of their future topics in their very first novel, and that is certainly true of Marlen Haushofer: we have here the close observation and unsentimental yet loving descriptions of nature that we see later in The Wall, the sophisticated understanding of the complexities of love, desire and marital life, the feeling of suffocation when living up to societal expectations, and ways in which to run away or retreat from those very expectations and demands.

The following passage (in my rough and ready translation) describes, I think, many of her female characters, living on the fence, half-frozen, yearning for something yet not daring to act. Just before the quote, there is an instance when her lover, Lenart, lays his arm around her in broad daylight – a gesture that she really doesn’t expect, as they never had a close relationship other than in bed.

The feeling of triumph quickened her breath momentarily, but the feeling ebbed quickly: the thought that Lenart might start loving her was claustrophobic and frightening. All of a sudden, she realised that she had never really wanted to be loved. She herself could only love what was difficult and unattainable, the thing that always withdrew from her. There was nothing more disappointing than to reach a goal, to fulfil a longing, and then be left with nothing to yearn for.

While this is not as accomplished as her later work, it is still an extraordinary novel in its candid depiction of a woman’s sensuality and defying of all social conventions. Marlen Haushofer always rejected being labelled a ‘feminist’, but I can imagine few other people writing like that about women’s innermost thoughts and desires in the early 1950s, even Shirley Jackson and Doris Lessing got there a little bit later than that.

#GermanLitMonth: Ingrid Noll

Ingrid Noll: Der Hahn ist tot (The Cock Is Dead), 1991

Yes, I’ll stick to the double-entendre of my translation of the title, because this is very much about the relationship between men and women, about men’s libido and one woman’s obsession with a man. I was also surprised to see that the book came out more than thirty years ago, because its style, the black humour and preposterous murderous storyline remind me very much of contemporary thrillers such as My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwhaite, How to Kill Your Family by Bella Mackie or the author who started this trend (in my mind) Helen Fitzgerald and her Bloody Women. The book was apparently translated and published by HarperCollins in 1997 as Hell Hath No Fury, although I was unable to find the name of the translator.

Rosemarie (Rosi) Hirte is a straitlaced insurance broker, considered an old-fashioned old maid by her colleagues. But then she falls for a handsome lecturer whom she calls by his second name Witold (and she prefers to be called by her second name Thyra by him as well) – and is prepared to grab this last chance at happiness and make him her own. This might include a couple of murders, some accidental, some more deliberate. Rosi changes from victim to active participant, from downtrodden Ms. Average and Jimmy-No-Mates to a vengeful go-getter. The plot just gets weirder and weirder, as the main protagonist gets more and more carried away with her mission and, as the readers suspect, more delusional.

Written in the first person, from the main character’s POV, I found that for the most part the author had an assured tone which just about steered clear of bathos. Rosi/Thyra inspires our pity at times (even if we might think that her obsession with having a man in her life is not all that healthy):

‘Look here,’ I plead with her in my mind, ‘I’ve never fallen so hard for anyone as I have for Engstern. You’ve already had everything in life: friends in your youth, marriage at a suitable age, children. Now you have an interesting job, a boyfriend and a huge circle of friends. I never had nor have now any of that. Please let me have him, Beate! I’ve never begged you for anything, I never beg anyone for anything. It’s hard for me to admit, but have a little mercy for an old maid, burning with love!’

At other times, there are moments of clarity, when she realises her would-be lover’s flaws and we hope that she will come to her senses:

Before he showed up, before I met up with him, I was always on high alert. I could picture our meetings clearly: full of soulmate stuff, love and erotic tension. But afterwards, there was nothing but disappointment and doubt. Was he really all that special? Did I really want him that fiercely as a lover?

There are similarities with the previous German book I read about a (somewhat younger) spinster, Mon Cheri und unsere demolierten Seelen: they both feel like they were written to trigger heated discussions at women’s book clubs, filled with clueless men, wisecracks about relationships and the failure to understand each other. By introducing a murder theme rather than a pregnancy one, this book more neatly avoids sentimentality, and I also felt that there was a more earnest heartbeat beneath the flippant surface, for example, when Rosi admits to herself why she is doing all the problematic things she’s doing:

Having power over other people is almost better than love, although in fact it’s the exact opposite. When you love, you are powerless, impotent, dependent. And yet I wouldn’t be without my lovesickness, it had entered my life too completely, given me youth, energy and drive, a new feeling in my body, a new level of self-esteem. I wanted to continue to fight for it, to experience that happy, carefree day when we went hiking in the Oden Forest at least once more.

One of the other characters in the book also makes a very salient point when she scolds her dog for chasing after a bird that is far too big for it, comparing it with all of us chasing after a goal, without realising that it might be the wrong size or shape for us, that we wouldn’t know what to do with it even if we did achieve it. The book makes us wonder what dark desires lurk within each one of us, what hateful things we might be prepared to do to achieve our goals, if we thought we could get away with it.

These hints at a more serious story beneath all the frivolity made the book more interesting, and it certainly was a quick, entertaining read and didn’t outstay its welcome – unlike the longer and more repetitive Mon Cheri.

NB: The smirk on the face of Eve on the front cover (as painted by Hans Baldung Grien in 1525) is very appropriate for the tone of the book and the sense I got of the main protagonist.

NNB: All the translations from German are my own.

My Top 10 Reading Habit Shifts

Inspired by book bloggers Lydia and Emma @WordsandPeace, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on how my reading habits may have changed as a result of regular reviewing and blogging.

Genre:

Before I started blogging back in 2012, I was mostly reading crime fiction and had been for several years. But before that, in my teens and twenties, in fact all the way before I had children, I read all kinds of literature from all over the world, and a lot of non-fiction, such as anthropology, biography, philosophy and so on. Once I started reviewing for Crime Fiction Lover, I ended up reading even more crime fiction, but that also meant that I reached saturation point and needed to find other reading outlets before every crime novel started sounding the same (I didn’t always get a choice of what to review, and in 2013-2016 it was the height of psychological thriller era, and they do start to all blur into one when you read many in a row). So I’m back to reading a huge variety of genres and a lot of books in translation. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction anymore, though, and am not particularly keen on YA or romance.

Format:

I prefer reading paperbacks, because hardbacks are heavy and occupy too much space on the shelves, and I can’t seem to remember much or find the bookmarks I made when reading on Kindle. But I do admit having a Kindle is very handy when going on holiday or commuting. As long as it doesn’t suddenly give up the ghost, as my old Kindle did at the beginning of a long train journey!!!

And I have to admit that some of the cheaper paperbacks that I’ve had on my shelves for decades (or even inherited from my parents) are either getting brown spots or falling apart at the seams.

Review copies:

When I first started out blogging, I used to be so proud and so keen to receive review copies, but then the books started crowding me out of the house and I realised I could not give the ones I didn’t want to reread even to charity shops. I’m no longer on most publicists’ mailing lists, but it’s only when I see some rare (and very expensive) research volume on Japanese literature (for example) that I get envious of other reviewers who receive a copy of it.

Reading challenges:

I never did any reading challenges before I discovered the world of book bloggers.

I particularly enjoy the geographical reading challenges: January in Japan, Spanish and Portuguese Literature Month in July, Women in Translation in August, German Lit Month in November. Sometimes I even create my own geographical challenges: French February, Northern Climes in March, Russians in December but there is no rhyme nor reason to it and it switches from year to year. I also like the #YearsBookClub run by Simon and Kaggsy twice a year, the latest of which was 1970 this October. I’ve occasionally tried to do the #20BooksofSummer challenge, and I usually only succeed if I cheat quite a bit.

Languages:

I read mostly in English (including translated into English), but also a considerable amount in Romanian and German (for pleasure and also looking for the next thing I might want to translate), a fair amount in French. That has always been the case, as I grew up with all of these languages. I am now attempting a few short pieces in Italian. I can no longer read in Japanese for pleasure, as I could back in my student days, but I might attempt an occasional bilingual version.

Tracking

I know Goodreads is not the best platform in the world, but it helps me keep track of the books I read, so it’s useful for my monthly and annual summaries. I’m too lazy to use any additional spreadsheets nowadays, but as a teenager I’d make neat notes about my reading at the back of my diaries.

Buying:

Well, we all know that I’m keeping the British publishing industry afloat single-handedly – that’s dedication for you. I buy far too many books, even when it’s imperative that I get rid of many, many books so that I can downsize and transport my library safely across to a different country. I’m a hopeless case NOW, but believe it or not, I used to be quite restrained earlier on (until about 20 years ago) and rely largely on libraries.

Book Reviews: Turning Back the Clock

It’s the month of switching back to winter time, so it’s entirely appropriate that I should be reviewing several books that are all about the passing of time and trying to turn back the clock – for very different reasons.

Kang Hwagil: Another Person, transl. Clare Richards, Pushkin Press, 2023

I read this back in September, but it seems more appropriate than ever to review it now, since there has been quite a bit of uproar in South Korea about Han Kang winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. While most people in Korea were delighted and her books sold out in bookshops and had to be reprinted, there were also some virulent criticisms in the men’s forums because she is considered a feminist author.

Kang Hwagil belongs to a generation of even younger feminist authors from South Korea and her book does not shy away from a highly emotive and charged subject matter, namely understanding coercive control and domestic violence in professional and personal relationships, instead of accepting them as the status quo.

Here’s a short attempt at summarising the story. Kim Jina is being publicly condemned for reporting her colleague and superior at work for assault. The problem is that she had been dating her colleague, so she is not believed and in any case condemned for attempting to ruin a good man’s career.

If anyone were to meet me as I am now, they’d likely think me weak – but I haven’t always been this way. I became weak.

I thought if the police investigated him, he’d be put under house arrest, surveillance, something – but none of that happened. I knew nothing about the legal system. I’d likewise thought there’d be protective measures put in place for the victim. I could of course apply for a restraining order. But that took time. I needed evidence as to why he shouldn’t be allowed contact with me, and then that evidence needed to be approved. I didn’t know the laws. I didn’t know the trial would take so long. Believing he would at some point be punished, I waited.

But the trial seems to be dragging on and on, the perpetrator gets away with just a fine and a friend and colleague from work jumps to defend him (so much for female solidarity), so in despair she posts details on a public forum, which provokes even more of a scandal and general disapproval. And then one day she sees a strange post on Twitter, saying she’s a liar and giving her the nickname of ‘vacuum cleaner bitch’. This takes her right back to her student days in her home town, because it used to be the very rude nickname of a classmate of hers, Ha Yuri, who was considered an easy target by all the boys.

She’s so easy. Say you like her and she’ll do whatever you want. The girl’s desperate. Won’t bother to find out what kind of guy you are. She’ll just fall straight in love with you. Like a vacuum cleaner -sucks anything.

Jina has always felt guilty that Yuri died in a traffic accident at young age and that she let Yuri down, not being as good a friend to her as she might have been, because she found her a bit too clingy. She returns to her hometown and to Anjin University, convinced she’ll find who is taunting her with that nickname. Instead, she begins to see the past in a different light, and uncovers memories of a toxic culture which destroyed both Yuri and her own perception of relationships.

Although these stories of abuse will sound almost unbearably familiar, the author does an excellent job at showing the gradual realisation of women that what they have experienced is not normal and acceptable, but also how many of them struggle to accept unpleasant truths about the men they thought they knew.

This is the first full-length translation of a Korean novel by Clare Richards, and she said she chose this book because it had a profound effect on her. Some might say that here in the West we are slightly more advanced in terms of women’s rights, but what can we say when women’s shelters in the UK advise women to not bother to report rapes because it will take many years to go to trial and the whole process will be extremely unpleasant and the outcome very uncertain. So this is a book that will certainly make you fume, cringe, sigh, cry and perhaps become even more militant.

Tudor Ganea: Vreau să aud numai de bine (I Only Want to Hear Good News), Polirom, 2024

Toma, the narrator in Tudor Ganea’s latest novel, has turned forty, an architect who seems to be resigning from every job after a year or so, whose relationship with his wife is not entirely happy, and is undergoing treatment for a nasty tumour – definitely ripe for a midlife crisis. Just then he and his three best friends from high school, whom he left behind in the port town of Constanța, receive a strange message from the mother of their fourth best friend, Mihail, who died in the final year of high school. She is inviting them back for a 22 year memorial of Mihail’s passing. They all show up, but somebody seems to be making fun of them, because there is no one of that name at the address they’ve been given. Instead, they spend the night drinking, misbehaving and reminiscing, and Toma finally faces up to the reasons for the guilt he feels towards Mihail. Although this is not a feminist novel (unlike the other two I’m reviewing today), it would be fair to say that the male characters get a bit of a wake-up call and that the most mature and uncompromising one in their group of friends is the only woman, nicknamed Stup.

It is yet again a well-trodden path, but the author injects it with humour and a very evocative atmosphere of both contemporary Romania and the early 2000s, as well as a loving yet unsentimental description of the rapid changes and general messiness of Constanța. This is the most realistic novel of Ganea’s that I’ve read, his earlier ones are more on the surrealist side of the spectrum, and I missed his more poetic style. I also read this with a view to potentially translating it, but I think the story is too banal and the details which make it rise above the norm are too specific, so will not have an appeal beyond a Romanian readership. But here is a passage which I found to be very revealing and relatable (in my translation):

We were the frail children of the transition and living our adolescence in a schizophrenic manner, stuck somewhere between the rigidity of old-fashioned parenting – which still had considerable authority over us – and the flexibility offered by the winds of change of the 1990s, with its ravishing kaleidoscope of stimulations ready to spring upon us at every step and carry us away from the path our mother and father had envisioned for us. We were the sons and daughters of parents who had been intimidated for decades by a system with severe rules, who’d somehow managed to forge their own path, and now they came out of their shells and found themselves let loose on a playing field where the only rule was that there were no rules, and all the oxygen in the air had been replaced with the strong whiff of emancipation.

Empar Moliner: Beloved, transl. Laura McGloughlin, 3Times Rebel Press, 2024

The main protagonist in this novel, Remei, is a renowned illustrator, not in her 30s or even her 40s, but in her 50s, going through the menopause, realising that her younger husband is falling for a young colleague (a fellow violonist in an orchestra) almost before he realises it himself. It makes her start to question her appearance, her life, her relationship with men, just as she thought she had it all.

This is a disarmingly frank, confident woman who has always been sure of her own merits as well as honest about her shortcomings – and it is this irresistable, no-prisoners-taken voice that guides us through this delectable, often very funny novel. Most of the story is really just Remei musing to herself about ageing and about the relationship between men and women, mothers and children, and women and women, but towards the end she decides to take action and it’s shocking (fear not, there is no graphic violence, but I can’t say more about it).

The novel is translated from Catalan and I notice once more the difference in approach to sexuality compared to English language novels, where it is either handled squeamishly or in a tawdry manner. No, Remei is perfectly calm and comfortable with sharing details about her body and her love life.

Let’s be clear. Until this moment I’ve been considered a well-hydrated, charming mature woman (yes, yes, I don’t look my age, none of us do, everyone says so, we ‘wear our years well’.) I run sixty kilometres a week, go to Body Pump on Mondays and LBT and take collagen pills, despite the studies suggesting their questionable effectiveness. I must point out that I find modesty overrated: I’m still a good deal. What’s more, until now I’ve performed pre-feminist sexual positions with total dedication and delight.

Does Remei want to turn back time? Yes and no. It is more the artistic, exciting side of herself that she misses, that she has now been pushed into domesticity and has therefore become boring (to her husband and even to herself).

I look at her. She’s a new, young version (more predictable, with easier and more intuitive functions) of what I used to be… of the artistic part he liked about me… A new phone for the same SIM, where everything is better optimised… I’m beginning to flicker, I’m about to go out. I’ll shift to domesticity (two artists cannot live together with children, without one ceasing to be so). Cristina will be the artistic life. It’s only a matter of time before they go to bed together…

Remei also has a group of women – and a man – who are running buddies, and through them we see other examples of relationships and are privy to witty social commentary, which may not be directly related to the story, but entertaining nevertheless, such as when she talks about a neighbour who is an author of spy thrillers, always featuring strong women.

If these women he describes were male protagonists rather than female, they’d be something akin to Rambo. But since they’re women, they can raise children, climb, be sensitive, love their excess weight, hack computers (they’re always very talented in detecting security flaws in cyber companies) and have forgettable sexual encounters that never make them suffer or feel insecure. They always have witty comebacks at the ready… There’s no longer any possibility of reading about women who aren’t ‘strong’. But what if you aren’t strong? And no matter how much you search every fictional tale, every single one, you can’t find any sort of redemption? What should what you’d like to read be called? New Contemporary Menopausal Literature, I suppose.

3TimesRebel is a small press that publishes women authors who write in minority languages, and their name comes from this quote by Catalan poet Maria Mercè Marçal: ‘I am grateful to fate for three gifts: to have been born a woman, from the working class and an oppressed nation. And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel.’ On the strength of this book, I’ll certainly be seeking out more of their publications.

Quick Reviews for September

This month I’ve been reading some of the books acquired in Romania as one might expect, but also remained quite firmly ensconced within East Asia. This has taken the form of books written by authors from that region (Toward Eternity by Anton Hur from Korea), or books set in that region (Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley and Goodnight Tokyo by Yoshida Atsuhiro) or, my favourite category, subversive books by Japanese women authors (I’ll write more about them shortly) and am currently about to start reading a (potentially subversive?) book by a feminist Korean woman author entitled Another Person.

My appetite for reviewing, however, has been greatly reduced, not just because of my travels or the many tasks I’ve had to do since getting back from my brief holidays. So I thought I’d do some mini-reviews in chronological order of reading, while these books are still relatively fresh in my mind.

Kashimada Maki: Love at Six Thousand Degrees, transl. Haydn Trowell, Europa Editions, 2023

This is the kind of book that I can’t quite make out upon the first reading, except that it leaves me puzzled and in a swirl of complex emotions (much like the main protagonist) and makes me want to reread it. Set mostly in Nagasaki, and, as the author explains, inspired by the film Hiroshima Mon Amour, it is at the most superficial level about a love (or should that be lust?) affair between a housewife who has run away from her family and a young Russo-Japanese man (the Russian connection feels random but becomes more meaningful later on). On a deeper level, it is about trauma and accepting one’s wounds and bad memories, rather than trying to push them away. I think readers will either love it or hate it, there seems no middle ground in the opinions on Goodreads. I am more in the ‘love it’ camp, and in fact found it more intriguing than previous works by Kashimada. Despite its brevity, this is a very rich, layered book, although I found the translation at times a little confusing – perhaps deliberately so.

Nick Bradley: Four Seasons in Japan, Doubleday, 2023

This book (or at least the publishers and cover designers) have clearly jumped on the bandwagon of ‘cat on the cover of a title proclaiming quite loudly to be about Japan’, as this is what appears to sell well at the moment. I’ve always been sceptical of books written by foreigners set in Japan, because they often are filled with all conceivable clichés. A bit like that relentless trickle of books about living in the south of France… This is a novel rather than a memoir, however. In fact, it’s a novel within a novel. Flo is an expat translator living in Tokyo, who’s reached a low point in her life, but finds herself charmed and then obsessed with a book she finds on the underground. We get extracts from the book for each season, and they’re about a grandmother and grandson learning to live together (and accept each other) in a small town close to Hiroshima. The story itself is somewhat predictable, and there are probably too many explanations of Japanese traditions for my taste. Interestingly enough, the framing plotline left me rather cold, although you might expect me to feel a lot of empathy for the struggles of an expat. After reading this book, I found the letters a university friend wrote to me from Japan, where she went to study and work – and her struggles seemed far more challenging and poignant. Nevertheless, this novel provided a pleasant enough way to while the time on the airplane flying to Bucharest.

Anton Hur: Toward Eternity, HarperVia, 2024

I just can’t seem to get enough of translators writing their own novels (or memoirs). Their books are almost guaranteed to be thoughtful, multi-layered and written with a great sensitivity towards language. Anton’s book is no exception: a fascinating future technology premise – curing cancer by replacing the defective cells with nanites, tiny robots that make the person virtually immortal, but also trying to make AI more human-like by teaching them an appreciation of poetry. Written as a series of diaries or documents left behind by various protagonists, the first part is at heart a love story – what are we prepared to do to cling onto a loved one, and what is it that truly makes up a person’s identity and what we love about a person, while the second part jumps into a future where soldier clones are commonplace, yet even they seek to find out what, if anything, makes each one of them unique.

There are action scenes and a mystery to keep readers entertained, but what I liked most about the book where those beautifully-written passages asking fundamental questions about language, humanity, the possibility of understanding each other and ourselves.

I suddenly realized that I understood the words like I’d never understood them before… Words that were not simply bits of cross-referential information but each a thing of living, breathing, tactile emotion. I felt these words against my skin as if they were physical objects, or as if they were light passing through the prism of my body and shattering into the spectrum. Had I ever truly understood any word before, ever? How could I have claimed to have made a study of poetry or that this study had made me human when I had never understood what it mean to feel words?

Yoshida Atsuhiro: Goodnight Tokyo, transl. Haydn Trowell, Europa Editions, 2024.

For fans of the TV series Tokyo Diner, this is a very similar set-up. Linked short stories that at first seem entirely disparate yet all come together and resolve themselves by the end. All set in nocturnal Tokyo, in the ‘witching hours’ between 1 am and dawn, with a diner run by three women friends in the background, a taxi driver, detective, a call centre operator, an employee in the prop department of a film studio and an antique store shop owner keeping bizarre hours keep meeting, intersecting, interfering and finding out more about each other. It was a pleasant enough read, but not particularly memorable (I struggled to remember any of the stories after a week), and fits very squarely into the ‘feel good, charming’ reads from Japan that seem to be so popular currently. Apologies, I seem to have less patience for them than most readers, but am glad that it’s giving Japanese to English translators so much work (and money, hopefully).

Ioana Pârvulescu: Aurul pisicii, Humanitas, 2024.

Ioana Pârvulescu is one of my favourite Romanian women writers currently writing. You too can develop a taste for her highly inventive books of historical/fantasy fiction, two of which have been translated and published by Istros Books. This one is very different, a love story set in the present-day, following a couple over twenty years or so, but of course, this being Ioana, the conventional love story then takes a strange turn. In the afterword, the author says that she began writing this story while she was in her twenties and still living under Communism, and only returned to it in 2022. It’s about the passage of time, time being, as she believes, the essential component in a love story, and it’s only how, in middle age, that she felt capable of writing a love story that avoids falling too much into sentimentality or, on the contrary, becoming too cynical and trite. Oh, and it does feature a cat – the title itself literally means ‘Cat’s Gold’, which is a much kinder way to refer to pyrite, aka Fool’s Gold in the English-speaking world.

t. s. khasis: Placerea spectacolului (The Pleasure of the Show), Tracus Arte, 2023

A poetry collection by an award-winning poet from Arad, Romania, born in 1975. I’m translating a couple of his poems for a volume of contemporary Romanian poetry so I wanted to find out more about him and his style. It’s a bit too cynical, try-hard and macho for my taste, aspiring to the style and lifestyle of the Beat Poets, if I’m not mistaken. But there are glimmers of beauty here and there, and I hope I can do those justice when translating.

Takase Junko: May You Have Delicious Meals, transl. Morgan Giles, Hutchinson Heinemann, 2025.

This book isn’t out yet, but I begged for a proof copy from the publisher, since I really like the translator and also love reading about Japanese office culture (having suffered through it myself) and food. This novella won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2022 and has been somewhat of a bestseller in Japan and it’s easy to see why. It tells the story of Nitani, a young salaryman dispatched to a new office, where he struggles to come to terms with the implicit rules about food and displays of power in the corporate environment. He’d far rather eat his pot noodles alone, rather than attend the mandatory lunches or drinking sessions with his boss. The only person who seems to understand him and also attempts to resist this culture of conformity is Oshio, an efficient young woman, who despises the ‘poor me’ persona of the hapless Ashikawa, a young woman who avoids late hours and any additional tasks by bursting into tears and currying favour by bringing in baked goodies for her colleagues. Oshio and Nitani are drinking buddies and complain about the pressures of work, the emptiness of life outside work (when you don’t really have much time for it) and relationship expectations… and yet, when it comes to it, will either of them have the courage to break free of those expectations? It’s a sad indictment of Japanese working culture, and the ending made me even sadder. Although a relatively simple story, this is perhaps the book that stayed most with me from this month’s reading. (But also Love at Six Thousand Degrees)

He imagined his life working there for another, what, forty years. How he might be moved to another branch in that time, but wherever he went there’d be someone like Ashikawa there; how he’d have to work with them, day in day out; how many more days, how many more hours’ worth of work he would have to shoulder for someone else.

Tell me all you like that eating a proper meal means taking care of myself and that eating pot noodles and ready-made side dishes is like self-abuse, but would working, doing overtime, going to the supermarket before it closes at ten, then making and eating dinner really be a better way to take care of myself?… Cook, eat, wash up, and before you know it an hour’s gone by. I only have two hours after getting home before I have to go to sleep, and if I use one hour on eating, then in the remaining hour I have to take bath and brush my teeth, then I only have half an hour to live my life! Would you still eat then? For your body? For your health? That’s not eating to live, is it?

Tudor Ganea: Vreau să aud numai de bine (I only want to hear good news), Polirom, 2024

An interesting young writer from the port town of Constanta, and the town features once again in his latest novel, about high school friends who are invited back to their home town twenty years later by the mother of their friend who died at a young age. When they show up on her doorstep, however, the whole thing seems to have been some kind of joke or set-up. But they take the opportunity to reacquaint themselves with each other, reminisce, and find their way back to what is important. It sounds a little predictable, but it is so well written, with punchy dialogue, so much local and historical flavour (of the 1990s and early 2000s), and packs so much social commentary in, that I was never bored. Just like with Ioana Pârvulescu, this book feels like a departure for Ganea, a far more realistic book than his previous ones, which tended more toward sci fi or surrealism.

Charlotte Printz: Im Netz der Lügen (Web of Lies), dtv, 2024

This is the sequel to the first Nightingale & Co dectective agency book that I’ve translated for Corylus. The first book Nightingale & Co will be published in January 2025 and leaves some issues unresolved, so of course I was curious to see what happens next.

A Month of Indulgence: June 2024

After a great transition from May to June with Capital Crime, I spent the rest of the month of June (a birthday month for me, my younger son, and many, many of my friends) in rather unproductive, self-indulgent decadence.

Events

I was planning to go out more and do more things, but the trains have been very problematic, so in the end I only saw the stage version of Spirited Away at the London Coliseum (the second part especially was magical!) and went to Oxford for the always interesting and motivating Translation Day. I also really enjoyed the Expressionist/Blue Rider exhibition at Tate Modern. I’ve always dreamt of having a group of artistic friends living together in a village over the summer and indulging in our creative pursuits during the day, giving each other support and feedback, and having glorious meals on the terrace in the evening. OK, those are not the most obvious critical points to make about the Blaue Reiter group, but it’s what I love about them.

Closer to home, I attended a monthly Royal Borough Writers’ Group meeting – which I haven’t been attending all that regularly recently. Not quite Blaue Reiter, but it made me a little sad to think that once I move I won’t be joining their sessions of feedback and fun writing prompts anymore.

The other great joy is that university exams are over and my younger son is back home at last. He’s inherited my more ‘mature’ tastes in food and drink, much to the surprise and mockery of his student friends, so we’ll be indulging in cheese, salmon blinis and cocktails until the older son comes home on the 10th of July.

I don’t think I’ve had Curacao since I was a student…

Reading

For the first time ever in my life, I can understand why some people don’t read as much as I do, because this month I’ve only read six books and struggled to finish even those, although I quite enjoyed them. They were all set in different places and I’ve written about three of them (Poland, Hong Kong and Japan). I wrote a reader’s report for Das Herzflorett by Marica Bodrožić, a coming-of-age story of a Croatian girl joining her immigrant parents in Germany. Chinatown by Thuan was part of our London Reads the World Book Club, set in Vietnam, Russia and France, with a hypnotic, repetitive prose that irritated some of our book club members, but which I found oddly soothing (but did NOT like reading on Kindle, especially when my Kindle died while I was reading it and it took a week or more to replace it). I got Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshanathan from the library a week or so before it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and, although it took me several weeks to finish it, I’d have to agree that it was a deserving winner: a family saga with a lot of emotional and social/political history, educating me about the civil war in Sri Lanka. But my appetite for reviewing was even lower than my appetite for reading, so that’s as much as you’ll get about this book.

Five books by women authors, three in translation – not a bad proportion, when the numbers are so low.

So what have I been spending my time on?

I’ve been spending a fair proportion of time getting the house surveyed, decluttering and getting ready to put it up for sale. But, to be perfectly honest, I’ve been continuing my unprecedented TV bingeing. So yes, I can see why people who watch Netflix or other streaming services so much (I rarely did before April) have little time or energy left for reading.

I did this partly because I knew that once my sons came back, I wouldn’t have the time or desire to watch TV much, other than perhaps some films or anime that they might enjoy too. However, it’s mostly because I discovered the gorgeous Korean actor Kim Jae-Wook in Her Private Life and then even younger and more gorgeous in Coffee Prince. So, just like I go down into a rabbit hole and read everything when I find a favourite author, I fell down into the rabbit hole of trying to track down as many of his films and series as possible. He seems to choose his roles carefully, to give himself as much depth and variety as possible, rather than playing the conventional leading man. I particularly recommend Butterfly Sleep, a Japanese film directed by a Korean director, a poignant meditation on ageing, dementia, loneliness and love, but he lights up the screen wherever he appears – that natural rather than manufactured charisma which I associate with Hollywood in the 1930s-1970s. He was previously a model and lead singer in a rock band as well, his hobby is reading and one of his favourite films is In the Mood for Love – so what’s not like, eh?

Of course, after a while, all Korean dramas start to feel the same, with accidents leading to coma, rich chaebol families fighting for succession, would-be lovers failing to talk to each other properly, lots of scenes of drunkeness where one’s true feelings finally come out, dominant and interfering parents (but with an emotional scene of mutual understanding and forgiveness) and a high percentage of orphans being adopted by families in Germany or the United States. Oh, and did I mention that the male protagonists are often portrayed as aloof or arrogant at first, but then utterly committed and caring, endlessly loyal and faithful? I’d have thought it’s obviously a case of wishful thinking, but apparently some women around the world start believing this might be true and travel to South Korea looking for love. This article explodes this myth: and convinces me that my strategy to admire the beauty on display from a distance is the correct one.

Luckily, just in time to avert complete obsession with Jae-Wook, I discovered another versatile and magnetic actor Woo Do-Hwan, in the Valmont-type role of a loose adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses called Tempted. I would have liked to see the TV series being more dangerous and dark, but Do-Hwan did a nice line in sinister brooding which the camera just lapped up. Apparently, he is more like an enthusiastic, smiley puppy dog in real life.

Just in case you thought I was completely wasting my time though, all this Korean drama watching has also given me the idea for a new novel: a sort of tongue-in-cheek fanfiction type thing to start off with, but then getting deeper and darker, as it tackles issues of ageing, loneliness, obsession, being unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, celebrity culture and online trolling. Not quite like Baby Reindeer though, which I just couldn’t bear to watch to the end.

However, I don’t really need excuses for self-indulgence, as I don’t believe in ‘guilty’ pleasures – they are all just little pleasures that harm no one and make our lives a tiny bit more pleasant amid the collective wreckage.

Plans for July

Time to get back on track with reading, writing, publishing, translating and home improvements this month, as well as spending time with my sons. Harrogate crime festival beckons, and Corylus will be publishing the fourth novel by our best-selling author Solveig Palsdottir. Shrouded is delightfully creepy without being too gory, and it also addresses issues such as ageing (again! do I detect a theme this month?) and preying on vulnerable people, so do consider pre-ordering it if you think you might be interested.

Stu will be hosting the Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month in July, so I’m planning to read mostly from those languages (and Catalan) over the next two month (because August is Women in Translation Month anyway). What do you think of my choices below? I just hope I regain my reading va-va-voom.

Reading and Reviewing Summary 13/08/18

This is a continuation of yesterday’s weekly summary, which was threatening to become far too long. I’ve been trying to curb my book buying, but I cannot quite boast of unalloyed success in this matter. I have borrowed more from the library as well. Netgalley has also reared its ugly (I mean beautiful, tempting) head, although my feedback ratio is still only 60%.

Sent for review:

Jean-Claude Izzo: Chourmo

This was my introduction to Izzo and remains my favourite of his Marseille trilogy. Something which really shouts out in all its dark, joyous, dirty, tasty, messy glory ‘Mediterranean noir’. I have it in the French original edition and now I have it in a rather beautiful reissued edition from Europa. And it reminds me that I need to have a holiday in Marseille and Provence with my boys soon.

Books bought:

Malaysian author Hanna Alkaf started an extremely valuable thread about Malaysian writers on Twitter (and this is where Twitter’s power for the good is evident). You can catch the whole thread on her website. It inspired me to order at least a couple of the books she mentioned, as this is a part of the world I know very little about. I bought Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day, a family saga in gorgeous prose, and Tan Twan Eng’s The Gift of Rain, with its links to Japan and the Second World War. Both are chunky books, which should keep me busy for a while. I also finally gave in and got myself another translation of The Brothers Karamazov, so this will be the fifth summer in which I attempt to read it…

Library loans:

Keeping in trend with the #WITMonth, I borrowed Norwegian crime writer Anne Holt’s Dead Joker (transl. Anne Bruce). Hanne Wilhelmsen is grumpy and exasperating at times, but ahead of the field in so many ways. I’m not going to have time to write a separate review of this book, but I read it in 2 days. Suffice it to say that it’s one of those ‘impossible’ crimes committed by a dead person, and that Hanne’s personal life also takes a turn for the worse.

I also got two very different books, one for a quick read and one because I admire the author’s willingness to experiment: Eva Ibbotson’s A Song for Summer (bonus: location of Austria) and Nicola Barker’s Happy, which is a triumph of typography and graphic publishing.

Netgalley:

I couldn’t resist the Swiss mountaintop hotel location and the And Then There Were None plot similarities, so I downloaded Hanna Jameson’s The Last. The other novel I downloaded is also kind of apocalyptical, but fits in perhaps better with my fascination for ‘dictatorship literature’: The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke, one of the foremost contemporary Chinese writers.

Reviews:

I have reviewed three books for #WITMonth already, which is a proud achievement in just over a third of the month. Two are on my blog: the dark Norwegian tale of descent into mental hell Zero and a Brazilian attempt to reconstruct memories and reconcile oneself with the past I Didn’t Talk. The third review is of Teresa Solana’s irreverent and utterly zany collection of short stories The First Prehistoric Serial Killer on Crime Fiction Lover.

#WITMonth

I still need to review Lucy Fricke, but I have three more books lined up for Women in Translation, so am doing better than I had hoped (I think I planned about 5 overall for the month of August, and now it looks like I might have 8). I’m in the midst of Tsvetaeva’s diary, and will embark soon upon Trap by Lilja Sigurdardottir and Veronique Olmi La Nuit en vérité (untranslated).

Feverish after Ferrante?

I was impressed by Elena Ferrante’s fierce honesty and gritty style in ‘The Days of Abandonment’, but I avoided the Neapolitan novels for a long time. The hype, the marketing of it as a family saga, the sheer wordiness of 4 thick volumes seemed to me run counter to everything I admire and aspire to be as a writer: elegant and pared down style, hidden and allusive observations, modest and restrained topic matters.

But then I found the whole set in English at the local library, so I thought I’d give them a whirl.

The flashes of insight and genius which I’d glimpsed in the standalone novel were what sustained me for the first few chapters. 60-70 pages in, I scoffed: ‘Soap opera’. After the next few chapters, I paused: ‘Hmm, soap opera with gender politics.’ Halfway through the first volume, I readjusted this to: ‘soap opera with gender and class politics’. I never watch soap operas on TV, but I started to understand why my mother would: this made for compulsive reading. I finished the first volume and almost immediately made a trip to the library for more. And now I’ve finished all four in record time and am tempted to say: ‘political and feminist discourse disguised as a soap opera’.

Many reviewers have spoken of its ferocious howl of anger – but there is also resignation, resilience and ‘getting on with things’ in the most unheroic of ways. I have mentioned before how it reminds me of my female relatives: the trials and tribulations, small joys and greater pains of their own lives, the way they come together to support but also sabotage each other. Events unfold at high speed, often with melodrama, blood, guts and tears, much shouting and throwing of objects, families and friends breaking off relationships for years, then perhaps reconciling for practical reasons. One of Ferrante’s brilliant abilities as a storyteller is to accelerate and slow down time at will, move from the overarching universal to the very particular detail and then zoom out again, in a way which feels very natural and effortless.

Picturesque Naples, from Raileurope site.

She has also been described as the Dickens of Naples. Yes, she conveys the noises, smells, charm and grubbiness of the city, she is unafraid to show its darker sides rather than the picturesque touristy bits, and she populates her pages with numerous vividly drawn secondary characters, but there is also a running commentary and analysis of events (through Elena/Lenu), as they occur, which is seldom the case with Dickens. Ferrante’s narrator shows a lucid self-awareness and hunger to understand, and the reader embarks upon the journey of self-exploration with her and gains her wisdom at the end of the tale. I am not quite sure that we get this level of self-dissection and clear-eyed, unsentimental analysis of those close to one’s self, even in David Copperfield.

One touching and very revealing moment occurs when the two friends, Lila and Lenu, both pregnant, are caught up in a major earthquake. Lila becomes surprisingly fearful and breaks down, trying to explain herself and her world view to her friend like never before (or after). She speaks of her need to control and manipulate things, and explains it as arising from her terror of dissolving boundaries, of being caught up in a messy flood, of something seeping through the cracks of reality (very reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s famous diary entry), of overthinking and overcomplicating things until you lose all joy in life:

…the fabric that I weave by day is unraveled by night, the heads finds a way. But it’s not much use, the terror remains, it’s always in the crack between one normal thing and the other. It’s there waiting. I’ve always suspected it… nothing lasts… Good feelings are fragile, with me love doesn’t last. Love for a man doesn’t last, not even love for a child, it soon gets a hole in it. You look in the hole and you see the nebula of good intentions mixed up with the nebula of bad.

Elena finally understands that perhaps brilliance comes in flashes rather than a steady lifelong light, and that she had been the stronger one after all in their friendship:

Everything that struck me… woud pass and I – whatever I among those I was accumulating – I would remain firm, I was the needle of the compass that stays fixed while the lead traces circles around it. Lila on the other hand… struggled to feel stable… However much she had always dominated all of us and had imposed and was still imposing a way of being… she perceived herself as a liquid and all her efforts were, in the end, directed only at containing herself. When, in spite of her defensive manipulation of persons and things, the liquid prevailed, Lila lost Lila, chaos seemed the only truth and she – so active, so courageous – erased herself and, terrified, became nothing.

I’ll be honest: Ferrante inspires me with mixed emotions. She writes in a voice which, despite my best efforts to be polished and Anglo-Saxon in attitude, comes through far too loudly and clearly in my own life. As with Javier Marias, I recognise in her a kindred spirit: she writes the way I think when I don’t censor myself, when I allow my Romanian side to come out. A voice which I have suppressed and perhaps slightly disparaged all my life. A voice which is easy to mock as too convoluted, messy and therefore inferior. A voice which has been misunderstood, laughed at, satirized or met with aggression and prejudice. So it will take a while for me to appreciate this voice – and I find it surprising that English speakers are so attracted to it.

At the same time, I feel exhilaration and liberation when I read her work. It is OK to be like this. And she also fills me with envy and the sadness of a missed opportunity. If in future I were to write the saga of my own extended family, farmers and shepherds in the sub-Carpathians, against the backdrop of war, Communism and then wild capitalism, with all the mixed messages about gender and family which have been the bane of my life… it wouldn’t be my story, because it’s all been done now by Ferrante in a different location.

Glasgow and Laidlaw: As Tough as It Gets

Just in case you thought I was turning away from a life of crime, here is a review of the first book in the Laidlaw trilogy. It took me a while to discover McIlvaney (for a while I mixed him up with his son, also a thriller writer), but I will be reading a lot more by him. Not suprisingly, he writes poetry too!

It’s impossible to read crime fiction in the UK without stumbling across William McIlvaney sooner or later. Crime writers rave about him (readers too, but it’s interesting that he is most appreciated by other writers, a specialist read if you like). He is considered the father of ‘Tartan Noir’ and his Laidlaw trilogy has been described as almost Camus-like in its focus not only on the ills of society but also our inner torments. But there is quite a poignant personal story there too. In spite of his obvious qualities, the author’s novels were out of print just 2-3 years ago. Luckily, publisher Canongate had the vision to see that his novels describe not just the 1970s but also our troubled times perfectly. McIlvaney’s star has risen and risen since they started reissuing his work.

The story is fairly simple: a young girl goes out dancing in the evening and is found raped and murdered in a park. The girl’s father is out for vengeance, Laidlaw and his new partner are out to find the killer, and a bevy of Glasgow tough guys and gangsters are involved either in covering up or in avenging the crime. But I wouldn’t read this book for the plot – it’s all about atmosphere.

It took just one or two paragraphs to establish that I was reading crime fiction quite unlike any other I’ve encountered. McIlvaney has a style all his own: not just noir, but also philosophical and very dense. Laidlaw is the knight errant of the Crime Squad: a hero who can be downright annoying at times, as his newly assigned and fresh-faced young partner Harkness discovers. What he brings to his life and career is constant doubt as to what he is doing, and still trying to do it well. ‘Throw him a question as casual as a snowball and he answered with an avalanche.’ Laidlaw has profound compassion and love for the people in the less salubrious areas of Glasgow. A devoted father, he chides his wife for caring just for her own children, not for all children.

Aside from the striking main character, what I really loved about the book is how it brings to life the contradictions of the city of Glasgow in the 1970s: ”home-made ginger biscuits and Jennifer Lawson dead in the park’, discrimination against Catholics and homosexuals, while hardened criminals preach a culture of violence, lots of drinking and being suspicious of the police. Compassion vs. division is at the heart of this book, us vs. them, dark side vs. light inside us all. We are shown the contrast between Laidlaw’s murky reality and the world of moral certainties and clear black/white divisions of Laidlaw’s colleague Milligan. Laidlaw may hate him, but he is more complex and better than he is given credit for. At some point, he says: ‘I’ve got nothing in common with thieves and con-men and pimps and murderers. Nothing! They’re another species. And we’re at war with them. It’s about survival. What would happen in a war if we didn’t wear different uniforms?’ Laidlaw doesn’t have these certainties to protect him, so he is more compassionate but also more vulnerable.

I did find the Glaswegian dialect rather hard going after a while, but the bits in the author’s own voice (or in Laidlaw’s voice) are superbly written and very quotable.

I’m linking this to the 2014 Global Reading Challenge, for Scotland and Europe, as it’s Tartan Noir at its finest.