Claudia Piñeiro – findingtimetowrite

Favourite Books in Second Half of 2025

My reading slowed down in the second half of this year, as I got busy with selling and buying houses, clearing out clutter and then planning and executing an actual move abroad. My brain often felt tired from all the project management, so I found myself reaching for books that promised to be entertaining or relaxing (spoilers: they didn’t always deliver on that promise), as well as books that had been lurking forever on my Kindle, since for 3 months or so I had no access to my physical books.

In July I managed to read the graphic novel Pyongyang by Guy Delisle before I packed it away in boxes for storage, and although his mockery of the North Korean regime was perfectly justified (surreal and ridiculous as it was and still is at times), call me over-sensitive but I also detected a bit of an insensitive, patronising tone to it. Nevertheless, an interesting insight into a place few people have access to.

In August I returned to two authors who are sure bets for me. Claudia Pineiro’s Betty Boo had been on my TBR pile forever, and she does her usual great job of using a murder mystery as a pretext to examine Argentine society and politics. China Mieville always has fascinating premises for his story and his The City and the City is full of mind-bending trickery but also great social commentary, I find.

September reunited me with Javier Marias. Thus Bad Begins has a relatively straightforward plot that could have been dispensed with in a novella, but in Marias’ hands, it takes flight and I simply cannot get enough of following his acrobatic train of thought.

October was a month of contrasts: the reasonably light-hearted yet fascinating peek at China during a critical time period in Hand-Grenade Practice in Peking by Frances Wood, and a reread of the cynical, world-weary Jean Rhys and her Good Morning, Midnight. Equally hard to forget were two books about the immigrant experience: Canzone di Guerra by Daša Drndić and So Distant from My Life by Monique Ilboudo. Funnily enough, all of those books were about strangers in a strange land… just as I was settling into my new home, luckily with more joy and satisfaction than any of the above.

November meant novellas and German literature, and I tried to combine both wherever possible. I was particularly struck by The Wall Jumper by Peter Schneider, Golden Years by Arno Camenisch and Erich Kästner’s Fabian.

In December I finally finished the biography of Franz Kafka by Reiner Stach, and although I had read so many of Kafka’s letters and notebooks, although I knew so many things about him already, I was amazed not only at the detailed and thorough research (unearthing some new things about Kafka), but how moving I found the final year or so of his life, the description of his few months in Berlin and then his final weeks and death. This was probably the most memorable read of this latter half of the year, if not the entire year, for me.

I have also just started reading Chevengur by Andrei Platonov and Love Machines: How Artifical Intelligence Is Transforming Our Relationships by James Muldoon, and they both look likely to be in the ‘best of/most memorable’ category for 2025, although I might not finish them before the start of the New Year.

I can’t say I was smitten by any of the covers of the past six months, although perhaps that is reflective of the fact that I read most of the books on Kindle. I’ll do one more wrap-up for December before New Year’s Eve, and then say goodbye to a year that has been full of (exciting) changes – but also a lot of loss and heartache.

Best Books of My Reading Year 2024 – July to Sept

The summer period was full of socialising, laughter, meeting new friends and reconnecting with old ones… and of course a fair amount of good books. The most memorable ones are once again evenly divided between those in translation and those written in English. And, for once, I have two non-fiction books on the list!

I tried to keep up with the Spanish and Portuguese Literature Month in July and with Women in Translation Month in August, and once again I’m biased towards Japanese literature, with another entry from my favourite Tsushima Yuko: Laughing Wolf, a disquieting tale of post-war Japan, and a strange love story reminiscent of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Love at Six Thousand Degrees by Kashimada Maki. I read two books by Claudia Pineiro, an old flame of mine, and Elena Knows, in particular, really touched me.

The two non-fiction books I mentioned reflect my current preoccupations: trying to keep on writing in the midst of uproar with Amina Cain’s beautifully reflective lit crit, writing craft and personal opinions book A Horse at Night, and the sorrows of downsizing one’s library in Alberto Manguel’s Packing My Library.

For my last pick for this period, you’ll probably say I’m biased, because I know Anton Hur personally and greatly admire him as a translator (and an advocate for translation more generally). However, bias aside, his debut novel Toward Eternity was sheer magic – science fiction with real soul and poetry. It really struck a chord with me.

It was also a good summer for films and TV series, once again quite heavily Asia-slanted, with rewatches of Tampopo, Days of Being Wild and two other Wong Kar Wai films (and introducing him to my younger son, who also fell in love with his cinematography and storytelling), as well as seeing my beloved Maggie Cheung in Comrades, Almost a Love Story for the first time. The new French Count of Monte Cristo film was fun but not as good or faithful to the original as we’d hoped (the book being a particular favourite in our house), and with visitors at home we had the opportunity to rewatch Cabaret, Oppenheimer and The Talented Mr Ripley. One of the most sad and infuriating (simultaneously) and memorable things I watched was a documentary (available on YouTube, I believe) about host clubs in Japan, The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief.

My bingeing of J and K dramas also continued unabated, even with sons around for the holidays. Of those, the following are particularly worth mentioning (and I probably did): One Day Off, and Reply 1988, for nostalgia, My Mister for depressing reality and Healer and Mad Dog for action and escapism.

#WITMonth: Claudia Piñeiro – Time of the Flies

Claudia Piñeiro: Time of the Flies, transl. Frances Riddle, Charco Press, 2024.

I no longer need to emphasise how much of a Claudia Piñeiro fan I am, as I’ve mentioned it on other occasions. I particularly like the way she takes common crime fiction tropes and turns them on their heads, allowing for a far broader social commentary, without ever becoming preachy or boring. It’s something I aspire to do in my crime fiction – but I have a long, long way to go still.

Time of the Flies is the longest novel by this author that I’ve read to date – and is in fact a sequel of sorts to the novella All Yours (published a long time ago in translation, in 2005, by Bitter Lemon Press). That novella (which I haven’t read) tells the story of Inés Pereyra, a self-satisfied wife and mother, who becomes obsessed with her husband’s infidelity and finally snaps. This novel opens 15-16 years later, when Inés has been released from prison for murdering her husband’s lover. She is now a reformed character, less chatty, more frozen, and she has started a business with another former inmate Manca, an agency called FFF, or Females, Fumigation, and Flies, dedicated to pest control and private investigation.

Life on the straight and narrow was never going to be easy, especially when a client suddenly asks for a deadly dose of pesticide (and for Inés’s expertise), ostensibly to kill her own husband’s lover. Inés is tempted by the money – and she also has unresolved business with her daughter Laura – but something about the client and her nefarious purposes doesn’t quite add up. And so the novel becomes something between a thriller and a romp, interspersed with comments from an Ancient Greek drama type choir, except the voices are not unified, but constantly disagreeing or debating.

Inés is a bitch, she never took care of Laura, only pretended to. Like mother like daughter. I don’t think either one of them is a bitch. I love my kids and I enjoy them, but I still ask myself every day what my life might’ve been like without them. I don’t ask myself that question because I don’t dare to consider the answer. In my case, I make a mental list of all the things I would’ve been able to do if I hadn’t had kids. Would you have actually done those things though? That’s counterfactual. It’s absurd and misleading, you’re just blaming them for your failure. Who said I was a failure? Your face says it all. Let’s keep it cordial, please.

Funny though these comments often are, they also underline the crimes committed against women – both the small ones (being judgmental, stereotyping women, demanding too much of them, double standards) as well as bigger ones such as violence, rape, mental abuse. Angry women such as Medea are mentioned, and a roster of feminist writers are quoted, but it always comes back to flies – of various shapes and sizes, each with their own characteristic. Flies, that are some of the most despised creatures on earth, yet Inés refuses to kill them. Instead, she has studied them during her time in prison and gives us a potted history of each type of fly and our relationship with them. But not before she suffers through an agonising story about the death of a fly by Marguerite Duras. (This made me laugh out loud).

The French author described how she sat on the floor and watched as a poor fly died. And then she had the revelation that when a fly dies, it dies (wow)… And she describes the fly as ‘polite’ even though it ’causes cholera and the plague’. A fly causes cholera and the plague? Really? She spent over fifteen minutes watching a creature die and the fly is the bad guy!

This novel is experimental enough to displease those who prefer more standard crime fiction fare, and possibly too page-turning and full of melodramatic flourishes to please fans of literary fiction. However, I found the streak of cruelty beneath the fun quite compelling, and enjoyed this stylistic mash-up.

Spanish and Portuguese Literature Month #1: Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro

Claudia Piñeiro: Elena Knows, trans. Frances Riddle, Charco Press, 2021.

Although I really had no hand at all in her success, I can’t help feeling that Claudia Piñeiro is my secret love that I’ve now been able to share with the world. I was reading the very first translations of her crime novels back in the early days of my blog, and then she hit the big time with her two books published by Charco Press. I reviewed the more recent one A Little Luck (and was saddened that it didn’t make the International Booker longlist), but I had Elena Knows on my shelf for ages without picking it up.

There was a personal reason for that. I knew that the topic was an older woman struggling with a galloping version of Parkinson’s, who’s trying to solve the mystery of her daughter’s death, and that simply felt too traumatic as the only daughter of a mother who’s descending rapidly into dementia and blindness (and with whom I have a very troubled relationship). Certainly not the escapist read one might hope for!

Challenging content aside, I must say that all of you who recommended it were absolutely right: it’s beautifully written, and all the adjectives showered upon it are justified: ‘haunting’, ‘taut’, ‘heartbreaking’. The prose is tightly-controlled while giving the impression of being utterly loose, vague, repetitive, chaotic… and propulsive. Which is precisely what poor Elena’s mind is, while her body is slow and unable to cooperate. Her day is marked by a strict pill-taking timetable, because after taking a pill she has a brief moment of mental clarity and slightly enhanced physical mobility.

Elena’s daughter was found hanging from the church belfry, and Elena refuses to believe it was suicide, because it was raining that day, and her daughter was terrified of going anywhere near a church in rainy weather. But the case has been largely dismissed by the police, with the exception of a kindly police officer assigned to listen to her ‘rants’, and he only does so because he’s being punished for a workplace misdemeanour. The priest at the church and her daughter’s fiancé (whom Elena never much liked) are both uncomfortable discussing the case over and over with her. In fact, nobody wants to listen to her, or dismiss her arguments as signs of her senility. Or, as Elena secretly believes, they all have forgotten Rita and it’s only her mother who still cares enough to find out what really happened.

No one knows as much about her daughter as she does… because she’s her mother, or was her mother… a mother knows her child, a mother knows, a mother loves. That’s what they say, that’s how it is. She loved and still loves her daughter even though she never said it, even though they fought and kept their distance, even though their words were like cracks of a whip, and even if she didn’t hug or kiss her daughter, she felt a mother’s love.

Could it be guilt over the imperfect love they shared that drives Elena in this quest to uncover the truth about Rita’s death? At any rate, at some point, Elena decides in her confused logic, that the only way she can uncover the truth is by going to find the woman whose life her daughter saved twenty years ago, and she does finally find her way there, where she gets a bit of a surprise.

I won’t divulge the ending, but the journey is just as rewarding in its very frank, occasionally gruelling detail about fighting the bureaucracy of medical insurance, the frailty and disgusting details of a human body struck by disease, the regrets about the loss of sex or physical desire, the exhausting list of daily challenges an ageing body and mind has to go through. All these vivid moments were handled so deftly and candidly (and even humorously on occasion), that I for one had an almost visceral reaction to much of the text. Here is Elena being scolded for not rubbing cream onto the rough skin on her heels, with the beautician saying she will give her calendula cream to use

It’ll just go to waste, Elena thought, because she wasn’t willing to add any more chores to the unending list of daily challenges: walking, eating, going to the bathroom, lying down, standing up, sitting in a chair, getting up from a chair, taking a pill that won’t go down her throat because her head can’t tip bac, drinking from a straw, breathing. No, she definitely wasn’t going to put calendula cream on her heels.

Elena herself is a fantastic complex creation: stubborn, infuriating, endearing, vulnerable and fierce in equal measure. We feel her tremendous loneliness and anger. We spend most of the book in her head – and yet we cannot help but understand and be moved by her own messy sense of logic. But some of the dialogues with the people she encounters give us the most memorable lines in the book, for example:

One day, some day… life will test us. For real, not a dress rehearsal. And on that day we will finally realise that we are all alone, forced to face ourselves, with no lies left to cling to.

So yes, a book that made me gasp and shed a little tear. Not the cheeriest of subject matters, but a tour de force of writing once again from this Argentinian author.

#WITMonth: Claudia Piñeiro – A Little Luck

Claudia Piñeiro: A Little Luck, transl. Frances Riddle, Charco Press, 2023.

I’ve gone completely off-piste with my #20BooksOfSummer (as you’ll see when you look at the original list), swapping so many around that it would feel like cheating to include this one on the list. But it certainly fits with #WITMonth, it’s from one of my favourite publishers… and I’m beginning to realise more and more that Latin American literature is probably the style and subject matter that I feel closest to. Mircea Cărtărescu has a point when he says that we Romanians are closest in spirit to the Latin Americans (and, sadly, often in troubled history and social issues too).

I’ve been a fan of Claudia Piñeiro’s work for many years and have reviewed a couple of her books on here and for Crime Fiction Lover. However, she didn’t really hit the big time in the English-speaking world until Charco Press published Elena Knows, also translated by Frances Riddle, and the book got shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. I’m just glad that readers are beginning to realise that authors writing in the ‘crime fiction genre’ can be of literary merit – crime fiction is an extremely broad church and tells us so much about society and cultural norms.

In this book, there’s no murder, just an accident. A very unfortunate, tragic accident; the account of it is repeated throughout the book, each time with a bit more detail. The author uses this fatal accident to highlight the hypocrisy and judgemental nature of a smalltown community (although Temperley is a suburb of Buenos Aires, rather than a provincial town), as well as individual pain, guilt and remorse.

Marilé fled Argentina after the tragedy: the exact circumstances surrounding the accident and its aftermath, the pressures that led to her departure for the US are gradually revealed to us, but we know from the outset that this is her first time back in Argentina in twenty years. She is now the respectable teacher and school inspector Mary Lohan, twenty years older, with a completely changed appearance. She lives in fear of being recognised and reviled all over again, but it appears that no one does, even though she is inspecting the very school where her son was once a pupil. But the hardest thing of all is to confront the past herself, to come to terms with it, to be honest with herself about what is self-justification and what was inevitable.

The only person who showed her some kindness at the time was the director of the school, Mr Maplethorpe, now deceased. I couldn’t help thinking that the words he uses to encourage Marilé describe the current online communities quite well too:

Don’t let them define you… Some communities are very insular, very… judgemental. And a bit hypocritical as well, I have to say. People who don’t know how to put themselves in other people’s shoes. They point their finger and pass judgement, certain that they’ll never be seated in the same spot.

Whenever I read a book about characters who have taken a wrong turn, who are damaged or depressed or struggle in some way, all those characters that people call unlikable or like to harangue for their bad decision-making, I say to myself: ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. The line between good fortune and destitution, between happiness and despair, between good and evil is most often paper-thin for most of us, who do not have vast wealth to protect and insulate us. This is what Piñeiro make so clear in this novel:

If that tragedy had never entered our lives… I’d have passed the test like so many other women. I’m not saying I’d have got the best marks, maybe just barely squeaked by. But I’d have been there, being the only mother I could be. Motherhood is full of little failures that pass unnoticed. If circumstances had been different, no one, not even me, would’ve ever known who I could become.

Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test.

I only have a little luck.

This is remarkably clever writing. Most of the book is told in the first person from Mary/Marilé’s point of view (there are also some letters written by other people), and therefore we are naturally led to sympathise with her and be moved by her predicament, and yet… we also feel that the narrator is stuck too much in the past, that hers has been a life half-lived, no matter how gentle and understanding her second husband Robert was. The conversations with Robert that she remembers are really all about convincing herself to move forward, but until she meets her son she is not really able to do so.

… the past can’t be changed, there’s no escaping it, no way to avoid it no matter which variables are altered… The only thing that isn’t fixed, Robert said, is what each person will do next… Not everyone is able to choose the best option, not all of us are prepared to. But, according to Robert, we have the rest of our lives to keep choosing, to either repair a mistake or forever seal off any chance of repair.

There is a nice reference in the book to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed (I reviewed this not that long ago), a sly hint perhaps that the sympathy of close friends and even the kindness of strangers may be limited, but above all a reminder that the narrator is not destroyed, merely damaged, that there is still hope that she can ‘be repaired, wounds sewn up, scars healed’.

A wonderful, deeply moving book, which brought a tear or more to my eyes, most definitely a Keeper. My rainbow collection of Charcos is getting bigger and bigger!

June Book Haul

I can’t really blame this on my upcoming birthday, since most of them are books I ordered a week or more ago, when my birthday didn’t seem imminent. I suppose it’s the usual displacement activity: where else to turn to but new books, if you’ve got a younger son with exams, an older son who needs financial support for his year abroad in Geneva (of all ‘cheap’ places, luckily he got a place in a student hall), a temperamental cat that you are not sure you can cope with and the anxiety of planning an ill-advised Japan trip that you’ve now committed to doing but would really rather be doing anything else instead. Makes zero financial sense to spend money on books when are you worrying about money, but there we go…

Let’s at least have some fun taking a peek at the books themselves.

I can’t always remember what sparked my impulsive buying, but it’s usually Twitter or reading your blogs. Starting from the top left:

Dana Shem-Ur: Where I am, transl. from Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan. I’m pretty sure I saw this on the Twitter feed of New Vessel Press, a publisher I’m very fond of. A book about expats, living between cultures, motherhood and wifehood across cultures – so very much my cup of tea!
Someone on Twitter was quoting some of the madder passages about Maria Callas’ funeral from this book. Sisters, a memoir written by her older sister Jackie Callas, herself a singer but very much in the shadows of her more famous sibling. So much to unpack there!
Kapka Kassabova: To the Lake – I actually have this already on Kindle but wanted to have a hard copy of it – it’s not quite the beautiful edition I was expecting from Graywolf Press, but a Granta edition.
Kapka Kassabova: Twelve Minutes of Love – while I was busy buying the previous book, I also came upon this earlier book of hers, a combination of travel writing, tango history and the search for connection and art. A must-have for a failed tanguero like myself!
Claudia Pineiro: A Little Luck – I’ve loved pretty much all the Charco books I’ve read so far, and Pineiro is never a dull author.
Attia Hosain: Phoenix Fled – I abstained from the Virago Anniversary Sale, but had already ordered this collection of short stories from an entirely new to me author, when I read a brief review of one of her stories in Jacqui’s blog post.
Darran McCann: After the Lockout – it’s once again one of my regular blogger friends, Fiction Fan, who introduced me to this writer and his evocation of a complex and dark period of Irish history
My last two are poetry books, because poetry presses are often a labour of love and need all the support they can get. These two are from Blue Diode Press in Edinburgh and are both about slippery cross-cultural identities: CaucAsian by Neetha Kunaratnam and Kayakoy by Jeri Onitskansky.

Of the two non-descript ones at the bottom of the picture, the first one is an ex-library copy of a book that I remember reading as a student and which I recently mentioned to someone asking about books about literary translation: Robert Wechsler’s Performing Without a Stage, a rather wonderful comparison of translators with musicians interpreting a piece of music. ‘While every musician knows that his performance is simply one of many, often one of thousands…, the translator knows that his performance may be the only one, at least the only one of his generation, and that he will not have the opportunity either to improve on it or to try a different approach… no one can see his difficult performance. Except where he slips up. In fact, he is praised primarily for not being seen.’

The last one is a library book: how I will miss Senate House Library when I no longer work in that iconic building and can go upstairs to meander around the bookshelves as and when I please. Couldn’t find a lot of Romain Gary (that I hadn’t read) in French, surprisingly enough, but I did find some English translations. Hocus Bogus is a translation of the book Pseudo, that he wrote under the pseudonym Emile Ajar.

September Reads

As I had feared, my August output of reading and writing was completely unsustainable. September brought a marked drop in all of the following:

temperature
time for writing
ability to post anything coherent on this blog
finishing any books

So here are the six I did manage to read, with links if they have been reviewed in greater detail elsewhere.

1) Claudia Piñeiro: A Crack in the Wall.

Is it possible to write a compelling book about a real crack in a concrete wall? This is exactly what Argentinian writer Claudia Piñeiro sets out to do in this unconventional crime novel, brimming with corruption, life, passion and disappointment. Of course, the cracks will prove to be metaphorical ones too: in business partnerships, marriages, personal life and in Buenos Aires society just before the economic crisis.

2) Zoë Sharp: The Blood Whisperer

Teaching newbie thriller writers a thing or two about plotting and feisty females, this is a new venture for author Zoë Sharp: a standalone thriller about forensics expert Kelly Jacks, who has been wrongly convicted of manslaughter, served her prison sentence and is now working as a crime scene cleaner. Her past threatens to catch up with her, however, when she suspects foul play at the latest crime scene.

3) Bernard Besson: The Greenland Breach

Join me on the 4th of November, when I will be reviewing this book as part of a blog tour, and also offering one reader the chance to win an e-book. An ecological thriller, is all I am going to say at this moment in time!

4) Håkan Nesser: The Mind’s Eye

I had read later novels featuring Van Veeteren, but I had somehow missed this first one, so it was a delight to see how the grumpy cynicism of the Chief Inspector is evident from the start. I have always situated Maardam in the Netherlands (must be that Dutch-sounding Van name, too), but of course the country itself remains nameless and generic. Interesting also to see that arm’s length quality already present even in this early book: there is something deliberately neutral, almost cold about Nesser, very different from the emotionally wrenching novels of Karin Fossum, for instance.

5) Cormac McCarthy: The Road

I’d deliberately avoided reading this book, because it seemed to be such a bleak, uncompromising subject matter. But when I finally succumbed to it, I found it quite different from what I expected. Sure, the ash-strewn landscape of the apocalypse features heavily here and there is very little joy in the book. In fact, nothing much happens at all in the book – it is all about what has happened, what may happen or what is about to happen. Humans are stripped bare of all humanity, there is a patient piling on of horrible detail after horrible detail… and yet, ultimately, I found it uplifting, how the strong bond of love between father and son can keep both of them safe and whole, at least spiritually, if not always physically. It is the triumph of the spirit in the face of calamity.

Cover of "A Circle of Quiet" — Cover of A Circle of Quiet

6) Madeleine L’Engle: A Circle of Quiet

A book to dip into now and then, whenever you find your writerly soul in need of inspiration or gentle understanding. She describes the challenges of combining family life and writing perfectly. One to treasure for a long time.