Tag: Iberian October

Reading Summary October 2023

You can tell that I was on holiday this month, because I got so much reading done. Not while I was actually with my parents and family, but I had a lot of hours to kill on planes, trains, at airports and train stations, quite a few of them books that had been on my Kindle. And, of course, now that I am officially an empty-nester, I have more time to read at home too.

18 books, of which 5 were in my so-called ‘theme of the month’, i.e. Iberian and Beyond literature. However, of those five, I’ve only reviewed the Javier Cercas and Javier Marias books, and The Delivery by Margarita Garcia Robayo. I would love to review Machado de Assis and his surprisingly modern, ambiguous, witty 19th century stories, although I doubt I will have the time this coming week. I was unable to finish Guillermo Arriaga’s The Untameable, partly because it was incredibly bleak and violent (and I just cannot deal with any cruelty towards humans and animals at this moment in time), but also because of formatting issues on Kindle. It is a story with two very different storylines – one set in a barrio in Mexico, one set in the icy Canadian tundra, with lots of random research facts thrown in as well, and it became virtually impossible to keep track of it all when you are not sure where one chapter begins and another ends.

Unusually for me, this month I also instantly plunged into four acquisitions I made at ChilternKills Festival: four highly entertaining crime novels, two historical ones (Death of a Lesser God by Vaseem Khan and The Square of Sevens by Laura Shepherd-Robinson) and two contemporary ones (A Killer in the Family by Gytha Lodge and Into the Dark by Fiona Cummins, both dealing with relationships between mothers and teenagers, so perhaps that theme exerted a little pull over me, since it carried on into another book I read this month). I also read two cosy crime novels set in the feline world of Mandy Morton, which were a bit silly, but quite good fun – and the feline detecting duo reminded me of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for some reason – and this theme also carried on, as you will see shortly).

Books that had been on my Kindle for a while included Other Women by Emma Flint – we are currently reading her first book Little Deaths for our Virtual Crime Book Club, which I remember really admiring when it first came out, so I thought it high time I read another one by her. It was once again a reimagining of a notorious true crime case, this time set in London after the First World War, but I didn’t like this one as much as the first. I have now tried three or four books by Peter Swanson and I think I have to admit defeat: he simply is not the writer for me, I find his twists heavy-handed and his psychological insights into women’s minds wafer-thin. Thirty Days of Darkness by Jenny Lund Madsen had a promising premise: a snobbish literary writer who bets she can write a crime novel in just 30 days and then stumbles on a real crime in Iceland. I was not that impressed with the execution of the premise though, it had the potential to be either funnier or more sinister, and it was neither. Paul Auster used to be a must-read writer for me when I was in my teens, but he’s dropped off my radar a bit in the last decade or two, so I was hoping for a return to form with his latest novel Baumgartner. It is the story of a widower, learning to cope with loss and grief, and finally moving on. It was ok, but I can’t rate it more highly than Hilma Wolitzer’s book on the same subject An Available Man.

I read two very moving books about mother-son relationships by Romanian-language writers: Alina Nelega’s Cloud in the Shape of a Camel is a contemporary retelling of Hamlet from the POV of Gertrude, while Tatiana Tibuleac’s The Summer When Mum Had Green Eyes is a very short but complicated story of family rift and reconciliation in the face of terminal illness. These are two of the many books that I brought back from Romania, and that I hope to pitch to publishers soon.

The final book is by a favourite crime author of mine Nicola Upson, whose Josephine Tey murder mysteries I greatly enjoy. This time she is giving a fictionalised account of the life and complex loves of Stanley Spencer. Since I live close to Stanley Spencer’s house and art gallery in Cookham, I know his work quite well, but I had no idea he was such a gullible and selfish artist. A rather sad story all round, but the art remains, I suppose.

I know quite a few of the books I read this month were light entertainment rather than seriously literary. Nevertheless, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that of the 18 books, the best by far were by foreign authors: Javier Marias, Margarita Garcia Robayo, Machado de Assis (especially his slightly surreal novella The Alienist), Tatiana Tibuleac and Alina Nelega. If the English readers are not reading translated fiction, they are seriously missing out on some good, good stuff!

Iberian October: The Two Javiers

There are two Spanish writers, both called Javier, whom I really enjoy reading, so no wonder that I decided to start with them for my self-imposed Spanish and Portuguese-language themed month of October.

Javier Cercas: Even the Darkest Night (Terra Alta 1), transl. Anne McLean, Maclehose Press, 2021.

I’ve appreciated Javier Cercas’ brand of ‘historically-tinged’ fiction since I first met him at Quais du Polar in Lyon and read him translated into French, and later a couple of his books translated into English. What do I mean by ‘historically-tinged’? He examines the impact of the Spanish Civil War and the many years of the Franco regime upon the present-day. He has done extensive research on that period, and his novels often blend fact and fiction, with perhaps the best-known one being Soldiers of Salamis.

So I was intrigued to hear that he had embarked upon a series of crime fiction novels set in Terra Alta, a sparsely-populated landlocked district in the south of the region of Catalonia in Spain. Even the Darkest Night is the first in a trilogy set in this region, featuring Melchor Marin, a young cop sent to this region from Barcelona to protect his identity after he foiled a terrorist attack. I suspected that there might be a historical component to the crime (and there is a bit), but it appears that Cercas is more concerned with showing us the less glamorous, more poverty-stricken regions of his country.

‘This is an inhospitable, very poor land. It always has been. A land people passed through and the only ones who stayed were the ones with no other choice, the ones with nowhere else to go. A land of losers. Nobody loves this region, that’s the truth, and the proof is that they only ever remember us in order to bomb us. What are we known for outside the region? For the Battle of the Ebro, the most ferocious battle that’s ever been waged in this country…’

Melchor has a troubled past and problems with anger management. The son of a Barcelona prostitute, he ended up in prison, where he was reformed after reading Les Miserables. He managed to get his slate wiped clean and join the police force upon his release from prison, and has been obsessed with finding his mother’s killer ever since. Over the past four years, he seems to have laid roots in Terra Alta, has married the local librarian and dotes on their daughter Cosette. When he gets called to investigate the grisly murder of the wealthy businessman Adell and his wife and maid in their country home, he feels that the investigation into their deaths is not quite adding up. Sure enough, it soon peters out for lack of proper evidence.

There is nothing new about cops with secrets and problematic pasts, but a crime writer would have drip-fed tiny bits of back story here and there, only as much as was necessary for driving the plot forwards and giving us an insight into the main character. You can tell that Cercas is not really a crime writer, however, as he seems to spend a considerable portion of the book in lengthy flashbacks, and the investigation becomes almost secondary. Nor are there any real clues for the reader about the true motives for the initial crimes, plus we encounter a rather unnecessary death which shocked me.

All in all, not the most satisfying book by this author whom I highly respect. I will probably read the next in the trilogy, though, if only to see if he has mastered the crime writing conventions a little better.

The book has already been given a more elegant but bland Penguin Modern Classics treatment.

Javier Marias: All Souls, transl. Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Press, 1999.

This also feels like a less typical effort by this author – perhaps the least complicated and most accessible of his novels, a good entry point to his work.

It is an often very funny depiction of the pretentiousness and pettiness of Oxford collegiate life, seen through the eyes of a young Spanish lecturer on a two-year visiting fellowship. During his stay he becomes the lover of Clare Bayes, an attractive academic married to a far duller, more senior academic. He also becomes protégé of two enigmatic old scholars (and possibly spies), Cromer-Blake and Toby Rylands, who later reappear in a more sinister capacity in the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy.

I have always been fond of Marias’ astute observations of individuals and social groups, and this book seems to have even more wickedly funny passages (the description of dinner at the High Table is hilarious) than usual – and perhaps less of the deeply troubling issues that make an appearance in his other works.

For the inhabitants of Oxford are not in the world and when they do sally forth into the world (to London, for example) that in itself is enough to have them gasping for air; their ears buzz, they lose their sense of balance, they stumble and have to come scurrying back to the town that makes their existence possible, that contains them, where they do not even exist in time.

In Oxford the only thing anyone is truly interested in is money, followed some way behind by information, which can always be useful as a means of acquiring money…Giving information about something is, moreover, the only way of not having to give out information about oneself… The more one knows and tells about other people, the greater one’s dispensation to not reveal anything about oneself. Consequently the whole of Oxford is fully and continuously engaged in concealing and suppressing itself whilst at the same time trying to winkle out as much information as possible about other people, and from here comes the tradition – true – and the myth – also true – of the high quality, great efficiency and virtuosity of the dons and teachers of Oxford and Cambridge when it comes to the dirtier work involved in spying… Oxonians have sharper ears, Cantabrigians fewer scruples.

Nevertheless, it is almost certainly not the way the Daily Mail blurb on the cover describes it: ‘probably the wittiest novels set in British academia since David Lodge’s Changing Places’, because Marias has never been interested purely in satire or a love story. His books are always about the slippery nature of memory, about how people constantly rewrite themselves into their own lives and the lives of others, about that longing for something indefinable yet more than what we have. It is also about displacement, about never quite fitting in, which I think Marias himself experienced (too ‘British’ for the Spanish, too Spanish for the English-speaking world). Here is an example of that wistfulness, in what Toby Rylands tells the narrator at some point:

I’ve always kept on learning. But that ignorance is still so vast that even today, at seventy, leading this quiet life, I still cherish the hope of being able to embrace everything and experience everything, the unknown and the known, yes, even things I’ve known before. There’s as intense a longing for the known as there is for the unknown because one just can’t accept that certain things won’t repeat themselves.

It is rather poignant that the author himself died at the age of seventy, no doubt harbouring a very similar sentiment.

A very enjoyable entry in my Marias reading, and I’m almost tempted to sneak in another one by him before the end of October, although I only have thick ones left to read and don’t want to carry them with me to Romania next week.