Tag Archives: Fiction

Peter Handke: Wunschloses Unglück aka A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (1972)

Posted in Austria, Books, Fiction, German Literature, German Novel, Germany, Literature, Novella by

Peter Handke’s mother was an invisible woman. Throughout her life—which spanned the Nazi era, the war, and the postwar consumer economy—she struggled to maintain appearances, only to arrive at a terrible recognition: “I’m not human any more.” Not long after, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.

Peter Handke’s Wunschloses Unglück or A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is the bleak account of a German woman’s life. It is the story of Handke’s mother, her struggle, her despair, her suicide.

The author starts with his own motivation to write this book, the attempt to make sense to put into words what is hardly comprehensible and to escape a feeling of being utterly numb. What did surprise me at first is his choice to call the account novella. Not memoir. After a few pages I realized that he wanted to make this an exemplary account. His mother’s life stands for numerous invisible women’s lives. When I finally got that, I felt like standing in a corner of a room and just scream. It’s such an outrageous account. It’s outrageous and infuriating and sad because it’s such a common story. Numerous women born in small towns (or even cities) between the wars lead lives like this. No one took them seriously, no one thought they should have a proper education. They were oppressed, and crushed, ridiculed and held small. All they were offered was the proverbial Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children. Kitchen, Church).

Handke has by now become one of the most controversial German authors, but at the time of the publication of Wunschloses Unglück he was still the German literary Wunderkind, so too speak.

Handke’s mother is born in Kärnten, a region in Austria, in the early 1920s. She belongs to the Slovenian speaking minority. Despite a joyless childhood and hardly any education – she is only a girl – , her curiosity and interest in many things make her leave home and enjoy life for a while. She is only a young woman, almost a girl still, when she gets pregnant from a married man. He is the love of her life and she will never love anyone else after this. Afraid of the shame and what would become of her and the child she gets married as fast as she can to someone else. They live in Berlin and stay there until after the war when poverty and the difficult situation in the bombed city drive them back to the village in Austria from which she came.

What follows is indeed exemplary and that is why it’s so sad. Her husband starts drinking and hits her. She gets pregnant at least another five or six times, three of the children she aborts herself. The society in which she lives consists of uncultured peasants. She looses all interest in life and starts to develop all sorts of ailments. In the end she has a chronic headache that is so severe that she can hardly think, barely see and speak. She goes to a doctor who diagnoses a nervous breakdown, gives her pills. She does get a little bit better. She starts to visit girlfriends, reads extensively. She reads the books Handke gives her and with the help of those books, she speaks about herself for the first time.  She tries to have some fun but her marriage is so love- and joyless, she can hardly stand it. Her husband has tuberculosis and is gone often, when he is back, they sit and stare silently at opposite walls. She says she wants to die by she is afraid of death. She starts speaking about how to kill herself and finally writes long letters of goodbye to everybody. She buys a red umbrella, goes to the hairdresser, has her nails done, lies on her bed and swallows all the tablets she has.

When Handke hears of her suicide his first reaction is one of pride. He is proud of her. After a while he starts to feel horrible. He starts to write about her but that doesn’t help. He wakes regularly in terror and dread.

Handke could have chosen numerous ways to tell this story, more personal ones. Throughout the narration he hardly ever uses perosnal pronouns like “I” or “she” but always “one did this, one did that”. The alienation is as complete as possible.

Handke is famous for his style, unwieldy at times but sparkling here and there with metaphors and sentences that you don’t find often. If you want to get to know him, it isn’t a bad thing to start with a short text like this one.

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams has been published by Pushkin Press and by the The New York Review Book Classics. It’s extremely depressing but a very important text. It describes in details the life of many a woman in Catholic petite bourgeoisie in dreary post- war Germany and Austria. It speaks of the misogyny and sexism that pervaded the society. The poverty, the struggles, the joylessness. Manic saving, mistrust of anything that looked like frivolity and be it only reading a book. It’s an oppressing account but worth reading.

Handke didn’t only write depressing books. He has, amongst a lot of other books, written the script of one of the most beuatiful movies, Wim Wender’s Himmel über Berlin aka Wings of Desire.

Anjali Joseph: Saraswati Park (2010)

Posted in Anglo-Indian, Books, Fiction, Literature, Novel by

Famous for its electric chaos, the city of Bombay also accommodates pockets of calm. In one such space works Mohan, a contemplative man who has spent his life observing people from his seat as a letter-writer outside the main post office. But Mohan’s lack of engagement with the world has caused a thawing of his marriage. At this delicate moment Mohan – and his wife, Lakshmi – are joined at their home in Saraswati Park by their nephew, Ashish, a sexually uncertain 19-year-old who has to repeat his final year in college.

The calm, quiet and floating feeling that permeates Saraswati Park makes this one of the most beautiful novels I have read recently. If Anne Tyler had been born in Bombay this could have been a novel she would have written. One of the critics did compare Anjali Joseph to Elizabeth Gaskell and from all the comments I read on my recent post I have a strong feeling Saraswati Park could also be called a modern, Indian set Cranford. In any case it’s a work of perfection. Cosy with a touch of melancholy.

I have always been fascinated by India and visiting Bombay is high on my travelling wish list. Opening a book and feeling as if you were actually already on that trip is a wonderful experience. Saraswati Park is rich in details about the life in Bombay, the climate, the weather, the light, the flowers, plants and birds, yet it never falls into the trap of exotism. Joseph was born in Bombay, she knows the city and, having moved away, misses it. She doesn’t write for foreigners, she writes about her experience and captures facets of Bombay that a foreigner might not expect. We generally associate noise and chaos with Bombay. Who would picture such orderly quiet as it is described in Saraswati Park? But this Bombay, the elegant Bombay of the middle-classes is what Anjali Joseph has experienced.

What I liked best about this novel is the combination of the outside world with all its strangeness and the interior lives of the two main-characters and the blend of the familiar with the foreign.

Mohan belongs to the vanishing profession of letter writers. Sitting day in and out in the middle of the noisy bustling city and writing letters for people who aren’t able to write, he still manages to find peace and quiet in the chaos. He loves the sound of the pigeons running over the roof under which he is sitting, likes to huddle with the other writers around a cup of hot tea during the Monsoon season and enjoys the pouring rains. Books are his passion and he buys as many second-hand books as he can. Preferably those with annotations as this makes him feel as if  he was following in the footsteps of others readers. When the book-sellers are moved one day, it is a huge catastrophe in his life.

At home he sits quietly in a corner, drifting in and out of the novels he is reading and only slightly aware of his surroundings. His wife chooses to watch Indian soap operas instead and they both sort of drift past each other, both lost in their interior worlds.

Still there are so many moments of intense and quiet happiness in Mohan’s life even though he seems to be only a spectator of what is going on in the outside world. Mohan enjoys the early mornings when he is drinking his tea on his own. He loves to watch the birds outside and listen to the rain.

When his nephew Ashish comes to stay with them for one year, things start to shift and move slightly. The death of Laksmi’s brother is the final tipping point. Lakshmi’s sadness and underlying frustrations become apparent when she takes the train and joins her family to help look after an ailing cousin but doesn’t return after one week but stays for over four months. It becomes evident that they are both disappointed by this marriage. Mohan had hoped to find in his wife someone to share his interior worlds with.

But his wife had turned out to be a talker herself. She had her own narration, so confident that he was never sure whether his made any sense to her; then, later, he’d begun to feel that maybe his private thoughts were simply meant to stay that way.

Ashish is a young boy, a quiet student who has to repeat one year. He seems to like being motionless, even enjoys boredom to a certain extent and there is a deep sadness emanating from him. What his uncle doesn’t know is that Ashish is heart-broken. He is about to lose his boyfriend Sunder. Although he finds someone else, his tutor Narayan, this only makes him happy for a little while as this relationship also ends abruptly and the boy is heart-broken again.

The loss of the book sellers, Ashish’s presence and Lakshmi’s absence spur something in Mohan and he starts to write. The first steps are very tentative but through Ashish’s influence he gets more confident and one of his stories is finally published. What he likes best about writing is that he feels

(…) a lovely quiet come off the page. It was rich and held the shards of past experiences.

One of the final scenes shows Ashish taking a last train trip back to the suburb. The scene is such a marvelous scene for anyone who has ever lived far away from home or was going to leave home. It illustrates what I mean when I say, Anjali Joseph knows how to blend the familiar with the – to us – foreign.

From his window seat he looked with hungry eyes at the dirty worlds next to the tracks: the brightly painted shacks, the grubby faced children, the ugly concrete tower blocks, the smells. It was his city, his world; it might be imperfect but it was home. Yet he knew that only his imminent departure nurtured this sudden passion for Bombay, which sometimes was neutral environment in which he existed, and at other moments felt like a trap he’d never escape.

The biggest achievement of this novel is to capture a foreign world and make it sound familiar. To portray the inner lives of people so skilfully that we can identify with each one of them. Saraswati Park is about love and marriage, loss and discoveries but also about the power of imagination and memories, the beauty and danger of reading and ultimately also about writing.

This is certainly one of the most beautiful Anglo-Indian books I have ever read. Do you have any favourite Anglo-Indian writers?

Dutch Literature Recommendations

Posted in Books, Crime, Dutch Literature, Fiction, Literature, Netherlands, Novel, Recommendations by

Lost Paradise

A post on Guy’s blog His Futile Preoccupations, followed by a discussion and comments on Dutch literature inspired me to write a post on maybe not sufficiently known Dutch literature. There is maybe also an upcoming European book tour on Bookaroundthecorner’s Blog.

I did learn Dutch because I wanted to read Dutch books in the original language. It’s a funny language and very close to the Swiss German dialects therefore I can’t say it was difficult to learn for me. The structure of the sentences is very English, the words have either German or English origin. However I read most of the books in the German translation which was mostly OK. Despite having read a fair amount of books I still have a big TBR pile of Dutch books.

I tried to find as many English translations as possible but depending on the author the result is somewhat meager.

The list below consists of literary fiction and a few crime writers. The authors that deserve particular attention are Grünberg, Mulisch, de Winter, Palmen, Hermans and Nooteboom.  I have also read the crime writers. Janwillem van de Wetering’s series is very different, very enjoyable. Saskia Noort seemed rather a bit in the vein of Mary Higgins Clark. Maarten t’Hart writes crime and memoirs and is good at both. Mulisch, Nooteboom and van de Wetering should be easy to find. Many of their books have been translated.

Arnon Grünberg: Phantom Pain

Arnon Grunberg’s masterful first novel is a rare feat: a work that manages to be shocking yet not sensationalist, hip but not trendy, ironic but not cynical. Most of all it is highly affecting. Highly recommended.

Leon de Winter: Hoffman’s Hunger

Felix Hoffman’s hunger is both physical and emotional. A Dutch diplomat with a chequered career behind him, he is now Ambassador in Prague in the late 1980s; his final posting. In Kafka’s haunted city, Hoffman desperately feeds his bulimia and spends his insomniac nights studying Spinoza and revisiting the traumas of his past. A child survivor of the Holocaust, Hoffman married and had beloved twin daughters, but a double tragedy has befallen his family; one daughter died as a young girl of leukaemia, the other, who became a heroin addict, has committed suicide.This has wrecked Hoffman’s marriage and his life; he has not had one decent night’s sleep since the death of his daughter over twenty years ago, and his constant physical hunger reflects his emotional hunger for truth and understanding. When Carla, a Czech double agent, gets into Hoffman’s bed, political and emotional mayhem ensues. Hoffman’s past and his present predicament are inextricably bound up with the tormented history of Europe over the fifty years since the Second World War. Like Europe, he is at a crossroads, and the signs point to an uncertain future.

Willem Frederik Hermans: Beyond Sleep

A gripping tale of a man approaching breaking point set beyond the end of the civilised world: a modern classic of European literature.

Margriet de Moor: The Virtuoso

A novel set in 18th-century Naples. For one entire season, Carlotta sits in her candle-lit box, held in the spell of a world in which knowledge, beauty and love collide: music. She has fallen in love with the male soprano, Gasparo.

Cees Nooteboom: Lost Paradise

Nooteboom brings a subtle, playful brilliance to this exceptional story of escape, loss and identity.

Harry Mulisch: The Discovery of Heaven

On a cold night in Holland, Max Delius – a hedonistic, yet brilliant astronomer who loves fast cars, nice clothes and women – picks up Onno Quist, a cerebral chaotic philologist who cannot bear the banalities of everyday life. They are like fire and water. But when they learn they were conceived on the same day, it is clear that something extraordinary is about to happen. Their worlds become inextricably intertwined, as they embark on a life’s journey destined to change the course of human history. A magnum opus that is also a masterful thriller.

Connie Palmen: The Laws

A debut novel which won the European Novel of the Year Award about unconventional love spanning seven years. A young philosophy student Marie Deniet encounters several men: an astrologer, an epileptic, a philosopher, a priest, a physicist, an artist and a psychiatrist, and attempts to comprehend the laws these loves live by.

and The Friendship

Ara and Kit, two girls in the village school, seem to have nothing in common. Ara, the elder, is large, earthy and illiterate; Kit is lean, brainy and interested in abstractions like philosophy. After they leave school Ara cannot let Kit alone – she is drawn to her as a moth to a candle flame.

Jessica Durlacher. I couldn’t find any of her books in English but she is famous as she writes on the Holocaust and is mentioned in this book: The Holocaust Novel

Dutch crime

Janwillem van de Wetering: Outsider in Amsterdam

Piet Verboom is found dangling from a beam in the Hindist Society he ran as a restaurant-commune in a quiet Amsterdam street. Detective-Adjutant Gripstra and Sergeant de Gier of the Amsterdam police force are sent to investigate what looks like a simple suicide.
Outsider in Amsterdam is the first in the Amsterdam Cops series of internationally renowned mysteries.

Saskia Noort: The Dinner Club

On a cold winter’s night, an elegant villa goes up in flames. Evert Struyck, happily married, father of two and successful business man, dies in the fire. His wife, Babette and the children manage to escape. Babette is part of a group of five women, known as “the dinner club”, who meet regularly and whose husbands do business together. Karen, a dinner club member, takes Babette into her house after the fire, but soon discovers that the friendships in the dinner club are not as unconditional as they seem. It becomes clear that some people have benefited from Evert’s death. Within weeks another member of the club falls from the balcony of a hotel and dies. Karen starts to put the pieces together. White-collar crime, fraud and adultery are the putrefying glue that has kept the dinner club together. Not for much longer. Set in a world of affluent suburbs, flashy 4×4’s and country clubs, familiar to readers in the UK and the US, “The Dinner Club” is a psychological thriller about a group of people desperately hanging on to the outer varnish of their lives. Some of them will defend their material success at any price. Imagine “Desperate Housewives” scripted by Patricia Highsmith. That’s “The Dinner Club”

Maarten t’Hart: The Sundial

The Sundial opens with Leonie Kuyper attending the funeral of her best friend Roos Berczy. She has always felt a little overshadowed by her friend’s glamorous looks and successful career so when she discovers she is the sole heir to Roos’s estate Leonie, an impoverished translator, cannot refuse. Leonie gradually begins to assume Roos’s identity, and as questions arise about her friend’s past, her curiosity becomes piqued. Leonie’s investigations soon unearth certain suspicious circumstances surrounding Roos’s death and the culprit, alarmed by this, springs into action.

I’m planning on reading either Hoffman’s Hunger or Phantom Pain soon.

If you think of reading books in Dutch, it might also be worth trying the literature of Suriname. I have one or two books but they have not been translated.

Does anyone have other suggestions and/or know the books?

If you are interested in a Dutch read along taking place in June, please visit Iris on Books

Phantom Pain

Elizabeth Gaskell: The Moorland Cottage (1850)

Posted in Books, British Books, Fiction, Literature, Novel by

Growing up in Yorkshire, the daughter of a deceased clergyman, Maggie Browne is encouraged to devote herself to her brother, Edward, upon whom their widowed mother dotes. Through the example and guidance of her mentor, Mrs Buxton, Maggie learns that self-sacrifice is the key to living a fulfilled life. How much personal happiness will she forgo in the name of duty and devotion to her brother? This novella depicts the struggle of a strong-minded Victorian woman, torn between her dreams and her duty towards her family. Maggie’s love story, Edward’s perfidy and the dramatic conclusion at sea, make The Moorland Cottage a timeless tale.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel The Moorland Cottage is said to be the precursor and the template for George Elliot’s The Mill on the Floss as we can read on the inner sleeve of this very nice Hesperus edition. As a matter of fact this and the blurb sounded so interesting and the book looked so appealing that I bought it and only realized later that this was the very same novel I had seen reviewed on Violet’s blog and sworn to stay away from. It wasn’t a positive review at all. I trust Violet’s taste and felt quite silly that I bought it. I must add that the cover of her edition looked very different. Tacky is the word for it. I have never read anything by Elizabeth Gaskell and this was short enough (140 pages) so I thought I give it a try anyway. Halfway into the book I discovered that Katherine from the Gaskell Blog, who is hosting a group read of The Moorland Cottage, dedicated one of the first posts to a stunning photo tour of the first chapter of the book.

The descriptions are easily one of the best things in this novel. For very personal reasons I also liked the character portraits. The mother does, in some instances, sound so much like my own mother used to be that it felt spooky to read how she reprimanded little Maggie the whole time, trying to crush her joy and preferring the brother over the girl for no particular other apparent reason than that he is a boy.

The Moorland Cottage tells Maggie Browne’s story. She is the daughter of a clergy man who has died a few years ago and leaves little Maggie, her brother Edward and a cold-hearted wife, who has adopted a theatrical, ostentatious way of mourning him. In the little cottage also lives a housemaid, Nancy, an old woman who is very fond of little Maggie and loves her dearly. This is lucky as her own mother only cares for the boy who is an obnoxious, selfish and reckless child. He suppresses and exploits his sister whenever he can.

One day the family is invited to the estate of the Buxton family. The Buxton family consists of the invalid Mrs Buxton, Mr Buxton, their son Frank and the niece Erminia. In the Buxton family Maggie encounters acceptance and love. Mrs Buxton as well as the girl Erminia like her a great deal and in the absence of her mother Maggie shows her true nature. She isn’t only a subdued little girl but very intelligent and truly kind.

After the death of Mrs Buxton the novel fastforwards a few years. Maggie and Frank have fallen in love, Edward has become a lawyer and handles some affairs for Mr Buxton The two lovers want to marry but Frank’s father is opposed to the idea. Chapter 7 is by far the most interesting. It displays all the themes that are recurring in Gaskell’s novels, one of them is the situation of the poor.

I found it particularly interesting because Frank asks Maggie to go away with him, to Australia or Canada.

I would go off to Australia at once. Indeed, Maggie, I think it would be the best thing we could do. My heart aches about the mysterious corruptions and evils of an old state of society such as we have in England.

Frank has lost all faith in the European society. He longs for a clean start in an uncorrupted environment. Where would Frank want to go nowadays, I wondered. To the Moon?

Frank has a huge problem with the way the rich treat the poor and the lovers discuss this at length. Maggie says she would be glad if there really was such a thing as “Transmigration”, something she has read about in an Indian tale. She would like to be transmigrated into a slave owner to see his side of things.

I quite enjoyed the first 8 chapters. I have to agree with Violet, the tone of the novel is mawkish throughout and there is a lot of crying but up to chapter 9 I could forgive it. From then on the novel unfortunately takes a turn. Maggie commits a huge act of self-sacrifice and the story’s plausibility is stretched a lot.

Still I enjoyed it overall because I cannot compare it to any of her other novels yet and because I could see what a truly good Elizabeth Gaskell novel would have to offer. Her descriptions are nuanced and beautiful, the changing of the seasons is rendered masterfully. Depending on the season her descriptions are either light and cheerful or dark and gloomy. Some character descriptions are interesting. Mrs Buxton, despite her insufferable moral teachings, is an interesting character. Why is she ailing and why does she love little Maggie so much?  The awareness of social injustices and the social criticism are themes Elizabeth Gaskell is known for and there is already quite a lot of it in this early novel.

Although the end dampened the overall impression, I will always remember the beautiful descriptions of the English countryside and feel like reading either North and South or Cranford very soon.

Do you have any other suggestions? Did someone else read The Moorland Cottage?

Literature and War Readalong April 29 2011: The Winter of the World by Carol Ann Lee

Posted in Books, British Books, Literature, Novel, Readalong, UK by

Carol Ann Lee’s novel The Winter of the World that has the same title as a collection of WWI poems, is the last novel in the readalong to be dedicated to WWI. I discovered the novel on Danielle’s blog and thought it would be a good addition to the 11 I had already chosen.

Carol Ann Lee has written mostly nonfiction books before. The Winter of the World is her second novel. This is what can be found on her amazon page.

Carol has written two novels: ‘Come Back To Me’ which is semi-autobiographical, and ‘The Winter of the World’ – about the Unknown Warrior – which received rave reviews when it was published in France last year. Le Monde ended their review: ‘Finally, here is a writer who understands the subtleties of the soul.’ The book was nominated for two major awards in France, but has yet to find a UK publisher (one commented that it was a beautiful story and compared her writing to Ian McEwan, but said it was simply ‘too patriotic’) although it has been published in America by Harper Collins.

Sounds intriguing. The French title is La rafale des tambours.

Among her nonfiction books are One of our Own: The Life and Death of Myra Hindley, Anne Frank’s Story, The Hidden Life of Otto Frank and Witness: The Story of David Smith Chief Prosecution Witness in the Moors Murders Case.

Should you want to read along you might want to get started a little earlier as the novel has a bit over 300 pages, however the discussion will start late in the month, on Friday 29.

Carmen Laforet: Nada (1945) A Classic of Spanish Existentialism

Posted in Books, Fiction, Literature, Novel, Spain by

One of the most important literary works of post-Civil War Spain, Nada is the semiautobiographical story of an orphaned young woman who leaves her small town to attend university in war-ravaged Barcelona. Edith Grossman’s vital new translation captures Carmen Laforet’s feverish energy, powerful imagery, and subtle humor. Nada, which includes an illuminating Introduction by Mario Vargas Llosa, is one of the great novels of twentieth-century Europe

I  had read an article about Carmen Laforet’s book when the re-translated German version came out in 2006 and although I was interested I forgot all about it until I read Richard’s intriguing review a couple of weeks ago. After having read what he wrote I had to get it immediately.

What a fantastic book! One of the best I read so far this year which is saying a lot as there were quite a few wonderful books already.

I can only agree with Richard,  Nada deserves to be called a classic. However, as he correctly stated, it isn’t a classic because of the plot which can be summarized in a few sentences but because of the style. This is a young writer’s book who manages to capture the intensity of living typical for the very young and passionate.

Set in post Civil War Spain, Nada (Nothing) tells the story of a young orphan, Andrea, who leaves the country for Barcelona where she wants to study literature. Young, enthusiastic and full of hopes she arrives in the middle of the night to find that no one is waiting for her at the train station. She is going to live with her family but since she missed the earlier train, they didn’t bother to wait for her.

Andrea is too happy to be in the big city to think much about it and enjoys the ride in a horse-drawn carriage in the middle of the night. When she arrives at the apartment of her relatives, they are sleeping. What awaits her reads almost like a scene from a horror movie.

In front of me was a foyer illuminated by a single weak light bulb in one of the arms of the magnificent lamp, dirty with cobwebs that hung from the ceiling. A dark background of articles of furniture piled one on top of the other as if the household were in the middle of moving. And in the foreground the black-white blotch of a decrepit old woman in a nightgown, a shawl thrown around her shoulders, I wanted to believe I’d come to the wrong flat but the good-natured woman wore a smile of such sweet kindness that I was certain she was my grandmother.

The flat has clearly seen better times. It used to be a big and elegant apartment once but after the death of the grandfather, the apartment was halved and the family continued to live in one part, keeping all the furniture. Apart from being messy, the flat is, as we soon will see, also very dirty. Not unlike his inhabitants who are all displaying various states of squalidness. The grandmother is not the only one who lives here in those narrow crowded rooms. Her two sons, Juan and Román, one of her daughters, Angustias, Juan’s wife Gloria and their son, and Antonia the housekeeper plus the dog Trueno, all share this sordid abode.

There was something agonising in the entire scene, and in the flat the heat was suffocating as if the air was stagnant and rotting. When I looked up I saw that several ghostly women had appeared. I almost felt my skin crawl when I caught a glimpse of one of them in a black dress that had the look of a nightgown. Everything about that woman seemed awful, wretched, even the greenish teeth she showed  when she smiled at me. A dog followed her, yawning noisily, and the animal was so black like an extension of her mourning. Then they told me she was the maid, but no other creature has made a more disagreeable impression on me.

As surprised and alienated she is, Andrea hasn’t seen it all. The more she enters the apartment, the more it gets squalid.

The bathroom seemed like a witches’ house. The stained walls had traces of hook-shaped hands, of screams of despair. Everywhere the scaling walls opened their toothless mouths oozing dampness. Over the mirror, because it didn’t fit anywhere else, they ‘d hung a macabre still-life pale bream and onions against a black background. Madness smiled from the bent taps.

Andrea’s family is a family on the verge of madness and total poverty. Juan is a brutal man who hits his wife, Román seems deluded, the old grandmother is half-demented and Angustias is a Catholic zealot who follows Andrea’s every step, lecturing her every minute. They fight constantly over one thing or the other and there is not one moment of peace to be had.

At the university Andrea doesn’t fit in at first. There is a rift between her and most of the students who come from rich families.  But then she makes a friend, Ena, a charismatic girl whom she loves fiercely. Ena will take care of her, invite her into her family and spend a lot of time with her.

Nada is as much the story of a young girl as a novel about Barcelona. It reminded me of an extended stay in this mysteriously beautiful city. Andrea is a loner and she loves to go for walks. We follow her on her ramblings through the nocturnal city.

Andrea is such an endearing narrator, she must have been given the writer’s voice, as Carmen Laforet was only in her early twenties when she wrote Nada. This is the story of a young woman who experiences everything with an intensity that is often lost in later years. Sorrow and joy are very close. And loneliness, a loneliness that makes her sad but that also permits her to explore states of mind she otherwise might not have explored. And there is the hunger. Andrea is constantly hungry, hungry to an extent that makes her almost hallucinate. She is poor and the family is poor. They are all skinny and starving. Andrea has a little allowance but she prefers to spend it on presents for Ena or cigarettes.

I was really touched by this story and curious what the outcome would be as it was obvious that the family wasn’t improving, on the contrary, they acted crazier and crazier, the violence intensified from page to page.

Nada has quite a surprising finale to offer and an ending that was not foreseeable.

The book is also very interesting as it paints an accurate picture of Spain after the Civil War. The rift between the rich and the poor is getting bigger and bigger and families that were well off before the war, loose everything and slide towards poverty.

Despite many gloomy descriptions, highly dysfunctional characters and a lot of sadness and loneliness this is not a depressing novel at all. Andrea is still joyful and her curiosity and intelligence are uplifting.

I read the German translation (not the brightest idea but it would have taken too long to receive the Spanish book), you can see the cover below.

I have read a lot of Latin American and Carribbean novels but, apart from a few, I don’t know a lot of Spanish books. Do you have any recommendations?

William Maxwell: So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)

Posted in American Literature, Books, Fiction, Literature, Novel, Novella by

The story of a murder is framed by the story of a brief friendship between two young boys. One, the narrator, is coping with the recent death of his mother; the other, a farm boy, witnesses his parents and a friend in scenes he neither understands nor wishes to. The narrative goes into his past and explores the events that destroyed the lives of his parents.

William Maxwell seems to be what I call a “writer’s writer”, meaning someone whose reputation is highest among writers. Fellow writers admire him, look up to him, try to imitate him. Yet it seems as if he had done a lot for fellow writers too. John Updike, John Cheever, John O’Hara and Eudora Welty are among them. He is truly a discovery for me, someone who writes books one can enjoy reading and admire the craft at the same time. His prose is accomplished, he writes with beautiful fluidity.

So Long, See You Tomorrow is set in rural Illinois during the early years of the last century. The narrator, an old man by now, was a boy of 10 when his mother died during the influenza epidemic in 1918. He looks back to this point in time in which his life was shattered. It seems he never got over his mother’s early death, nor over all the things that happened afterwards. There is something he regrets, something he wants to atone for and that is tied to another story, the story of a murder. Now an old man, he tries to understand what happened. Why this murder was committed, how it affected the lives involved and led to the worst thing he did in his life, or rather something he didn’t do, a fatal omission.

Trying to look back and reconstruct what has happened also leads to the exploration of memory.

What we, or at any rate what I refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.

The book starts with the murder of a farmer on a lonely farm in rural Illinois. He is shot by his best friend who commits suicide after having killed him. From that starting point the book moves to the death of the narrator’s mother and then to his friendship with Cletus Smith, the son of the murderer. The narrator tries to reconstruct what happened. Some things he remembers but knows they are distorted information as their source is gossip. He tries to find newspaper articles of the time, talk to people and where he really cannot find anything, he imagines how things could have been.

The narrator is a very lonely boy when he meets Cletus and the murder becomes part of his life. He has no friends and all the other boys pick on him, as he likes reading and isn’t the sporting kind. He and Cletus, who live in Lincoln by now, meet by chance and form an intense friendship until the murder happens.

A few years later – the narrator’s family has moved to Chicago where he fits in much better – he meets Cletus again. They meet only one single time and that’s when the thing he can never forget, happens.

So Long, See You Tomorrow is a beautiful and melancholic short novel that explores a wide range of themes like memory, the past, isolation, loneliness, friendship, jealousy and violence. The central theme is that of the omission and the following regret. There are so many things left unsaid, things not done or too late in a life, that this core theme will speak to almost all of us. It’s often little things but they resonate for a long time in our lives and we might wish to turn back time and undo what has happened.

Has anyone read William Maxwell? Which one should I read next?