Tag: book review

The memory remains: My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose

Sometimes, the simplest premise is all you need. Like this one. The setting is Tundla Station near Agra in north India on a frigid December night. In the first-class waiting room four middle-aged men sit, bundled up in their winter coats, as long, bitterly cold hours stretch before them. A derailment on the rail line ahead has forced this unanticipated stopover and now all they can do is wait. This is the unfortunate predicament that sets the stage for a warm-hearted take on the Decameron in Bengali writer Buddhadeva Bose’s 1951 novel My Kind of Girl.

 The four delayed travellers include an exceptionally large-framed contractor leisurely making his way back from a business trip, an established bureaucrat from Delhi with an urgent and important schedule to hold to, a well-known doctor from Calcutta on his way home from a conference and a man on holiday who described himself as writer, if, the others might have wondered, writing could even be considered a profession. As they prepare themselves for an unwelcome and uncomfortable sojourn, the doors to the room slide open, briefly revealing a young man and woman, clearly newlyweds, looking for a private place to settle. This moment changes everything:

That couple, who had only given them a glimpse of themselves at the door before disappearing, had left something behind; it was as though the bird of youth had shed a few feathers as it flew by: some sign, some warmth, some pleasure, some sorrow or tremor that refused to dissipate, something with which these four individuals – even if they did not speak, if they only thought about it silently – would be able to survive this terrible night.

First love—that joy, so fleeting, but never forgotten. As if they have been awakened to memories long assigned to the past, the men decide to pass the time by sharing, in turn, stories of their own first loves. As each man slips into his own youthful reminisces, the story he offers emerges with a distinct setting, character and voice. The contractor goes first, refusing to own the account he shares, saying it is only one that he heard of, but the young man he describes as burly and powerful, but admittedly a little thick-witted, seems to be only a faint effort to camouflage himself. Perhaps the sadness is hard to acknowledge; it is the tale of a family that builds a successful manufacturing empire right through the worst of the Japanese attacks on Calcutta during the war and the enterprising son whose mother is endlessly obsessed with securing for him the hand of the daughter of the neighbouring professor, all for envy of their library no less. But money, it turns out, cannot buy everything.

The Delhi bureaucrat’s story carries him back to his adolescence in rural Bengal and his first intimations of love, barely spoken, with Pakhi, a girl he secretly adored. Over the years, as life leads them both in different directions, to different cities, they chance to meet from time to time, and her actions lead him to wonder if she might have once cared for him in return. His tale asks if the embers of love can still burn even if busy lives, marriages and families separate the two people who may have shared that early spark. He thinks back to a night long ago when they had walked home from town together, ahead of their families. Pakhi says:

“I was thinking – I was thinking, this walk is lovely, but it’s because we’re walking on it that the road will end.”

Back then, I found this funny. But now it seems that fourteen-year-old girl had, without knowing it, spoken wisely. Our existence is like that: living eats into our life, all the roads we walk end because we take them.

The doctor, when his turn comes, takes the subject in yet another direction. He promises a happy story, one in which his first love becomes his wife, but the route by which that end is reached is a strange and convoluted one. Suffice to say, when he meets the woman he will eventually marry, her focus is on someone else altogether. Finally, the writer, almost reluctantly, takes over. His poetic, tragic tale is one in which he and his two best friends are all completely besotted with the same girl, collaborating with and competing against one another to win her favour in sickness and health.

This gentle, affecting novel is a thoroughly entertaining read, always feeling fresh as it moves from speaker to speaker. Each man reaches deep into his own memories to share youthful passions and vulnerabilities that, by the light of day and in any other circumstances, would have remained half-buried in the mists of time. Everyone marvels at how their emotions have been stirred in this unexpected interlude—until daybreak returns each traveller to the road he was on the day before.

Buddhadeva Bose (1908–1974) was one of the most accomplished and versatile Bengali writers of the twentieth century. He was also celebrated for translating Baudelaire, Hölderlin and Rilke into Bengali. My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose is translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha and published by Archipelago Books.

Out of the never-ending flow of stories: Journey to the South by Michal Ajvaz

“Little did he know—or maybe he refused to acknowledge—that there are no pure story streams; all stories are scary, all come from a single strange-smelling wellspring that seeps into the folds of things and collects in dirty corners of the spaces we inhabit, all trace patterns of desire and fear that aren’t even ours but those of a monster whose dream is our life.”

Here’s a story that starts innocently enough, like so many stories before it, with a murder—no, make that two. Of course, that’s too simple. No murder mystery, if you’re expecting a story that will attempt to reach some kind of conclusion, an explanation, starts with the act itself alone; it begins somewhere else, somewhere back where the story really begins… But here’s a warning: this is a murder mystery that will wind its way through more than a few wildly unlikely stories on the way from execution to explanation.

To be honest, I signed up for the adventure that is Michal Ajvaz’s Journey to the South without any clear expectation about what might lie in wait for me. If you come to this 2003 novel, newly translated by Andrew Oakland, with previous experience with the Czech author’s idiosyncratic approach to postmodern fiction, you will likely be prepared to simply strap yourself in for an improbable, endlessly discursive, multi-layered excursion into the heart of what it means tell stories at all. If you’re new to his work, consider this an invitation to dive into the deep end—about six hundred pages deep, give or take.

The novel opens in the isolated village of Loutro on the south shore of Crete, where an unnamed narrator chances upon a young man, a Czech it would seem, with an unusual assortment of reading material. Overcome with curiosity, he decides to eschew his typical tendency to avoid engaging with fellow countrymen when abroad, and comment on the books. Thus begins a lengthy conversation that will extend over several evenings and countless glasses of wine and ouzo as Martin, a philosophy student working on a PhD thesis on Kant, shares the strangely convoluted tale of the circumstances that have led him to travel from Prague to Crete.

One evening some four months earlier, on his way home from the library, Martin had chanced upon a poster advertising a ballet based on The Critique of Pure Reason by Emmanuel Kant. The show was playing every Wednesday for two months and, this being a Wednesday, he headed to the theatre that very night. According to the program, the composer Tomáš Kantor was a writer with little published work who had “died tragically in Turkey in July or August 2006”—the summer before. As the show began, the young Kant scholar endeavoured to interpret the meaning and roles of the dancers onstage. To his surprise it really did begin to make sense to him. Certain dancers were clearly portraying sensory matter, others pure form, with a violet clad figure to represent Transcendental Apperception, that which we call “I.” Standing in the back, was a veiled mysterious figure that could only be Ding an sich—“The Thing in Itself” or the true status of objects which we cannot know. All was going well until the end of the second act when suddenly The Thing In Itself emerged from the shadows and began to move about, throwing off the dancers. The figure advanced to centre stage where it stopped, pulled out a pistol and shot straight into the audience, killing a man seated in the front row.

Martin, like everyone else in the theatre, is now witness to a murder. But before long he is even more deeply involved. The victim, it turns out, was a wealthy businessman, Petr Quas, and the step brother of the ballet’s composer, Tomáš Kantor. However, what captures Martin’s interest is the lovely red-headed woman he sees, first at the police station and again at the university. Drawn to her, he discovers that she is Kristyna, Tomáš’s ex-girlfriend who is still holding an inextinguishable torch for him since he abruptly broke up with her two months before his mysterious death. Smitten, he arranges to meet with her daily so she can tell him all about Tomáš on the pretence of wanting to understand if and how the two brothers’ death may be linked.

So, now we have Martin reporting what Kristyna told him about the unhappy childhoods of Tomáš and Petr, the former’s multiple attempts at creative expression that ultimately ended in darkness and despair, and the latter’s brief success as a poet. But where one brother finds his way from poetry into business, the other settles into a post as a transportation dispatcher at the end of the tram line. Then, one day, while off sick, a novel suddenly starts to take shape before Tomáš’s eyes, first as an empty city, then as a coastal town in an imagined nation complete with characters and strange occurrences. A series of events ultimately leads to the injury of his protagonist, Marius, who is taken to recover at the home of his lover’s grandparents  where he is told a story, second-hand, which in turn contains a novel—science fiction this time—and by this point the depth of stories within stories is running very deep, taking us to cities and countries, real and imaginary, across oceans and continents. However, when he finally winds his way to the end of his composition, the author is unsatisfied. Tomáš feels that his book, which had arisen out of nothing, has failed to correspond to the nothingness he carries inside:

“There was nothing so rich that it could be expressed merely by an endless proliferation of stories, a never-ending cascade of events in which other events spurted forth from every object, space, and gesture, then yet more events from the spaces, objects, and gestures of these. Tomáš felt that even the entire cosmos would be too little for the expression of nothing; a cosmos that expressed emptiness would have to be endless.”

His overarching novel then starts to mutate and grow, sending out tendrils, so to speak that branch off and flower in unexpected ways forming part of a network of signs and rebuses that Martin and Kristyna will follow as they eventually travel from Prague to Crete in search of Tomáš’s killer.

If Journey to the South sounds like a baggy monster of a book, well, it would be if Ajvaz didn’t have both feet firmly planted in the tell-don’t-show school of storytelling. The ungainly nest of narratives he constructs has its own internal cohesion and propulsive energy—no matter how strange or how far reaching—because at the end of the day, Martin is reporting it all to his audience, the narrator who interjects when he wants to clarify something and reminds us that we are actually at a quiet resort in Crete. And, of course, Martin himself is an active participant in the story he is relaying, driven by his attraction to Krystina if nothing else. Their fanciful journey through Europe from one unlikely—and strangely unravelling—clue to another is marked by their own doubts about the reasonableness of the entire enterprise. At one point, Martin even wonders if he has gotten caught up in a cheap Dan Brown novel, his own private Da Vinci Code. But this is a murder mystery and our amateur detectives do manage to make their way to an oddly satisfying conclusion. If, in fact the story actually ends when this book does…

Journey to the South is, then, classic Ajvaz territory. Structurally he favours the mise-en-abîme, the story with a story framework (fittingly, “placed into the abyss”), and delights in cliché genre tropes like car chases, monsters, cartoon villains and more. Woven into this are philosophical, scientific and theoretical references, often in unexpected contexts. I suspect that one will either welcome the kind of world he creates and his exploration of the possibility of reaching some semblance of truth (reality) in the stories we read and tell, or find his work hopelessly restricted to a game of limited scope and value. However, although he likes to keep his fiction separate from his theoretical work, like fellow Czech postmodern novelist Daniela Hodrova, Ajvaz is a respected literary critic and it is unlikely that his critical principles have not seeped into his fantastic storyscapes to some degree. (For a discussion of his academic work see David Vichnar’s essay on the Equus site.) Nonetheless, some critics have accused Ajvaz of repeatedly playing in the same sandbox, hauling out the same tired toys. Vichnar also answers this complaint cleverly:

What this wide-spread, if also reductive and simplifying, viewpoint fails to acknowledge is that Ajvaz’s fictional world leaves unresolved, and thus in perpetual motion and fruitful exchange, the dynamics of opposing principles which his thought strove to bring to a stasis of resolution. His fiction is, thus, bound to repeat itself, again and again, in all of his attempted re-writes of the impossible accounts of all the other cities, all the other intimations of pre-articulated fields, approachable in fiction only through linguistic articulation, and thus always already pre-fabricated. If this be the failure of Ajvaz’s fiction—a simple formula repeated ad nauseam without conclusive progress—then its saving grace, like that of Beckett’s, is its continuous effort to “fail better” – imaginatively, challengingly, and ultimately, enjoyably.

At the end of the day, I am hard pressed to express how effectively Ajvaz manages to pull off such a multi-layered, wildly entertaining feat of storytelling making it intelligent and thought provoking at the same time. It’s easy to lose track just how deeply embedded you are in the stories within stories (or even now to unwrap them to remember just who was telling what when), but somehow it works. It’s serious and absurd, sad and funny, cheesy and moving. So, although it may have been my first Ajvaz adventure, it won’t be my last.

Journey to the South by Michal Ajvaz is translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland and will be published by Dalkey Archive Press on March 28, 2023.

Whose child are you? Twilight of Torment: Melancholy by Léonora Miano

During the heat of the dry season a storm is brewing. The air is thick, the skies dark and streaked with lightning. Thunder, still distant, is advancing, the prelude of a night that will threaten to open wounds and leave scars, on the parched ground, and in the lives of four women. Twilight of Torment: Melancholy, the first part of a two-volume novel by Cameroonian writer Léonora Miano, unfolds over the course of this one turbulent night and the day that follows. Directed to one man who is not present, the second person narrative is passed, like a torch from his mother to his ex-girlfriend to his fiancé and finally his sister, as each woman speaks to her individual circumstances, history with him and personal dreams for the future. Together their voices weave a complex tale which explores femininity, sexuality and self-identity in contemporary African society, against a backdrop in which the legacy of colonialism, slavery, patriarchy, ancestry, class, family dynamics and domestic violence intersect.

Set in Cameroon, exact place names are never used in this novel, affording a certain ambiguity that implies that it could easily be set in a number of sub-Saharan nations. What applies in the country, applies throughout the “Continent.” By contrast, the “North” refers to France, Paris in particular, but again reflects the double role Western countries play as an educational destination for those who wish to improve their prospects and as a point of origin for the descendants of the African forced dislocation who seek connection with a cultural and spiritual homeland. Mythologies drive movement in both direction. The use of such ambiguous language heightens this reality.

The novel opens with Madame, hotelier and mistress of a large family dwelling in a well-to-do neighbourhood in a coastal city. Her lonely soliloquy begins with a impassioned elegy for the loss of culture and tradition that occurred during the years of colonial control and its impact on women and female society. But it is also apparent that she was aware of the rules of the game that she needed to play if she wanted to achieve her goals. Her ambition was not money—she brought wealth into her marriage—but a level of respect no wealth could buy. She talks of the wound she carries early on, but otherwise addresses her son in guarded terms, she wants to explain herself but refuses to accept that her intentions were nothing but the best:

I can name the thorn that, lodged in me since an early age, is my torture and my compass. My true identity. I know the reasons that drive me and never delude myself in this regard. Let me be clear: everything proceeds from a crack but that does not mean I’m wrong. Our coastal plain, our country, have their ways. Their understanding of things. I make do. It took finesse, skill, and tact to hug the edge of this fissure without falling, and I only slipped once or twice.

Madame’s most valued possession, it becomes clear, is respect. Status matters. So she pursues a husband from a noble line, Amos Mususedi, who bears an patronym of import that she can pass on to her children. However, he also comes from a line of men known for their violent tendencies and the marriage she ultimately submits to is loveless and brutal. She is aware that her son resents her for not leaving, so much so that he is determined to put an to end his patrilineal bloodline. But he is not opposed to allowing the name to carry on.

When her son returns from the North with a woman he intends to marry and the child he wants to adopt, Madame is beside herself. Pride and respect matter above all and now this is the second lineageless woman he has brought home. His first girlfriend was less than ideal, but now, although she is willing to accept an adopted grandson knowing a biological heir is unlikely, young Kabral’s mother is an entirely unsuitable daughter-in-law and, after all, it seems like the proposed marriage is a sham. Madame will not allow it to happen, even if she has to turn to occult connections to ensure her desired outcome is realized. The strange storm brewing gives her pause…

As Amandla, the former girlfriend, picks up the narrative, we learn more about the absent man, her one great impossible love. A native of French Guiana, Amandla met him in the North where she was involved in political pro-African causes. Now resettled on the Continent she is engaged in a spiritual journey of self-discovery through deeper involvement with fellow Kemites, followers of an Egyptian neo-paganism. Her story calls attention to the longing to belong to an idealized ancient tradition and the challenges of finding acceptance in a world that views her as an outsider:

Rumors were running around town about a White Woman who’d rented a carabote house in a populated neighborhood of the district. A White. A Northerner in the minds of the people here. It’s interesting that the terms Black and White are unrelated to race in these parts. They refer to culture. To lifestyle. Racial thinking does not belong to original Kemite conceptions. Racism concerns us only because we deal with it. We’re not the ones who fractured the unity of humankind. We’re not the ones who hierarchized people only to recant when it was no longer useful. We’re not the only ones who are now duty bound to care for their souls. To cleanse their interiors. To make the inside shine until its reflected on the outside. May each know and accomplish his or her duty.

Midway through the book, at the height of the storm, a pivotal act of violence occurs that will bring the four women together, directly or indirectly and shift the balance of the narrative. Here we join Ixora, the questionable would-be fiancé and mother of Kabral as she lies, beaten immobile, on the muddy side of a road with the rain hammering her bruised body. Her spirit, however, is indefatigable. The narrative now takes a near stream of consciousness form, rolling out in breathless, single-sentence paragraphs. The woman so openly disparaged by Madame is revealed anew as she expands our understanding of the troubled man who has just left her for dead and the complicated and surprising circumstances that unite and differentiate the women who have come into his orbit.

Finally Tiki, the sister, takes over. No longer living on the Continent, she addresses her brother, Big Bro, with a directness, affection and understanding that belongs to her alone. Although he has disappeared into the night after attacking Ixora, she anticipates a call from her brother at some point and is preparing to fill him in on what she has learned about the fallout from what has occurred back home. But she also takes time to explain her rebellious youth, her need to fill in some of the pieces of her parents’ lives that have remained mysterious, and the strange process of self-discovery, through questions of sex and gender, that have led her to carve out an independent and idiosyncratic life in the North. Her account, played out against a soundtrack from the 1980s, comes full circle, painting a complex portrait of the lasting impact of life in a dysfunctional family, in a society still struggling to come to terms with its own legacy of complicated alliances and prejudices. But the novel closes waiting for the call which has not yet come. It is to Tiki’s brother’s story, from his perspective, that the companion volume, Heritage, will turn.

I plan to read that soon.

Twilight of Torment: Melancholy is an impressive novel that brings to the forefront the many diverse and conflicting elements that impact and shape the lives of African and African origin individuals in our modern world. It is an undeniably feminine novel, yet one which underlines the damage that patriarchal structures enact on both women and men. And, although I am not typically a fan of multi-voice narratives, this one is very well executed. A central story line is carried through the stormy night and the day that follows; events that occur and information revealed shifts the dynamics between the characters. Each woman, with her own torments of personal and historical origin, brings a distinct voice, complicated life experience and a surprising angle to this ensemble piece. By the time night falls again, Melancholy closes with promise and hope, but leaves many unanswered questions and uncertain outcomes.

Twilight of Torment: Melancholy by Léonora Miano is translated from the French by Gila Walker and published by Seagull Books.

One day you will meet yourself returning: Embark by Sean O’Brien

In these days of howling sunshine
when in the grove the aspens fret and pull
like maddened horses now silver now grey
in the curdling light, when the leaves of the cherry
are first all hands and then all birds
that point the way they cannot travel with you,
what then is to be done?

– from “Poem in German”

Every time I sit down to write about a book of poems, I am confronted with a wave of insecurity. Is it possible to write about poetry without the requisite vocabulary and knowledge to adequately assess the collection at hand? I have long argued that “ordinary” readers should be encouraged to read and engage with poetry, free from concerns about doing it “right.” After all, what does it mean to be “right” in one’s reading of any piece of literature? Even in the course of a single lifetime we never come to the same work in the same way, or as the same person. And yet, I am increasingly inclined to read poetry without any thought to whether I will or will not write about it because sometimes, no matter how much I enjoy a collection, I can find myself hopelessly at a loss when it comes to imagining how I might express my feelings.

Embark is the eleventh collection from well-known—albeit previously unknown to me—British poet Sean O’Brien. I ordered this book inspired by a couple of selections shared by someone on Twitter which is, I confess, one of my primary resources for finding poetry. Something about the pensive, gloomy tone of O’Brien’s poems caught my attention. Now, having read and reread this slender volume, I wanted to reflect on what strikes me in his work.

O’Brien’s publisher describes him as “‘Auden’s true inheritor,’ and one of our wisest poetic chronographers” and this, for a start, signals a return, for me, to a manner of poetry that has commanded less of my attention in recent years as I’ve read more inventive contemporary poetry and more in translation. I almost feel embarrassed to confess that his attention to metrical form, occasionally rhyming, and his use of popular or colloquial language, with a strong sense of place, feel familiar and welcome. His use of historical, literary and cultural references fall within a comfortable realm, at least in my reading. I was not left wondering what obscure references I might be missing.

Though poems should not mean but be,
all information tends to entropy:
What was the Word is emptied of itself

and speechless water rises through the stacks,
engulfing like a continental shelf,
implacable as death or income tax.

– from “Waterworks”

Of course, one of my key points of reference is simply one of age. O’Brien just turned seventy and, even if I’m eight years younger, the perspective that comes with living, looking back over the decades, colours the concerns, moods and tones that I recognize in his poetry. The ghosts of old towns, the crumbling decay and industrial detritus traced in the soil, water and stones, and the shadows of memory surface that again and again. His landscapes are charged with life, but his verses reflect an awareness of mortality and the absences that increasingly haunt us over time. This is the work of a mature poet, in age and in his confidence with language. But it is also very much of the present—climate change, disturbing political trends and the reality of the pandemic are all apparent here.

Rain is falling on the metal tables
piled with chairs, and gleaming
as it floods the blue brick gutters,

perfect and anonymous and beautiful.
Be careful what you wish for now
the very air has somewhere else to be.

The city has a headache
but it dare not speak its name –
the bitter patience that till yesterday

we learned from middle age –
and now the plague is blown
as lightly as a kiss across the street.

– from “A Last Turn”

There is a pensive, even bleak quality to many of these poems, but his imagery, his turn of phrase catches me in the moment, causes me to pause. But then there is this hint of guilt I feel when reading poems in English. As much as I love and believe in the importance of reading poetry in translation, aware of the challenges and decisions involved in translating verse (and O’Brien himself is a translator, having translated the poems of Kazakh national poet Abai Kunanbayuli), there is a special joy that comes from reading poetry in my native language that, oddly, I might never have considered before I became so passionate about reading in translation. Of course, O’Brien’s poems have also been widely translated into other languages, but all I can say for now is that I am glad I took a chance on this fine collection.

Embark by Sean O’Brien is published by Picador Poetry.

Only existing to get away: Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal

He’s posted at the far end of the train, at the back of the last wagon in a compartment slathered in thick paint, a cell, pierced by three openings, that the smokers have seized immediately. This is where he’s found himself a spot, a volume of space still unoccupied, notched between other bodies. He has pressed his forehead to the back window of the train, the one that looks out over the tracks, and stays there watching the land speed by at 60km/h—in this moment it’s a wooly mauve wilderness, his shitty country.

Aliocha, twenty years old, a boy in a man’s still uncertain body, is onboard the Trans-Siberian railway bound for an undisclosed location in the far eastern reaches of his nation, one of the many Spring recruits too poor, too unfortunate to have otherwise devised a plan to avoid compulsory military service. As Moscow slips farther into the distance and the vast Siberian landscape opens up around him—“this enclave bordered only by the immensity”—he desperately wants to find a way out. The only practical solution he can imagine is to simply get off at one of the many stations on route and disappear, risk everything to lose himself somewhere, anywhere other than on this train packed with anxious recruits and assorted restless travellers.

This is the conflict French author Maylis de Kerangal sets in the early pages of Eastbound, her latest novella to be released in Jessica Moore’s English translation. Of course, Aliocha’s first attempt at escape is foiled and he finds himself back on the train, back in his favourite spot watching the rails roll away behind him into the dark night. But soon he is not alone, the foreign woman he had just seen on the platform joins him, a lonely vigil of her own to keep. Hélène has just left her Russian lover, a man she had followed from Paris to Siberia when he was offered a job he couldn’t refuse, but the isolation and loneliness proved too much for her. Once she decided she had to leave, she had to act fast, catching the first train coming through town—eastbound to Vladivostok—away from Anton, but away from France too.

There is a distance—age, language, culture—between Aliocha and Hélène, but the boy impresses upon the French woman, with a mix of pantomime and force, that he wants to take refuge in her first class compartment until he can escape the fate that awaits him. What develops is an uneasy, unsettled alliance that becomes increasingly tense as the young would-be deserter’s absence is finally noticed. From the opening pages, de Kerangal’s prose carries the emotional intensity swelling in the cramped quarters of the train, the Siberian landscape rushing past the windows, and the increasingly fraught atmosphere of the station breaks without dropping a beat. Long, breathless sentences open across pages, punctuated here and there with short staccato statements. In vivid contrast to the vast expanse unfolding beyond the train, she zeroes in on her protagonists’ minute physical sensations, doubts and fears, effectively playing on the balance between infinite and finite.

Externally, Lake Baikal is an obvious highlight, a treasured vision momentarily uniting everyone  onboard (except Aliocha who, much to Hélène’s dismay, is still in hiding in her compartment when she thought he had disembarked). The excitement rises off the page as passengers hurry out to witness its passage, record it with cameras and cell phones, and celebrate with cake, vodka and song. Baikal is a shimmering source of national pride:

The lake is alternately the inland sea and the sky inversed, the chasm and the sanctuary, the abyss and purity, tabernacle and diamond, it is the blue eye of the Earth, the beauty of the world, and soon, swaying in unison with the other passengers, Hélène, too, is taking a photo with her phone, an image she sends to Anton straightaway, the train is passing Lake Baikal and I am at the window on the corridor side, I’m thinking of you.

But it is the smaller human drama—will Hélène continue to protect Aliocha and can he manage to avoid detection?—that gives this novella its true momentum. The growing tension and affection between the French woman and the frightened but muscular young man, mediated with gestures and limited shared vocabulary, is unfolding in the confined spaces of the moving train. At less than 130 pages, Maylis de Kerangal’s Eastbound is a short, perfect embodiment of the principle that less is more. Not a single word is wasted here, but her characters emerge as full-bodied, conflicted individuals and the suspense, which starts out as a simmer, builds to an intense boil that is likely to have you holding your breath at its peak.

Developed from a short story composed in 2010 when the author was travelling on the Trans-Siberian as part of the French Ministry of Culture’s programme of French-Russian events, Eastbound was originally published in French in 2012. Sadly, her portrait of the rebel Russian soldier is eerily timely now, a decade later. Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal is translated by Jessica Moore and published by Archipelago Books in North America and Les Fugitives in the UK.

An explosion of strong female voices. Balkan Bombshells: Contemporary Women’s Writing from Serbia and Montenegro compiled and translated by Will Firth

First we meet Marijana, the daughter of a farmer who imagines a fantasy encounter with “A Man Worth Waiting For,” someone to sweep her off her feet, knowing well that the first facsimile of a “hard-working young fellow with house, land and cattle”—be that a forester with a cabin in the woods—who asks for her father’s permission to marry her will be sufficient to send her packing. Dreams will be put aside. Then we find ourselves in the midst of a feminist folkloric horror tale, followed by excerpts from an emotionally charged diary. And these three pieces, by Bojana Babić, Marijana Čanak and Marjana Dolić respectively, simply mark the beginning of a journey through some of the rich fictional landscapes envisioned by contemporary Serbian and Montenegrin women writers.

Anthologies can have many points of origin. This collection, Balkan Bombshells is, as compiler and translator Will Firth admits, the “fruit of happenstance.” The idea of an anthology was first suggested during a month-long stay in Belgrade afforded by a travel scholarship. An initial selection of short prose pieces by women from Serbia was made with the support of the KROKODIL Centre for Contemporary Literature and the organizers of the Biber contest for socially engaged short fiction. However, to ensure he’d have sufficient material for a book-length project, the scope was expanded to include the neighbouring, historically linked, country of Montenegro where Firth had many connections. The resulting multi-generational anthology of Serbian-Montenegrin prose is a collection of seventeen powerful pieces from both established and newer authors, many of whom are appearing in English for the first time. All of the writers are working in the language formerly referred to as Serbo-Croat(ian) that is now often described with the acronym BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian).

The stories gathered here, several of which are excerpts from longer works, feature a variety of voices and styles, a diversity that is highlighted by the organization by alphabetical order rather than region or theme. Many of the pieces afford snapshots into the lives of women caught in difficult situations, facing the dismal options available to them in working class communities or chafing against the traditional values of their parents. There is humour, Jelena Lengold’s “Do You Remember Me?” being a notable example that also calls attention to the loneliness of middle-aged city dwellers, and tales that are disturbing, strange and sad. As one moves through the collection there is a welcome, often unexpected freshness to each piece, perhaps because most of the authors are, as yet, not widely known outside their home countries. Three, including Lengold have been published by this collection’s publisher, Istros Books, but there are many I would love to see more from.

There are so many strong entries, but I was especially impressed by the metafictional “Zhenya” and the two more explicitly political pieces. Lena Ruth Stefanović’s smart and funny “Zhenya” begins in a backward village in Russia (the author studied Russian literature in Belgrade, Sofia and Moscow) but becomes, in the end, as the narrator/author openly imagines a possible future for her protagonists, as the most decidedly Montenegrin:

First, I’ll send them to my motherland, Montenegro, to warm up after the Russian winter. I’ll ask my parents to welcome Zhenya and Vova and to treat them as guests in our hearty, homey way.

Then I’ll send them on an excursion to Bari to pay homage to the relics of St. Nicholas, and maybe I’ll go along myself.

Along the way, a Russian flavoured fable is transformed into a vibant commentary about the evolving identity and literature of the people of Montenegro.

The most political offering comes, unsurprisingly perhaps, from the most established of the authors, Svetlana Slapšak, a writer, editor, anthropologist and activist with over seventy books to her name. Her story, “I’m Writing to You from Belgrade” is set in Toronto, where an immigrant family learn of the death of Slobodan Milošević. The protagonist and her husband respond to the news:

‘There will be no relief,’ Milica said. ‘But I’m afraid there will be fear because he died without being brought to justice…’

‘What difference does that make to us?’ Goran said after a brief silence. ‘The country we once lived in no longer exists. We have to tend to our memories so they don’t disappear in a puff of smoke, and that’s very hard here. Do you sometimes feel we’ve sailed to a distant shore, from which there’s no return?’

Later, while her daughter and husband debate the news, Milica reads a long email from a friend and former lover who is passing through the altered remains of their former homeland, observing the immediate response to Milošević’s death on the ground. It’s an incredibly effective, well-written approach to the complex emotions of exile raised the distant tremors of history and politics.

Finally, my favourite piece in Balkan Bombshells is political in a smaller, infinitely human manner. “Smell” by Milica Rošić is a short poetic tale about memory, the pain of war and the spiritual bond between three generations of women, Alma, Almina and Ina, or as the narrator runs her name together with that of her mother and daughter—Almaalminina. Grandmother and granddaughter never knew each other, the former died enroute to the border during the war long before Ina was born. A sudden and natural death, but one that leaves Almina with no option but to ask the soldiers to abandon her mother’s body in the forest. It is an action perfectly aligned with the character of her pragmatic mother, but one with its own lingering pain. “I cried like the rain” is her sorrowful refrain. But there is an unspoken, innate thread binding Ina to Alma without her mother’s direct intervention. Such a beautiful, poignant little tale.

So often anthologies, with all the best intentions, run the risk of collapsing under their own weight. This collection, even with seventeen contributors, only runs to 143 pages, offering just enough to give a reader an entertaining and intriguing introduction to a wide range of Serbian and Montenegrin women writers who will, with luck, reach a broader audience in translation over the years to come.

Balkan Bombshells: Contemporary Women’s Writing from Serbia and Montenegro is compiled and translated by Will Firth and published by Istros Books. More information about the authors included, see the publisher’s website.

Nothing threatens the meaning of life like freedom: The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali

On a plateau atop a mountain in Kurdistan, at the border of heaven and the realm of earthly reality stands a lone pomegranate tree. Known as “the last pomegranate tree in the world,” it is an enchanted and symbolic point of intersection for a handful of boys and the man whose life is bound to all of them although he will only meet one in person. His story—and, through him, their stories—recounted night after night to an audience of fellow refugees on a ferry riding dangerous dark waves, is one of hope, despair and the immeasurable price war exacts.

No, tonight I’m not going to tell you about Muhammad the Glass-Hearted, Saryas-i Subhdam, Nadim-i Shazada, and their connection to a pomegranate tree that heals the blind. It’s too early to reach the heart of our story. It seems as if we’ll be out at sea for many more nights. And if God comes to our help and our story is cut short because we’ve reached some country’s shores, if the coast guards detain and separate us, don’t worry that you haven’t heard the end of the story. You are right there at its end. This ferry marks the very end of the story.

The road to autonomy for the Kurdish people has been long and bloody, marked by insurgency, uprising, genocide and civil war. This is the reality of Bachtyar Ali’s The Last Pomegranate Tree (originally published in Kurdish in 2002), but the tale he gives us is one filled with magic, mystery and philosophy. Unfolding over the last decades of the twentieth century and just into the twenty-first, amid the dark, violent years of Iraqi-Kurdish conflict, it is as much a story about orphans, oaths and glass pomegranates, as a testimony to the brutality of warfare and the hollowness of victory. Yet above all, it is a story about the power of storytelling.

With his captive audience, our narrator, Muzafar-i Subhdam, is an unlikely Scheherazade, weaving his tale, not to save his own life, but to preserve the memory of a story beyond anything he ever expected to encounter—one he has now has committed himself to carrying. He begins with the account of his sudden release from prison after twenty-one years confined, alone with only the vastness of the desert for company. However, rather than finding himself a free man, he is taken to a luxurious mansion surrounded by a dense forest, where he soon learns that his old childhood friend, Yaqub-i Snawbar intends to keep him hostage so that they may grow old together apart from a world ravaged by destruction and disease. Years earlier when they were fellow Peshmerga freedom fighters, young men dreaming of a new future for the Kurdish people, Muzafar had forfeited his freedom to allow his friend to escape. He emerges from the desert, long thought dead and nearly forgotten, while Yaqub has amassed great wealth and power. But the wounds of conflict and corruption run deep, and Yaqub sees Muzafar as pure soul whose presence will ultimately cleanse his sins. But our hero has no desire to trade one prison for another. He has only one goal—to learn the fate of the infant son he left behind when he was captured so many long years ago.

Like a seasoned raconteur, Muzafar-i Subhdam entwines the story of his own search with the stories he acquires along the way, offering his audience hints at what lies ahead, but making them wait as a rich mythological tapestry slowly takes shape. Whenever he asks about his son, he is told that he is dead though no one can or will tell him how or when he died. Again and again he is advised not to seek answers, to accept the truth and move on. But for the decades he spent surrendering himself to the world of sand, letting all other memories be swept away, the one thing he held fast to was the thought that somewhere on earth there was someone named Saryas-i Subhdam. His son.

In these unusual times, fathers have become estranged from their sons.

Slipping into what at first seem to be magical detours, we learn about Mohamed the Glass-Hearted killed by love and two mysterious sisters who have sworn to never marry and always wear white. As Muzafar will discover when he conspires to return to the outside world, the life of Saryas-i Subhdam is bound to their lives and to the lives of many others. His efforts to piece together the clues he uncovers blends fantasy with the very real horrors of a series of conflicts that are, at the time, still ongoing and unforgiving. The chronicle he shares with his ferry companions is filled with memorable characters and strange coincidences, interspersed with philosophical musings as in the following testimony from Ikram-i Kew, the giant-sized,  soft-hearted fixer who agrees to help free Muzafar from the mansion and assists him as needed on his journey:

“I served the revolution for many years,” he said. “I’ve done everything except kill for it. I often regret it, and often I don’t. Muzafar-i Subhdam, innocence creates two feelings in us: on the one hand, you feel you’re nothing, you’re weak, and your innocence is like a rabbit’s in the middle of a pack of wolves. At other times, you have the opposite feeling – that you have encountered every kind of war and filth but retained your innocence. You tell yourself: that’s good, that’s beautiful, it’s a great achievement. Muzafar-i Subhdam, the revolution is a great big lie. You’re fortunate – you’re a revolutionary without having been in the revolution. And that’s divine grace. I had thought that the success of the revolution would automatically bring about paradise on earth. And yet, from the next day, the very next morning, when you opened your eyes and washed your face, you could see that everything was starting all over again. I saw that devil being reborn day after day, a devil that was only small to begin with. At first you say, So what? That devil is part of all of us, it’s only small, a natural part of any human being. But you can see it gradually grow bigger, sweeping everything away. Everything.”

The Last Pomegranate Tree, a modern Kurdish fable, is an immersive, entertaining tale that fuses the charm of ancient legend with the harsh reality of contemporary history. It honours a generation lost or, worse, hardened to death and disaster by years of hostility—both coming from outside the troubled region and arising from within. Resilience, as fragile as the glass pomegranates at the heart of his tale, is what Muzafar-i Subhdam cherishes and holds close as he trusts the convoluted story of Saryas-i Subhdam to a group of refugees lost at sea.

The Last Pomegranate Tree by Bachtyar Ali is translated from the Kurdish by Kareem Abdulrahman and published by Archipelago Books.

Of that which is left unspoken: The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

He knew how to sign his name, he had no reason to keep the ID card with just his thumbprint and a red stamp on top of it, illiterate. He had to change it, he was somebody else now. Knowing how to read and write was doing that him. Raimundo Gaudéncio de Freitas. Literate, alfabetizado.

The stories of those pushed out of their homes and communities when their sexuality or gender identity becomes known—or even for fear that their hidden truths might be revealed—have been, and are still, commonly echoed in societies around the world. For that reason alone it is important that such stories continue to be told. The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel, a writer who was born in a rural part of northeastern Brazil, is an ambitious addition to the growing body of international LGBTQ literature.

This debut novel tells the story of an illiterate man who has carried a letter he has been unable to read for some fifty years. But, because it was written by the boy with whom he fell in love as a youth, he is unwilling to let anyone else read it to him. Now in his early 70s, he has learned the basics of reading and writing and yet the unread letter weighs heavily. The only son of a poor farmer, Raimundo was needed on the farm so he was denied the opportunity to go to school. As his father told him “writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table.” Why then, when Cícero was well aware that he couldn’t read, did he insist on this form of communication rather than meeting at the river as planned so many long years ago? As he looks back over all the decades that have passed, Raimundo recalls his passionate affair with his childhood friend, hidden for a time from their families and their small agricultural community, and the violent, unforgiving reactions of their parents when they are exposed. When it becomes clear to him that he is no longer welcome in his family, Raimundo leaves, his final undecipherable message from Cícero carried close to his heart.

He makes his way to the Capital where he lives, closeted, for a quarter of a century. He supports himself picking up work with truckers, a life that allows him to enjoy the freedom of the open road and hide the fact that he is a man who likes men. His sexual indulgences are limited to the dark, dingy interior of a porn theatre when the opportunity arises. It is through the most unlikely friendship that he develops with a tough transgender sex worker named Suzzanný that he finally comes to peace with himself and settles into a new form of self-employment with a found family arrangement that, if not what he once imagined as a lovestruck young man, offers stability and affection. And, finally, the courage to learn to read and write.

There is much to like about this book and its intention, but the execution does it a disservice at times. Although he employs passages of third person narrative in setting the stage for this tale, it seems that Gardel is trying to achieve an immersive experience, pulling his reader into the world of a doubly marginalized man—gay and illiterate—by relying heavily on often fragmentary dialogue-driven scenes, in concert with extended passages of internal monologue that land somewhere between stream of consciousness and first-person remembrances. The chronology is choppy. Details from much later in the protagonist’s life are introduced early and out of context, whereas other events, such as the death of Raimundo’s twin brothers, are revealed awkwardly, some way into the story, leaving one to guess when it occurred. The result is a narrative that feels, especially through the middle third of the book, oddly pieced together, stretched thin. Overly simplified even.

With the final third, the narrative becomes much tighter and the timeframe starts to fall into place. Suzzanný, who is a wonderfully realized transgender character, acts as the catalyst that the protagonist needs to finally come into being as a fully fleshed person, a fact that then is also reflected in the storytelling. For someone who has been living in denial, in hiding  and filled with shame for so much of his life this is understandable, but in Raimundo’s personal story a certain depth is lacking until he finds companionship—a different kind of love that brings meaning in more ways than one.

In the end, sadness and joy blend together in The Words that Remain to paint a moving story of LGBTQ existence that does not attempt to hide the alienation and loneliness that marks the lives of so many people who do not fit into the expectations of their societies. Opportunities are lost perhaps, but resilience and self-acceptance prove more important in the long run.

The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel is translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato and published by New Vessel Press.

Not exactly at a loss for words: Doom Town by Gabriel Blackwell

That was the start of it. That moment.

What I mean to say is, and I want to be clear on this point, what I mean is that I knew then—at that exact moment—that all, all of my efforts in that area, that is to say, in the area of attempting to heal the rift between my wife and myself (and why not be blunt? all of my efforts in every area, every single one), had been and would continue to be futile.

Standing in Macy’s watching his wife examine pillows when they are supposed to be shopping for a replacement decorative bowl for a broken bowl that neither had liked or really wanted to replace save for an unruly accumulation of bills and notices that had gathered on the sideboard where the bowl had once sat, when intact, otherwise collecting the mail, the narrator of Gabriel Blackwell’s Doom Town is overcome with an inescapable sensation of, well, doom. What follows is a tightly wound, forever second guessing, forward glancing and backward looking circuitous internalized narrative—shades of Bernhard at his least ranting and most humane (think, Yes), if he was to write a domestic tragicomedy set in suburban America. It takes a while to get the rhythm of the troubled narrator’s cycles of prevarication, denial and doubt as he struggles to articulate, for himself at least, the story of the disintegration of his marriage in the wake of the death of their young son in an accident he feels responsible for, while the rest of his immediate world implodes in the most incredible yet thoroughly contemporary American fashion. But one is soon swept up in his desperate attempt to make sense of it all.

The narrator was, at the time of the accident, a lecturer in the linguistics department of the local university, a tenuous position in a seemingly impenetrable institution. As he feels that his entire world collapsing, it is critical to him that he be able to set the record straight on several levels, explain his side of a multi-faceted story. However, the tool one might imagine he would trust the most for this task has long since betrayed him:

Although my job was the teaching of the study of language and its use, or maybe because my job was the teaching of the study of language and its use, I had, long ago, lost faith in what most language did—what, I guess, I’d realized language was capable of doing, which is to say, nothing much, or else, something both very fleeting and very weak (and so maybe also, I’d once thought, something  therefore beautiful, in the way that beauty itself is often fleeting and superfluous… )

His efforts, then, lead him into long, discursive explanations and equivocations, carrying parenthetical asides within parenthetical asides, arriving at often indeterminate and inconclusive results that only seem to necessitate further clarifications. This distracted method of trying to construct a narrative, causes him to regularly allude to events that haven’t yet occurred chronologically in the story he is attempting to move through, which can, at times, be a source of both confusion and suspense. But, of course, although he has an imagined audience, a “you” to whom he is addressing his confession/defense, he is really only speaking to himself. Beyond that, his efforts to communicate with others are, as he well knows, sorely impaired not only by grief but by the variety of habits of inattention that tend to trouble most everyday human interactions.

After a period of intense confusion following his son’s death, he admits he experimented with a few bizarre efforts to express himself, finally settling on the use of stories, not only as a classroom teaching tool but unfortunately, in times of stress, with his wife. The range of stories he calls upon, well known and arcane alike, are typically interrupted or otherwise left unfinished. His stories become a stand-in for what he cannot, and often should not, say so it is generally for the best that his audience is spared the conclusions. Meanwhile, his own personal tragedy aside, he is also at the centre of a vortex of tragic events that, were this simply a black comedy, would add a measure of absurd humour. But given the reality of contemporary American life reflected in this flood horrors, it is difficult to laugh. Rather, it adds to our ill-fated narrator’s multitude of woes.

The core event, the death of his young child, is a known fact throughout Doom Town, one that is steadily, if silently, undoing whatever fragile bonds were holding his marriage together. However, the actual accident itself—an unthinkable horror certain to send spasms of shock through the hearts of anyone who is a parent (or grandparent, aunt, uncle, and so on)—is hardly discussed. It is clearly a wound too deep, one the narrator has, by his own admission, not even begun to process, at least not by any socially acceptable means, and by this he means acceptable to his wife. His own private attempt to heal is a project, a reconstruction (symbolic resurrection?) of his son in the garage, cobbled together out of toys and items from his room. Yet, as strange and idiosyncratic as the protagonist is in his effort to salvage the fractured pieces of his world, his pain and desperation are very real.

Despite its frequent convolutions, this novel manages to capture, with stark precision, the agony of loss and the resulting dissolution of a marriage.  The steady erosion, under pressure, of existing fault lines and fissures may well be familiar to those of us who have experienced the slow-motion collapse of a long-term relationship. A tragedy can easily accelerate the process. This story also calls into question the myths of perfect parenthood and highlights the many ways we risk failing our children. But at the end of this brilliant, devastating tale all we really have is the internal soundtrack of one deeply traumatized, heartbroken and totally relatable human being. And that is, at its best, what language is capable of offering.

Doom Town by Gabriel Blackwell is published Zerogram Press.

To exist, and yet not be “fully alive”: Scarred Hearts by Max Blecher

In his short life, one defined by and confined by illness, Romanian author Max Blecher (1909 – 1938) published two novels, a collection of poetry, and a number of prose pieces and translations. A journal he kept was published posthumously. He also corresponded with some the most important writers and thinkers of his day. For a young man who spent the last decade of his twenty-eight years in various sanatoria with his torso immobilized in plaster, it is quite an achievement. Beginning in the 1970s, his work started to appear in translation in various languages including English, but the twenty-first century seems to be even more openly receptive to his work. The publication in 2015 of Michael Henry Heim’s new translation of Adventures in Immediate Irreality (which had been published in an earlier translation) brought his singular pained and distorted visions to an enthusiastic new audience, myself included.

Adventures in Immediate Reality is an existential sort of coming of age story in which the young narrator wanders through town engaging in “adventures,” many of which are sexual in nature. However, rather than becoming more confident and secure in his physical and emotional identity, he is increasingly aware of a nebulous, uncertain relationship between the tangible reality others appear to inhabit and the off-kilter space he navigates. Hallucinatory and surreal, haunted by questions of identity, bodily disconnect and discomfiting glimpses of a gloomy future, this work conjures a world not unlike those imagined by Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Dali. His other novel is quite a different beast.

Scarred Hearts is a much more conventional affair, a love story set in a sanitarium in the French seaside town of Berck where Blecher himself lived immediately following his diagnosis with spinal tuberculosis or Pott’s Disease. Like Blecher, the protagonist Emmanuel is a young man whose studies in Paris are cut short by the same devastating condition. The opening scenes wherein an x-ray and exam reveal that Emanuel’s spine is disintegrating, followed by the graphic description of the lancing of an abscess back home in his boarding house room are chilling. The shock he feels with his new understanding of the truth of his circumstances is vividly captured:

[E]verything seemed much sadder, more indifferent… A blighted Emmanuel walked this world, a man with an eroded vertebra, an unfortunate before whom the houses parted in fear. He stepped softly on the pavement, as if floating on the asphalt. In the interval spent shut inside the doctor’s office, the world had become strangely diluted. The boundaries of objects still existed, but merely as thin lines that, like in a drawing, surround a house in order to make it a house or stabilise the outline of a man; those contours that enclose things and people, trees and dogs, while barely possessing the strength to hold within their limits so much matter on the verge of collapse. It would be enough for someone to loosen that thin line around the edges of things for those imposing houses, their outlines suddenly wanting, to dissolve into a murky, homogenous grey sludge.

However, once he arrives at the sanitarium—a strange world unto itself, a hospital with the illusion of cultured society— the narrative that unfolds sheds most of its dream-like interiority and becomes remarkably standard and straightforward.

As Emmanuel settles into his new life, he learns to accept the peculiar atmosphere of the clinical hotel-like quality of the sanitarium and the resort town peopled largely with caretakers and former patients, at least in the off season. His perspective is now an essentially vertical one; he like so many of his fellow invalids he spends his time, day and night, on a trolley. In time, a plaster cast is constructed around his torso. Nonetheless, every day he is dressed as if still a man about town, wheeled down to a dining room for meals and allowed to travel about the town and countryside with horse and carriage. He makes friends with a cast of fascinating characters and soon he falls in love.

The object of his desire, Solange, is herself a former patient who stayed and now works in Berck. She accompanies Emmanuel about town in his carriage and visits him in his room, but in time his passion cools and his irritation with her grows. It is at this point that Emmanuel becomes an increasingly self-absorbed and selfish character but the motivations for this change are unclear and the novel seems to lose its steam. Although Blecher must be drawing on the experiences he himself had or observed in others, his unwillingness or inability to slip deep into the consciousness of his character as he did in Immediate Irreality, leaves a flat bitterness on the surface of a novel that started with such promise.

There is, of course, much to admire here. Blecher excels at evoking the smells and sensations, often revolting, of a world inhabited by the sick and dying, and laying bare the medical conditions of his era. At the same time, his descriptions of the flood of summer tourists who turn a quiet town dedicated to convalescence into a crowd of vacationing families and competing gramophones demonstrate how little has changed over the years, music plying devices aside. But the third person narrative creates an unfortunate distance. The title, Scarred Hearts, refers to the impact of severe illness on the ability to express emotion, but this tale seems to lose its soul as well.

Given its conventional form and general accessibility, Scarred Hearts was well received and has even been made into a movie. Adventures in Immediate Irreality is a much more daring work, so now that I have read this, I wonder if Blecher’s Sanitarium Journal will provide a context and some of the heart I felt was missing with this recent read. Last year two translations of the journal were finally published in English for the first time, along with his collection of poetry, so I will be able to find out.

Scarred Hearts by Max Blecher is translated from the Romanian by Henry Howard and published by Old Street Publishing.