Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner

I'm just back from England. I told myself I wouldn't take a book with me. I was hoping to travel light, and I knew I would never read on the red eye over. I did have 2 significant train rides while there, on one of which I might have the energy to read. I thought I'd just pick something up to read in my explorations. Then at the last minute I threw in Dostoyevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, which I'd been intending to reread and was appropriately slim. Of course that didn't stop me from picking up more books while I was there. At an Oxfam shop I found Hotel du Lac, and I bought it as well as a Penelope Fitzgerald book. I almost bought Lauren Groff's Matrix as well, but it was raining and the only means I had for keeping books dry while I was out was to put them in the front pocket of my hoodie and zip up my rain jacket over them and I didn't think all three books would fit.

I was drawn to the Brookner because I seemed to remember the writer Rumaan Alam posting about her recently. Hers was a name I knew, but that's about it. I didn't even notice until today the "Winner of the Booker Prize" tag on the cover of the book. I started it in my hotel room in Manchester on Saturday didn't get very far. I did read a bit more on the train ride from Manchester to London yesterday. And then I finished on my flight home, reading the last pages just as we were landing. It's a quiet little book and the culture in captures I think must have been a throwback even when it was published in 1984: well-heeled women at a discreet Swiss resort to escape the boredom or the scandal of their lives at home. But it's not set in the past; it's more the tail end of a period. The novel's protagonist is experiencing that end herself. At the start of the book she is thoroughly modern in some ways, but at the same time rather old fashioned. Over the course of the book, she grows up – she says so herself, though she's already 39. Her two weeks at the Swiss resort prove consequential for her coming into herself.

Croatian War Nocturnal, by Spomenka Štimec; Taiwan Travelogue, by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

I was excited when my book club chose Croatian War Nocturnal to read because I'd never read anything written in Esperanto before. As a lover of languages and utopian projects, I've always liked the idea of Esperanto. I visited the Esperanto Museum in Vienna several years back and loved looking at all the documentation there and the pictures from the Esperanto congresses over the years. It wasn't until I read this book that I discovered Yugoslavia was a hot spot for Esperanto, though on reflection, it made sense. How better to unify the multiethnic multilingual population of a new nation than under the banner of a utopian created language that is foreign to all. You see this sometimes in formerly colonized countries that keep using the language of the colonizer as the official language rather than favoring any ethnic group in particular. And isn't a language with idealistic foundations better than a language associated with empire? Of course, like the languages of the colonizers, Esperanto is a Western construct. And apart from all the brutality that comes with a colonial language, they also come with a certain kind of access. (As becomes clear in Croatian War Nocturnal, Esperanto also comes with a kind of access: to a small but devoted international community of Esperantists. A very narrow power, but an interesting one.) 

The book itself recounts the 1991 war period in Croatia, mostly in vignettes. The author's own experience in Zagreb, that of some members of her cross-border family, and the wartime losses of some of her colleagues in the Esperantist community. She describes very clearly the way Yugoslavia fractured, with fault lines that were barely under the surface suddenly splitting, dividing families and neighbors and communities. It was a slim book and, as someone who has developed a strong interest in the region, I wished there had been more. 

I started Taiwan Travelogue about 3 weeks ago and had to take a short break from it to read Croatian War Nocturnal. It took me nearly all those 3 weeks to read the first half, and I read the second half in just a couple sittings yesterday and early this morning. 

It's clear to see why Taiwan Travelogue won the National Book Award for Translation. Language is such an important part of this book. It demands a translator who knows both Chinese and Japanese, and the translator's notes (mixed in with the author's notes, as well -- occasionally -- as notes from the fictional author in the book) provide quite a lot of context that is helpful to a reader who is unfamiliar with Taiwan and the languages in the book. 

This feat of translation surrounds a conceit in the book that it is itself a translated work. The book claims to the recently rediscovered manuscript of a Japanese writer's book about a year she spent in Taiwan in the 1930s when it was under Japanese rule, recently retranslated into Mandarin in the twenty-teens. I found this frame to be an unnecessary distraction. 

The story at the center of the book is about the relationship between the Japanese writer and her local Taiwanese translator and guide, which turns out also to be a story about empire and power and self-determination. And food. Above all, you could say this book is about food. Each chapter title is a dish, and each chapter recounts how the two women came to eat this dish, as well as often how the dish came to be, with other events seeming almost incidental. I found the food discussions occasionally fascinating and occasionally overlong. I think the best way to read this book would be as part of a culinary experience, because one does truly feel one is missing out by not having the opportunity to taste these foods that are described with so much detail as to their history and preparation.

An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

I can't remember where I first heard about An African in Greenland, but I believe I picked up a copy because it was the first book I'd heard of by a Togolese author. It does feel a bit ironic to count this book for Togo in my world books reading project (I already have Greenland covered!), but the book does start out in Togo. The first quarter of the book documents Kpomassie's long (physically and temporally) and circuitous route to get from Togo to Greenland. Honestly, I could have read even more on this period: from his village in Togo, when he was just 16 years old, Kpomassie traveled first to Ivory Coast where he stays with an aunt, then to Ghana where he gets an embassy job and teaches himself English, then to Senegal where he gets another embassy job, then to Mauritania from where he intends to leave, only to find ships don't travel from there anymore, so he must return back to Senegal in order to get a ship to France. After arriving in Marseille, he travels to Paris where he spends a couple of years before traveling to Germany and on to Copenhagen, the point of departure for ships to Greenland. Everywhere he went, Kpomassie had to pause and work for months or even years to save up enough money to fund the next stage of his travels. At the same time, he encountered incredible generosity, including one benefactor in Paris whom he began to think of as a second father. It's astonishing that he undertook this adventure at such a young age and against such challenges, though maybe it was only his youth that made it fathomable.

On arriving in Greenland, Kpomassie was completely reliant on the generosity of others – he was never able to legally work there – and many of the people who helped him get by there were living in poverty themselves. They shared their homes, their limited food, their abundant coffee and booze, and sometimes even their beds with him. He traveled up the west coast from south to north over a period of a year and 3 months, ending up in Upernavik, which is apparently the south of the north of Greenland. 

One gathers that Kpomassie became something of a celebrity while in Greenland as the first African ever to visit the island. Early on, he is a novelty, but as time passes he finds that people have begun to expect his arrival. They have heard about him from friends or family in other villages where he stopped, and when he arrives in Upernavik, at the house where he stops to seek shelter the owner says he heard about him on the radio.  

I must say, after reading this, Greenland sounds utterly unappealing. It's not just because of the food, though that is a big part of it. Food is a major theme of the book because of the general scarcity of it, and because one must constantly find ways to feed oneself through the long, dark winter. Kpomassie's diet on his travels seemed to consist primarily of seal meat, blubber, and organs, eaten raw a lot more often than you'd expect, with occasional fish or reindeer meat. There are also huge quantities of coffee, and pervasive binge drinking. (This last I remember well from Last Night in Nuuk.) 

I also don't think I would manage well in either the polar summer or the polar winter. I never realized before reading this book just how long the sunless days and full sun days lasted. Even today, 6 weeks after the solstice, Upernavik still gets 24 hours of daylight. In about a week, on August 8, the village will get just over an hour of twilight. Then in late September, it will get 2 hours of night and from there the nights will just get longer until November 13, at which point there will be no sun for many months. Living in a place where there is a distinct difference between winter and summer daylight hours, I somehow only noticed a couple years ago that the day to day change happened more quickly around the equinoxes and more slowly at the solstices. Of course, at the poles, this is more pronounced.

Kpomassie, however, loved Greenland. The story, and his telling of it, is really remarkable. He heard of this far off place from a book he found in Togo at age 16, fell in love with it at a distance, and spent 8 years working and traveling with the continuous goal of getting there. At the end of the book, he says he could imagine himself staying there forever, but he feels obliged to leave to get news of his family and share his experiences with the world. After finishing the book, I learned that Kpomassie is evidently still alive at age 85 or so, and that he moved back to Greenland in 2022 to live out his final years.