Eve Out of Her Ruins, by Ananda Devi

I've had Eve Out of Her Ruins on my to-read list for quite a while, so I was happy that my Women in Translation Book Club selected it. I originally picked it up to count for Mauritius in my world books reading project, but then I ended up reading another book from Mauritius: The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, which I read in 2018 -- the year I didn't write about the books I read. I don't remember a lot about The Last Brother but I do remember thinking it gave me a real sense of the island and its geography. The same cannot be said at all for Eve Out of Her Ruins. Perhaps it's a good thing I'd already read something that did give me that sense. In some way, Eve feels like it could take place in any impoverished community where people feel trapped in poverty and cycles of violence. 

The titular Eve is a girl from a poor and abusive family who at a young age finds she can use her body as currency, not to lift her out of poverty but to bring her small advantages where she had none. She believes she has control of the situations she puts herself in, but from the perspective of the reader, as we learn more about them, it's hard to accept her claims of control. The book follows Eve and a few of her peers, who take turns telling us the story, in the events leading up to and after a brutal murder that's pinned on a repeat-offender youth from Eve's community. It's a dark book, but circumstances being as they are, things could be darker still. There is something that could almost be described as hope at the end.

In Concrete, by Anne Garréta

I'm in Paris at the moment, and I finished In Concrete a week ago before I left. I didn't like it nearly as much as the other two Anne Garréta books I've read, but it put her in my mind to the point that I spent my first few days here checking every bookstore I came across for her books — with nearly no luck. On my second day of searching, I went to a shop specializing in LGBTQ books and they had one book of hers: this one. I didn't really consider buying it. Having read it in English, I'm fairly certain the French would be beyond my abilities. The book is full of word play: it must have been quite an undertaking to translate. I wondered, as I read it, how it was done. (There is an afterword by the translator, which I read in part.) I assume much of it wasn't so much literal as thematic. In Concrete is a strange book about a pair of sisters who, as girls, help their father with his mad home improvement (muddernization) schemes until one of them gets trapped in concrete. While their father is out seeking help, the free sister (who is also the book's narrator) recounts stories of their wild childhood to entertain her sister and pass the time, and this makes up about half the book. 

Eventually, I found a bookstore here where they offered to order me some Anne Garréta books, so if all works out I'll be heading home with French editions of Pas un jour and Sphinx.

The Tale of the 1002nd Night, by Joseph Roth

I started The Tale of the 1002nd Night just after finishing Dora Bruder. Something about Dora Bruder put me in mind of Joseph Roth, who was living in a hotel in Paris at the time of his death in 1939 – like Dora Bruder and her parents. A Jew born at the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth spent most of his adult life living in hotels in various cities in an increasingly inhospitable Europe. I took a break from The Tale of the 1002nd Night to read two book club books (one of which I have yet to finish), but I went back to it yesterday. It seems this was his last novel, published a few months after his death. 

The book opens in the court of the Persian Shah sometime in the 19th Century, who in a fit of ennui decides to pay a visit to Vienna. The first several chapters of the book are something of a comedy in which the Shah sees a woman at the ball thrown in his honor and decides he'd like to spend the night with her. She's a married member of the nobility, so this certainly can't be allowed, however a Captain in the army who has been attached to the Shah and his retinue knows of a prostitute whom he believes resembles the desired woman enough that they can trick the Shah. The plan goes off and the Shah goes home, but the book stays with the characters in Vienna, whose lives take turn after unexpected turn. There was a point maybe three quarters of the way in when – taking it all in – I believed I saw the reference to The Thousand and One Nights. The story kept shifting, the central characters were rotating, the book had drifted so far from the Shah's first visit, but it was the event that changed the course of all the character's lives. The book wraps up nearly twenty years later when the Shah makes a return, but everything is different after all that time.

Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada

My reading continues to be irregular, but at least I have my Women In Translation book club to motivate me from time to time. Scattered All Over the Earth was our selection for this month. I previously read Tawada's book The Emissary, and this could almost be a companion book – one could imagine the events from The Emissary describing the situation in Japan as the events of Scattered All Over the Earth take place. 

In Scattered All Over the Earth, Japan (without ever being named) has disappeared from the map, though it's not entirely clear what has happened to it. Hiruko, a Japanese woman living in Europe – and stranded there now that her home country doesn't exist – sets off from Denmark to Germany to find one of her compatriots to she can speak Japanese again. This turns into an unexpected adventure with an accumulating number of traveling companions of various nationalities, and accompanying native tongues. 

While I think of Hiruko as the center of the book, we hear from all the characters who join in her travels, and the character who begins and ends the book is a Danish linguist named Knut, who hears Hiruko speaking a language of her own invention, which she uses to communicate across Scandinavia. Other characters speak German as a native or second language, or Danish as a first or second language. One character no longer speaks at all. English is used as a common language, but also avoided because of its associations with imperialism and domination. Much of this book is about language and communication, making it a particularly interesting choice for a book club about books in translation. 

Dora Bruder, by Patrick Modiano

My reading was going so slowly this year that I decided to slow it down even more by attempting something I've never done before: reading an entire book in French (or in any language besides English for that matter). It turned out to be a very satisfying exercise, so maybe I'll do it again. 

How I got here is a story of its own. I was in Rome for a week at the end of March. One night I went to a language and culture exchange meet-up. It was at this strange cafe in the basement of a large building. When you entered, it seemed like you were going into an underground garage, but when you got down there it was a huge space, with bookshelves all around and the books were free! I wasn't really looking at the books, but at some point in the evening I sat down at an out of the way table to eat my plate of pasta from the buffet (another odd feature of this cafe) and a glanced over and saw Patrick Modiano's name on a cover at the end of a nearby shelf, and then I saw it was a French edition. I read the first page to gauge my ability to read it and it seemed manageable to so I decided to take it. 

When I got home from Rome and unpacked I put the book on my coffee table pending shelving and over the next few days I kept seeing it and feeling drawn to it, so that Saturday I decided to give it a try. I wondered if I was being crazy, or trying to find an excuse for not reading, but actually I found I could read it – albeit very slowly. I think I averaged about 15 pages per hour; it took me 9 days to finish the 145-page book, though only a couple of those days included long, concentrated stretches. The book has nice short chapters, and plenty of stopping places even within chapters, making it ideal for a slow read.

The titular Dora Bruder is a Jewish girl of 15 born in Paris in 1926 to an Austrian father and Hungarian mother. It's hard to know the extent to which this is a work of fiction. The narrator (who seems to be Modiano – he recounts some details of his life that (according to Wikipedia at least) are true to Modiano's and at a couple points he also refers to his own books) comes across a notice in an old newspaper from 1941 stating that Dora Bruder's parents are looking for her and providing an address for any information. He is struck by the notice because the address is familiar to him, and over a period of a few years he seeks to find whatever information he can about Dora Bruder. What he ends up with is very little, but aspects of her experience – being sent to a convent school, then later being arrested and interned in a series of camps in France before her eventual deportation to Auschwitz – are filled in by other materials and accounts that Modiano provides. The gap that he's never able to fill is her 3-month sojourn as a runaway during the winter of 1941-1942 (sa fugue in French, which I really liked – I don't think we have a word for this in English in the noun form). Mixed with what Modiano learns or assumes about Dora Bruder's life, are memories from his own youth (and his own fugue) in very different circumstances – he is 20 years her junior, and observations of the physical changes in Paris between the 1940s, the 1960s, and the 1990s, which is the present day of the book. 

Dora Bruder's family lived in the 18th arrondissement, near the Porte de Clignancourt and the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen. I visited that neighborhood when I was in Paris 2 years ago and went to that flea market. When I was walking back to the Metro, I came across a memorial to the deported Jews of Saint-Ouen. I spent a long time reading these names. When the book mentioned the Marché aux Puces, I immediately remembered this site (as well as a plaque on a nearby building indicating that it had been a depot for explosives and munitions used by the Resistance). Saint-Ouen is actually beyond the 18th, just outside the Boulevard Périphérique that separates central Paris from the banlieues, but it's a short walk away from the address given for Dora Bruder's parents. These would have been her neighbors, people she passed in the street. 

Carte Blanche, by Carlo Lucarelli

Facing a quiet evening ahead early last week, I decided to pick up something new to read rather than one of the two books I was already in the midst of. With an upcoming trip to Italy in mind, I pulled out the appealingly short Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli, which I picked up a few years ago at my old favorite thrift shop on Third Avenue. I read about half the book that very evening. The next morning, I read a few more pages before work. I had contractors in my house that week doing work on my kitchen and they arrived that morning half an hour before my workday. I got out of their way and brought the book with me to the office to get some reading done there, and that was the start of the whole mess. 

When I'm reading a book, it lives on the coffee table across from my couch, or in my purse if I'm taking it out with me, but once I'm back home it returns to the coffee table before long. I don't read in bed, so I don't have bedside table books. My books are in the living room. The kitchen work had compacted my living room. The coffee table where the book should go was pushed away in a corner. In any case, I brought the book upstairs to my office. I remember bringing it to my bedroom at one point and then, I thought, back to my office. And then I lost track of it. I hadn't been loving the book, but it was so short I was determined to finish it. I couldn't understand how I might have lost it. Every couple days I would puzzle over it briefly, then forget about it. It seemed bound to turn up, but I was fairly certain it wasn't in my office or bedroom, the last places I remembered having had it. There just wasn't a place for it to hide in either room. 

Two days ago, I decided to just give up. Some people I knew were starting up a new book as part of an ongoing book club and I decided it was a good enough excuse to consider Carte Blanche abandoned. After work on Wednesday, I sat down on the couch and read one chapter of the new book. Later that evening, as I was having dinner at my dining table, which was still pushed close to my couch for the kitchen work (though it had finished a week earlier), I noticed a little blue-green corner sticking out from between two pillows on the couch. My missing book showed up just when I was ready to move on. This evening after work I finished it. 

Carte Blanche is a crime novel set toward the end of WWII in Italy, when the many competing military and political powers each had its own police force, muddying authority and politicizing crimes. When an influential, womanizing friend to the fascists is killed, the policeman at the center of the book simply wants to do his job without being part of a larger agenda, but this proves impossible. In a long foreword, the author explains how his inspiration for the novel resulted from his own academic research into the many competing police forces during that period of Italian history, and a particular policeman who ended up serving in many of them – even those from regimes at opposite ends of the political spectrum. He believed himself beyond the political, that being a policeman he could stand outside those forces. While on the one hand, this book showed that to be impossible, on the other, it didn't question that as an ideal itself. As an avid watcher and occasional reader of mysteries, this is something I grapple with not infrequently – I'm familiar with the concept of copaganda. I don't intend to entirely defend the genre, but the cozy murder mysteries I consume are practically in the realm of fantasy. Whereas Carte Blanche wanted to portray an honorable cop in a flawed system. (This is a whole genre of its own, I know, but not one I consume typically.) But I can't accept the idea of an honorable cop serving a fascist regime. 

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, by Maria José Silveira, and Drunk on Love, by Jasmine Guillory

I started Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters back in late October. I read it for a week or two and I was enjoying it, but this was during the period when I was about six weeks out from my move with a vacation to Italy right in the middle and I was just terrible about reading. As readers of this blog will know, I measure my reading in years. I suppose many people do. I have a sort of tradition at the end of the year, when I allow myself to give up on books that I started at some point during the year and never got around to finishing. Some books don't even make it to this stage, I'll just abandon them outright, but this annual reset keeps me from feeling the weight of unfinished books hanging over me indefinitely. The process for me formally abandoning a book was to mark it abandoned in Goodreads (I've stopped using Goodreads this year and moved things over to The Story Graph, so I guess now it will happen there) and to either get rid of the book or, in some cases, to return it to my shelf (usually with the bookmark still in place, so I guess these cases aren't really total abandonments). Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters would have been destined for this fate except that, surprisingly enough, my Women In Translation book club selected it as our next book. (I was the person who added it to the list we voted on, but I didn't really expect it to win.) And so I kept it out, knowing I needed to return to it in time for our next meeting in early March. Last Thursday I did return to it and I finished it this past Wednesday.

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters is the second Brazilian novel I've read, but in many ways it felt like the first. (The actual first was Clarice Lispector's Near to the Wild Heart, which I read some 20 years ago.) It spans 500 years of Brazilian history told, as the title suggests, matrilineally. Each chapter picks up the story of a new mother/daughter, following them down through the generations, and through their lives and experiences we get a full history of Brazil since the arrival of Europeans. But along with the story of the country, we get intimate portraits of these women some with wonderfully long lives, some with tragically short; some wealthy, some poor, some enslaved; some urban, some rural. I believe Silveira attempted to capture every angle of Brazilian life, every corner of the country as much as could possibly be done in under 400 pages. It's an impressive feat. 

Before my return to Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters, and while also in the midst of reading two other books, I took a little break and read Jasmine Guillory's latest book, Drunk on Love. It delivered in all the ways I expected it to – funny, relaxing, with a satisfying end. Jasmine Guillory's books always include plenty of food, and this one – set in Napa – left me craving arancini and wine. Her books are escapist for me, not just because of the romance but every character is out there doing their best. Friends are supportive in exactly the ways they should be. Family dramas exist, but are resolved or turn out to be one big misunderstanding. The conflicts that arise loom large for the characters, but are on some level trivial and you know they'll be worked out. I never knew this was something I was looking for in books – and, to be honest, most of the time it's not. But now and then it can be pure pleasure to read something that's comforting, that you know will resolve in the way that you want it to, and that will make you laugh along the way. 

The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald

After finishing Shrines of Gaiety, I briefly went back to Midnight in the Century (I suspect I'll continue to work my way through it slowly), but then I had a rather harrowing Tuesday morning. I woke up around 5am and was vaguely aware of a cat meowing continuously somewhere outside my window. I dozed for another hour or so, then got up, showered and came downstairs just before 7am. The meowing was still going, and seemed to get louder as I walked into my back room, which opens out to my backyard. I decided to investigate. The meows seemed to stop when I went outside, and I looked around my yard and what I could see of my neighbors', but didn't see a cat. Just as I was about to head back inside, I noticed a paw sticking out between two wooden fenceposts in my neighbor's yard. I realized the cat was trapped there, with one of its back legs stuck in the fence. On my side of the fence, there was a second chain link fence, topped with concertina wire. The cat must have tried to climb under the wire and over the fences and gotten its paw caught jumping down. I couldn't get a good look at her from my yard because, except for her paw, she was on the other side of the wood fence. I brought out a ladder and put on a coat, hat, and gloves for protection, and got a towel to try wrap the cat in. I had to lift the concertina wire and duck under (which is why I wore the hat) it to be able to grab her on the other side of the fence. She squirmed and hissed and put up quite a fight even in her state of immobility when I tried to close the towel around her, but I was able to get enough weight off her leg that I could twist it the right way and pull it up out from between the fence posts. I thought I might be able to pull her through to my side wrapped in the towel, but she bolted as soon as she was freed. From what I could tell in the brief moment I could see her running off, she seemed okay so hopefully her leg didn't sustain too much damage, but the whole experience left me quite shaken. I came back inside and had my coffee and breakfast and I decided I wanted a book I could curl up into for comfort and warmth. I looked at my shelves and thought The Bookshop might do the trick.

I'm not sure in retrospect if it was quite the book I was looking for – in fact, the end left me a little gutted – but for the hour or so that I read it on Tuesday morning, it was just the thing. A youngish widow in post war England decides to open a bookshop in an out of the way coastal town in East Anglia. There are forces in the town for her and against her, but things seem to come together for her – until they don't. This is only the second book of Penelope Fitzgerald's that I've read, but her simple, clear voice with beautiful attention to details is just how I remembered it. This was a lovely little book. 

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

I've become such a slow reader. After finishing the Marías two weeks into January, I started Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge, who has stuck in my mind since I read Unforgiving Years in 2021. But like Unforgiving Years, it was slow going. I would find my mind wandering, so I only read little bits at a time. Last Friday, I settled in to read it and after a few pages decided it just wasn't what I was in the mood for. The weekend prior, I had gone to New Orleans where I found Kate Atkinson's Shrines of Gaiety in a Little Free Library. It was an exciting find, because I'm a fan of Kate Atkinson and yet I hadn't even known she had a new book out last year. It was sitting on my coffee table when I picked up – and put back down – Midnight in the Century. I thought it might be more my speed, and it was.

I enjoy Kate Atkinson both for her historical literary fiction and her Jackson Brodie detective novels. Shrines of Gaiety is sort of a blend of the two. It takes place in the nightclubs of interwar London. There has been a string of missing girls and unsolved murders, police corruption is suspected, and a detective is determined to clean things up. The novel follows a wide cast of characters in the London nightlife scene. I was reminded of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, which I read many years ago – though I've seen the film adaptation of it, Bright Young Things, much more recently. Specifically there's a gossip columnist in Shrines of Gaiety who reminded me of Simon Balcairn (played by James MacAvoy in the movie). Shrines of Gaiety takes a similarly dark view of the "bright young things," though they are peripheral figures in the story, which focuses more on the people behind the scenes – the nightclub owners, managers, dance hostesses, the dirty cops. Among the central characters are two resourceful young women (one a girl, really) and they give the book its heart. This was a fun read, and apparently just what I needed.

All Souls, by Javier Marías

Once again, I've started the year with Javier Marías. This marks the eighth year I've done so, but the first time I've read one of his books since his death in September of last year. This made the weight of choosing which book to read seem significant, knowing that the number of books remaining is finite. His most recent book, Tomás Nevinson, still hasn't been released in English. It's due out this March I believe, and there may be some early works still untranslated. There may also have been something left nearly done that could be published posthumously, but basically his collection of works is now complete. 

When Marías died, I took it as an opportunity to order every book of his available in English that I didn't already own. This worked out to be three novels, two books of essays, and a tiny volume about Venice. I considered going right back to the beginning and reading Voyage Along the Horizon, his earliest novel available in English, which he started at age 19 and was published when he was 21. But I didn't think it would give me what I wanted. Last year I started the year with his second earliest book available in English, which was published 15 years after Voyage Along the Horizon. I'll admit to knowing next to nothing about the three other books that predate The Man of Feeling, which have not been translated, but operating on the assumption that it might be considered his first mature work, I decided to proceed chronologically from there and so I started All Souls, which is also notable for being the first book of his to be translated into English. Beginning with All Souls his books have been routinely translated and released in English in the expected two years or so following their Spanish publication.

With All Souls I did feel I was getting the true Marías – in short, it gave me what I wanted. This narrator was never named (though at one point he is given a false name). There's a Luisa (the first Luisa?) although she's not the woman at the center of the book. That woman – to my shock – was named Clare*. (I believe I've read only two** other books that featured Clares: Passing and The Road to Damietta, a book I read in middle school about Saint Francis and Saint Clare.) There's the Oxford don and spy, Toby Rylands, who shows up in several other books. In this one, I think, we get more of an origin story for him than in any of the others. There's Oxford itself, which plays a part in so many of Marías books. All Souls featured the usual long ruminations on what appear to be tangential topics, which of course come back in the most unexpected context. 

If I am to proceed from here chronologically, the next steps would be to reread A Heart So White and Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, but I think I may jump ahead instead to the next book I haven't read: The Dark Back of Time. Near the end of All Souls that book's title pops up in the text. But once I've read that, I will have read every novel except the early works and the most recent. There's no question in my mind that I want to reread some – perhaps all – of his books, the question is only of order and timing. 

* Evidently, this same Clare shows up in the Your Face Tomorrow books, a detail I'm surprised to have forgotten. 

** A google search has reminded me of another fictional Clare in a book I've read. It's the rarer male usage: Clare Quilty from Lolita