Read 7 of 2023. The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier. Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker

Title: The Birthday Party
Author: Laurent Mauvignier
Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 9781804270226
Genre: Literary Fiction
Pages: 504
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier will test your patience. Nothing happens till the book reaches the last 250 pages or so. A lot happens – a lot more than we can imagine and Mauvignier takes us through lives in a hamlet, with such unassuming clarity and nonchalant writing that as a reader you feel removed and involved at the same time – if that can ever happen while reading a book, and yet it did happen to me.

The Birthday Party takes place in the present time, hurling back into time, traversing happiness, and melancholy, only for the characters to tumble into unbearable catastrophe. Patrice, a farmer in a French hamlet, is out on an errand for his wife Marion’s 40^th birthday. Their daughter Ida is on her way home from school to get a cake ready with their solitary artist neighbour Christine. In seconds, or rather what seems pages and pages, Christine and Ida get taken hostage by intruders. Why did this happen? What was the reason? Who is behind this? Is it connected to Patrice, Marion, and Christine’s past?

There is a lot to cover to get to the answers. Long winding paragraphs, each character and their experiences are fleshed with great care, the translation by Daniel Levin Becker is busy – all over the place, given how the original is – till the reader finds a rhythm and pace to the chaos that is about the unleash itself, both on the reader and the characters.

The Birthday Party is so much more than what meets the eye. A book about families, about should the past really matter when it comes down to it, about what we have done that cannot be undone, about the evening itself, about what we truly know when it comes to those closest to us, and what lays beneath – quietly, silently, most dramatically, waiting to explode.

March 2020 Wrap-Up

March has been a fantastic month. For me, personally. I have struggled with anxiety and calmed it. I have switched off from the news, and trying very hard to keep away from it on social media as well. I’m just made this way. On the reading front, I read 23 very different books and I am on top of the world. I feel ecstatic. Here’s hoping we all get out of this sane. Much love.
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Here are the titles with the ratings:
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1. Death in her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh (4)
2. Fabulous by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (4)
3. And I do not forgive you: stories and other revenges by Amber Sparks (4)
4. Faces on the tip of my tongue by Emmanuelle Pagano. Translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis (5)
5. The Seep by Chana Porter (5)
6. Fern Road by Angshu Dasgupta (3)
7. Apartment by Teddy Wayne (4)
8. The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar. Translated from the Persian (5)
9. Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara (4)
10. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (4)
11. The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta (4)
12. Girl by Edna O’Brien (4)
13. A Burning by Megha Majumdar (3)
14. Amnesty by Aravind Adiga (3)
15. Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann. Translated from the German by Ross Benjamin (2)
16. Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin. Translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (4)
17. Red Dog by Willem Anker. Translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (2)
18. The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchinson (4)
19. The Other Name: Septology I-II by Jon Fosse. Translated from the French by Damion Searls (5)
20. The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. Translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder (5)
21. Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (4)
22. The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara. Translated from the Spanish by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre (5)
23. Mac’s Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa and Sophie Hughes (4).
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That’s it, folks! What was your reading month of March like? Any favourites?.
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Here’s to April 2020. Can’t wait.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor. Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes

Title: Hurricane Season
Author: Fernanda Melchor
Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 9781913097097
Genre: Literary Fiction, Translation
Pages: 272
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

This is the last book I will be reviewing for the month of March 2020. I am just only too happy that I read Hurricane Season, and enjoyed it to the hilt. There is no way my review is going to do justice to the book, but I shall try.

The book starts with the Witch’s death. Yes, The Witch is dead (almost reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz). Her corpse is discovered by children playing near the irrigation canals (I absolutely loved the imagery of this one, I mean to make this seem so casual and yet not something children want to ever face. The bleakness was delicious). And the book then is about how and why this murder took place. I am putting it in a very simple manner though.

Hurricane Season is not for the faint-hearted in my opinion. There is a lot that gets uncovered and most of it is not pleasant. Yes, there is a lot of violence in the book, but there is a lot of hope and humanity as well. The book is told through the stories of Luismi, Norma, Brando, and Munra. The vividness of a small Mexican village comes through stunningly in Hurricane Season. It reminded me of so many other Latin-American writers, and their spaces, and yet it was so different and new.

Hurricane Season might perhaps be hands-down one of the best books I have read this year. The sheer intensity of the prose, while also showing the read lives wrought with poverty, violence, misogyny, and prejudice. Each chapter presents itself in a different voice – so yes, there is a different perspective, and all of it falls together at the end of it. Everyone says there is a bit of Faulkner in it, but I couldn’t find him. All I heard was Melchor’s distinct voice and the brilliant translation by Sophie Hughes.

The sentences do tend to go on and on and on most of the time, but if you concentrate, and comprehend the narratives, you will be just fine. There is anger, pain, and the understanding of the role literature plays when it comes to compassion and empathy.

 

The Other Name: Septology I-II by Jon Fosse. Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls.

Title: The Other Name: Septology I-II
Author: Jon Fosse
Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 978-1910695913
Genre: Literary Fiction, Translations
Pages: 340
Rating: 5/5

This time the International Booker 2020 longlist has outdone itself. With almost every book I have read so far from the list (barring two), I have enjoyed the rest. Some more. Some less. Enjoyed nonetheless. One such book is this one. The Other Name: Septology I-II is a strange read (like most that I have read this month). It is so much more than what it appears to be. It is not easy to comprehend but please do not let that deter you from reading this lovely novel about an artist, Asle, struggling with his faith. On the other hand, it is also about another artist named Asle, living not very far, almost sharing the same life.

I love experimental literature. I love literature that pushes the boundaries of my limited intelligence and makes me speculate, think, and challenge what I read. The Other Name managed to do that and more. There are no breaks in sentences. You do not know if one character is speaking or someone else is. And despite all of this, The Other Name makes for great reading.

The concept of a doppelgänger has always fascinated me. This book with its many layers, and the intellectual puzzle it presents to readers is complex no doubt, but there is a layer of simplicity to that as well. The Other Name speaks of so many things – faith, love, loneliness, identity, memory, and above all what art is all about. I think these are the major themes in a sense of this year’s International Booker long-list. I am not complaining at all. Such themes work the best for me as a reader.

Fosse doesn’t try too hard to connect with the reader. The prose is there. It is almost a take it or leave it kind of situation. There is a lack of plot in a sense that the semblance of a plot meanders and continues to right till the end of the book, but even then the book leaves you in a trance every time you read portions from it.

The Years by Annie Ernaux. Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer

Title: The Years
Author: Annie Ernaux
Translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
ISBN: 978-1910695784
Genre: Biographies, Memoirs, Women Writers, French Literature, French History
Pages: 240
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5 stars

The Years by Annie Ernaux caught my eye when it was long-listed for the Man Booker International Prize 2019. I am on the shadow panel of the prize and have till now read 11/13 long-listed books. This one for sure is on my personal shortlist. Why you ask? Here’s why.

The Years is considered to be Ernaux’s finest work and rightly so. It is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 and all of this is told through events – historic and personal, impressions – past and present, and through culture, habits, books, art, music, movies, and above all people. It could be termed as meta-novel but it is so much more according to me. It is a woman’s experience growing up in tumultuous years. It is an experience of history, the world at large, and memory of a woman in a time that stays and mostly does not.

The Years captures so much. It is political and individual. It is Proust-like, only to find a voice of its own. It is full of lists (which I love) and long passages of what happened where and when, what food was cooked and what did it smell or taste like, what mode of transportation was taken, and whose heart was broken. Not to forget the lucid translation from the French by Alison L. Strayer. It isn’t easy to capture emotion and translate that to perfect sentences the way Strayer manages.

The Years is a book that deserves to be savoured and not rushed into. You need to take your time with it. You need to nurture it. Its fluidity, grace, and by that extension all heart is very rare to find in books. So when you do, you hang on to it and cherish the writing. Time, place, and memory beautifully merge in this gem of a book.