Ethel by Helen Mort- the biography of countryside pioneer Ethel Haythornthwaite

If Ethel Haythornthwaite isn’t yet a household name, then she really should be. She was the woman who, in 1924, gathered together a group of Sheffielders that went on to co-found the CPRE—the Campaign to Protect Rural England. After the Second World War she helped set up the National Parks, of which the glorious Peak District was one of the first. She was a passionate lover of the countryside, a tireless campaigner for its preservation from the encroaching ills of industrialisation, and a published poet—her long-form poem The Pride of the Peak was published by Jonathan Cape in 1926, and appears in the second section of this book. The CPRE Peak District and South Yorkshire wanted to honour Ethel in this, their centenary year, by producing a biography, and asked Helen Mort to write it. A local poet and writer, a runner and climber with an intimate knowledge of both Sheffield and the Peak District, I can think of no better person than Helen for the job.

Helen’s presence is there in the book, as she runs through Longshaw and Blackamoor, feeling in the mud under her feet the places that Ethel preserved for us. We hear the poet when she describes the border of Sheffield like a squashed, distorted maple leaf…trampled somehow, softened by rain and then moved by someone’s steel-toe-capped boot. We meet the curious researcher as she walks through Endcliffe Park and up Riverdale to find the site of Ethel’s home on Endcliffe Vale Road. Then there are the letters that Helen writes to Ethel in between chapters, commenting, admiring, asking about her life—mirroring the means of communication that Ethel herself used, day in, day out, to family, to friends, but also those in power, to cajole and persuade them of the importance of her mission. Ethel was no street protester after all, Helen tells us. She used the quieter, more genteel method of letter-writing to achieve her goals.

Ethel was born in 1896 into money, though recently acquired. Her father was Thomas Ward, who made his fortune from scrap metal, crucial for Sheffield’s steel industry during World War One. (Amongst the several intriguing photos in the book I must mention the one of the elephant named Lizzie Ward, leased by Thomas Ward’s firm during the war to cart scrap metal through the streets of Sheffield!)  Her mother was Mary Sophia Bassett from the liquorice family. The family were comfortably off, and Ethel was well educated, attending a boarding school in Kent with her sister, Gertie, then studying English literature at university in London. When she returned to Sheffield in 1913 her father had been appointed Master Cutler in Sheffield, a highly prestigious public office—there’s no doubt that his connections helped Ethel in her campaigns.

Very sadly, Ethel suffered a tragic personal loss early on in her life. She’d met and married a young man called Henry Burrows Gallimore in 1916, a Sheffielder and poet, like Ethel. They  shared an adoration of the countryside, honeymooning in the Lake District, and the intense passion they experienced on this trip formed the basis for Henry’s poem An Offering, discussed by Helen in some detail in the book. Like so many of his generation he was killed in the First World War, in 1917, aged thirty-one. He and Ethel had been married for just fifteen months and she was a widow at twenty-two. Arguably, this tragedy was the trigger for her life’s work. Ethel’s sister Gertie would drive her out into the Peaks in the years after Henry’s death to help her sister find solace there and heal. As she experienced the beneficial spiritual powers of the countryside, Ethel also became aware of the perils of unbridled development springing up to spoil it. In May 1924 she invited the great and the good of Sheffield to a meeting in the billiard room of Endcliffe Vale House with a view to setting up a committee for the protection of the countryside. The committee soon became the Sheffield wing of the national Council for the Preservation of Rural England, and Ethel its secretary, a post she held till 1980, for over 50 years.

Their mission was at first an aesthetic one, concerned with the effects of modernisation. Ethel and the committee were worried about the ugliness of electricity pylons, the rise of the motor car bringing day trippers into the countryside, and the prevalence of litter. She was keen to get people on board, to help them see what was happening to the beautiful countryside on their doorstep, and was adept at using visual imagery to do so. In 1929 she displayed a collection of litter found in the Peak District in a glass fronted Display Case in Sheffield’s Cutler’s Hall. In the publication The Threat to the Peak, she used Phil Barnes’ photographs to show the ugliness of the huge advertisements placed incongruously on the side of rural buildings. She recognised that petrol stations were now a necessary evil, but did they have to be so unsightly with their medley of strident colours? Ethel was also concerned about housing development, the sprawl of towns overwhelming the countryside, and it wasn’t until 1947, with the passing of the Town and Country Planning Act, that controls on development were introduced. To prevent that sprawl, the association raised money to purchase part of the Longshaw Estate from the Duke of Rutland in 1927, which they then conveyed to the National Trust in 1931. To protect the Blacka Moor Estate, just outside Sheffield and now a wild-life-rich landscape, Ethel used her powers of persuasion on Alderman Graves. He bought the land himself and then handed it over to the city of Sheffield in 1933.

A longer and more drawn out campaign, which was also—and remains—a national issue, was that of the preservation of the Green Belt. The Sheffield CPRE mapped out land around the city to preserve it for the enjoyment and leisure of city folk and Ethel was helped in this by Gerald Haythornthwaite, her second husband, whom she met when he applied for a job with the CPRE in 1935. Their plans were approved by a small majority of Sheffield Corporation in 1938, but the war intervened, and the slum clearances after the war meant there was a desperate need for house building on the edge of Sheffield. Accordingly, development was permitted at Meersbrook, Rivelin and Gleadless despite Ethel and Gerald’s plans. The achievement that had perhaps the widest impact was Ethel’s contribution to the setting up of the National Parks after the war. She was invited to serve on the Hobhouse Committee by the new Labour government in 1945, and their report, published in 1947, led to the founding of the first four National Parks, of which our lovely Peak District National Park is one.

Inevitably a book like this, brought out for a centenary celebration, leads us to reflect on the differences between then and now, and Helen Mort is particularly good at bringing these out. As a wordsmith, she’s aware of the rather different, occasionally patronising, language used in Ethel’s day to describe developments she found objectionable. Though Ethel’s concerns in preserving the countryside were primarily aesthetic, our concerns now are more around the effects of climate change, species preservation, access to the countryside for a wider group of people. Some things, however, are not so different: Ethel’s insistence on the spiritual benefits of the countryside sounds remarkably like the mental health messages we receive today.

What I most enjoyed about the book, though, (as well as the wonderful green flaps and many compelling black and white photographs) was the presence of both biographer and subject, of both Ethel and Helen, in the text. It really does feel like one restless woman looking for another. And in these final words, this coming together of land and language, it’s as if they’ve found each other: Landscape as a constant. As partner. Language as a moor. This is Ethel’s world and she welcomed us to it.

Thanks to Vertebrate Publishing for the review copy. You can order a copy from Vertebrate at https://bit.ly/3QccggK

Black Car Burning by Helen Mort

The title might make you think it’s a novel about an urban riot, but in fact Black Car Burning is the name of a challenging climb in the Peak District, just outside Sheffield. You wouldn’t be wrong in making that urban association, though. This is a novel that rocks between Sheffield and the Peak District, both beloved of the author, poet Helen Mort. It covers themes absolutely integral to the character and recent experiences of both places—the tragedy of Hillsborough, the climbing community—interleaved with some gorgeously lyrical passages where the Derbyshire Edges, the Sheffield rivers and parks, come into their own and talk to us directly.

The narrative follows the stories of three characters: Him, Alexa and Leigh. An early scene has Him as an older man in the local library with a new black notebook, open at the first white page, looking at the computer in an attempt to read reports and to make notes on the 1987 Hillsborough football disaster. His attempts are interrupted by random thoughts triggered by terms like asphyxia and damages, his black underlining on the page reminding him of something. Another page. Other words. Underlining the parts that didn’t fit. A brief reference to the force lets us know that he was one of the South Yorkshire Police at the Hillsborough football stadium that day and as the narrative progresses we see the toll the tragedy, and the subsequent behaviour of South Yorkshire Police, has taken on him.

Alexa is a young Police Community Support Officer with South Yorkshire, dealing with the day-to-day challenges of policing in Sheffield now. There’s been a recent rise in the Eastern European Roma population in Page Hall, causing tensions in the community, and there’s the other characters that Alexa comes across in her work—Eva, a survivor of domestic abuse, Tony up on the rooftop—their sadness and loneliness and bitterness bundled into a lump the size of a stone and lobbed into the air. Alexa is not confident in her work, sometimes struggling to find the right words in her dealings with people. Her anxiety is compounded as the story unfolds by a recurrent dream that she’s driving an emergency vehicle on the day of the Hillsborough disaster, and can’t get through, the bodies piling up on each side. And this at a time her colleague Dave is concerned about Operation Resolve, the latest criminal investigation into Hillsborough.

The third character is Leigh, a young woman who works at an outdoor gear shop in the Peak District. She gets on well with her older co-worker Pete, and it’s through them that we’re introduced to the climbing community. There’s an older cohort, described at times as a little seedy, sitting in Derbyshire pubs reminiscing about heroic climbs and climbers. Leigh’s part of a younger generation though, and her head is turned, near closing time one day, when Caron comes into the shop looking for climbing shoes. Through some flirtatious banter they establish that they move in overlapping climbing circles and Leigh’s subsequent sexual fantasy is overlaid with a dream of watching Caron climb. They start to climb together, Leigh holding the rope for Caron, while Caron tells Leigh her real ambition is to climb Black Car Burning.

Watching and reflecting on the goings-on of these characters are the very rocks and villages of Derbyshire and these passages will lift the heart of readers who know the Peak District. I loved the words of Stanage,  I’m strewn with beads, cast-offs from a giant, stone bracelet, dropped and forgotten in the heather. Then there’s Hathersage, fed-up with going soft to appease the tourists, I want the wind to batter me so hard my stone houses start to creak… I want to be cut, the way the edges cut the violet heather and divide the land from the sky. The interventions from Sheffield places resonate with the city’s history, the river Don, a seam through the city, gleaming like melted-down cutlery when the sun shines on me directly, a memory of knives and brightness, polished usefulness. Just listen to that assonance, the stately pace at the end of the sentence.

Now the links between these three characters and their narratives, revealed more or less gradually, is echoed in one of the novel’s important themes, that of relationships. We learn that the male character, Him, enjoyed a conventional monogamous relationship, whereas Alexa is polyamorous, and Leigh is having a secret affair with Tom, about to be married to another woman. It’s as if Helen Mort is showing us this range of relationships, inviting us to think about secrecy and openness and the question of trust. Trust being of course a seam that threads through the whole novel—the community no longer trusting the police, the trust of the climber in their mate holding the rope below.

While the writer makes no judgement on relationship choices she does suggest a generational difference in attitude. We learn that Alexa has fallen out with her father because he doesn’t approve of her polyamory. And those androgynous names, Leigh and Alexa, surely invoke a more gender-fluid world. But the generational difference goes beyond differences in sexual behaviour. Towards the end of the book, there’s a sense of the younger generation moving on. Alexa and Leigh eventually find friendship through participating in the Sheffield tree protests—preventing the felling by climbing up them of course. While the older man Him attends the 2016 Hillsborough Inquest. The verdict is Unlawful Killing. A 7-2 majority vote. He checks the timetable for trains to Liverpool, buys flowers, presumably to lay at his wife’s grave. Has he found closure? Is it even possible to find closure, to move on after such a tragedy?  Maybe not, but there’s some comfort in that last line, he loses himself in the crowd. He’s less alone than before.

This is a powerful and moving novel about tragedy, loss, and its inescapable aftermath. It’s a close portrayal of community and the power of human connections. It looks both to the past, and to a very ancient past at times with the rocks and rivers speaking to us, but also to the future with the younger generation moving forwards and finding ways to heal.

Un Amor by Sara Mesa, translated by Katie Whittemore

I really enjoyed Sara Mesa’s short story collection Mala Letra (Bad Handwriting) so was delighted to find that Pereine Press are now publishing her novel Un Amor in English translation. Some of the same themes in the short story collection are present in the novel—power in everyday relationships, claustrophobic spaces, the need to escape, miscommunication—but the unsettling atmosphere she excels at creating is drawn out here, expertly plotted and paced to maximise tension, over 170 pages.

It’s the story of Nat, a woman in her thirties, who arrives in a small village, La Escapa, in southern Spain, where she intends to rent a house for a few months and work on a literary translation. She has numerous practical difficulties to contend with: the house is basic and ill-equipped and the garden, where she’s trying to grow veg, dry and unyielding. The weather is intense: blistering heat alternating with ferocious storms, her nights tormented by mosquitoes, spiders and salamanders, her days by flies and ants overrunning the kitchen.

Relationships with the locals are no less challenging. There’s Nat’s landlord, an unpleasant, rude and leery man, whose presence has the power to contaminate the house in just a few seconds. He demands she pays the rent in cash, so he can make monthly visits to stare at her breasts. There’s Píter, called the hippy, who becomes a friend, yet is forever telling her what to do, one of those annoying people with a stream of bright ideas as to what she should cook/ plant/grow. There’s the young shop assistant, keen to escape to the bright lights of Cárdenas, who gives Nat the low-down on the locals, like the elderly brother and sister, thought to have had an incestuous relationship, their house now in ruins, the tags God’s Punishment and Shame graffitied chillingly across the walls.

It’s hard for Nat to know who to trust here, how to read the codes in this new community, and this is reflected in her difficulty with the translation she’s working on. The author is not writing in her native language, and Nat asks herself, is each unexpected or ambiguous word an error based on a lack of knowledge of the language, or an intended effect resulting from intense consideration? There’s no way to know. There’s an awareness, too, of the emptiness of language, a performance with no meaning in the case of Roberta, suffering from dementia, who reproduces words from a TV programme, learned words, seemingly unconnected, words with limited meanings. Sometimes it’s just the sound of language that draws attention, the German with his odd way of speaking, knocking his syllables together, like he’s in a rush or being abrupt. This is of a piece with this author’s finely tuned ear and her use of auditory detail to increase tension: creaks and squeaks, air whistling through the shutters, the fan’s hum, Sieso’s toe-nails click-clacking on the old wooden porch, pacing around the stake.

The plot takes a new turn when Nat’s predatory landlord refuses to mend the leaking roof, and she’s offered practical help from an unexpected quarter. The consequences of this are played out in the second half of the novel, and involve Nat becoming sexually infatuated with her lover, to the detriment of everything else in her life. She can no longer concentrate on translating, and takes her eye off the ball with Sieso, the hopelessly ill-trained dog that the landlord has left her. Suffice to say, a horrible accident occurs, and Nat is only saved from very serious consequences by her neighbours’ decision not to press charges. And suddenly we’re plunged back into an incident from Nat’s past that she confessed to Píter early on as the reason for her coming to La Escapa—an act of wrongdoing on her part, where the victim had forgiven her, but could at any time turn this into condemnation. Nat had come to La Escapa to escape the power of the victim, only to find herself, nightmarishly, in the same situation again.

There’s a clever exploration of power relationships in this novel, highlighted by Nat’s essential vulnerability as an outsider in the community and as the object of the predatory male gaze. But it’s Sara Mesa’s technical skill, her careful pace and plotting, her succinct but vivid language, which also keep our attention and unnerve us. And I love the way she can take us from the vastness of the external natural world one minute to the smallest details the next: from the hulking form of the El Glauco mountain to that snake in the woodpile, a snub-nosed adder with an insolent snout and scowling, concentrated expression. It’s a powerful read indeed, that I thoroughly recommend.  Many thanks to Peirene press for the review copy.

 The novel will be published on 4 June 2024, Peirene subscribers will receive it in early May.

True North- Selected Stories by Sara Maitland

I’ve been a great fan of Sara Maitland’s writing over the years, so was thrilled to discover that Manchester’s Comma Press have just published True North, a selection of  short stories written over her impressive 40 year career. It’s a wide-ranging collection, including reworking of fairy tales, classical myths and historical moments often from a feminist perspective. Several explore twin and sibling relationships, where we can see a deeper preoccupation with balance and harmony beneath the surface. She’s an acute observer of the natural world in some heart-stoppingly beautiful lyrical passages, yet gives a sharp and witty portrayal of human interaction and relationships in others. And my favourites are when those stories grounded in a quotidian reality morph into something rather unexpected and definitely surreal.

Hansel and Gretel takes place many years after the two little children gaunt with hunger, glazed with grief, are lost in the forest. Here, they’re twins who now, as adults, live near one another and Hansel is regularly drawn to visit his sister who lives alone. Gretel confesses to him one day her guilt at killing the witch and wonders if the whole story about Hansel imprisoned in the cage even happened, if any of it happened, it was all so long ago. She herself puts out sweeties for the little children who come past her house and hope they won’t push her in the oven. In Rapunzel Revisited we see our heroine many years after her confinement in the tower. She’s enjoyed her time at court, but now as an older woman returns to the tower to get some peace and quiet. She describes the expansive view from each window, so it’s hardly a prison, more like being on top of the world, and she even has a new witch to look after her now, bouncing up the ladder with youthful enthusiasm, radiant good health and a mild excess of jollity. And the silly young thing calls herself a health visitor!

Witches are often a presence in these stories and in Moss Witch we learn that they’re found in places where ancient woodland is caressed by at least two hundred wet days a year. The Moss Witch is a sort of guardian and expert on 154 moss species in all their variety: great swathes of sphagnum on open moors; little frolicsome tufts on old slate roofs and walls, surprising mounds flourishing on corrugated asbestos, low-lying velvet on little-used tarmac roads, and weary, bullied, raked and poisoned carpets fighting for their lives on damp lawns. Of course, there’s the historical fact that women deemed to be witches were burned to death, but in The Swans we have the silent princess saved on the pyre by her brothers transformed from swans when they catch her embroidered shirts in their beaks.

Those brothers, those siblings, feature in several stories. In some cases it’s the helpfulness of a brother as in The Swans, or the friendly familiar banter between siblings in Her Bonxie Boy. But in others it’s the relationship between identical twins that’s centre stage. In A Fall From Grace, the acrobats leave French circuses in their droves to work on Eiffel’s new tower in Paris. They, of all people, knew in the marrow of their bones and the tissue of their muscles the precise tension—that seven million threaded rods, and two and a half million bolts could, of course, hold fifteen thousand steel girders in perfect balance.  Identical twins Eva and Louise as girls aren’t allowed to work on the tower, so they dance in the nightclubs of Montmartre instead, meeting the rich Countess, shifting their bodies for balance in her carriage as they do on the tightrope, finding harmony when they do finally scale the tower, drunken and reckless. In The Beautiful Equation David returns home after their mother’s death to look after his identical twin brother, Derek, who has Asperger’s syndrome. He’s mystified and irritated when Derek starts writing the same mathematical equation all over the house. When Derek explains that the equation represents positive and negative forces, and reflects their sibling relationship, a punch up ensues. Neither man is ever seen again.

Her Bonxie Boy is one of the stories with a realistic, relatable protagonist that morphs into the surreal later on.  Helen is an internationally recognised ornithologist who’s returning to the Scottish Island of Allt na Croite in the early spring to continue researching the effects of wind turbines on different bird species. Her particular focus is on skuas, the big thuggish ones with the heavy beaks and barrel-chests. There’s some wonderful description of bird life, landscape and seasonal change as she heads north. She’s also looking forward to some solitude, treasured by many women in this collection, though we know from a joshing phone call with her brother, she’s got a love interest up there whom she’s keen to get back to.

Why I Became a Plumber is also grounded in the banality of everyday events. The protagonist is given a garden with a little house attached as a silver wedding anniversary present, only to discover it’s a retirement present too: she’s being retired as a wife by her husband who’s found a younger model. She keeps hearing a slight sibilant noise coming from the loo and realises she’s got to sort it out by herself now, having relied on her husband throughout her married life. Amidst lots of word play on flushing—her menopausal, the loo’s technical—she discovers the unexpected explanation for that noise. And resolves to capitalise on her new knowledge by becoming a plumber.

Now, I’ve sadly no time to go into detail here on the historical stories, An Edwardian Tableau, The Pardon List, or indeed the reworking of the classical story of Andromeda. Suffice to say that running through these three is a tremendous and breathtaking thread of women’s rage. Their rage at being put down, controlled and belittled by men. And a sort of celebration of their anger when they physically act out that anger, rampaging through their environment and discovering their power. And I am saying their here but actually I want to say our, because the strength of feeling in these stories got right under my skin and I was right there with them.

This is a great collection, really showcasing Sara Maitland’s considerable story telling skills, her careful plotting and pacing, the originality in her reworking of old stories, the fresh imaginativeness of her new tales. If you love short stories, this collection is for you. Thanks to Comma Press, experts in the short form, for bringing these to us and for my review copy.

Volver la vista atras- Retrospective by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, translated by Anne Mclean.

This most recent novel by Juan Gabriel Vasquez focuses on the life of Colombian film director Sergio Cabrera. The frame story is Sergio’s trip to Barcelona, where a retrospective festival of his films is taking place. Just before the festival starts, Sergio gets the news that his father, Fausto, has died. Fausto’s death prompts much reflection on his upbringing, and the bulk of the novel takes us back to his extraordinary youth in Mao’s China and in the EPL guerrilla movement in Colombia. We know this is a writer deeply concerned with the history of Colombia, and the account of life in the guerrilla movement is absolutely compelling, but I was also struck by the theme of fathers and sons here, a theme we’ve met in his previous novel, The Informers. Not only do we see the relationship between Sergio and his father Fausto, but also Sergio’s relationship with his own teenage son, Raúl, who accompanies him to the film festival.

The personal retrospective starts with Fausto. His Spanish Republican family is forced into exile at the end of the Civil War and, after living  a while in The Dominican Republic and Venezuela, ends up in Colombia. He becomes an actor, working first on radio, and then television, always maintaining his left wing sympathies through the violence and bloodshed of the late 40s. His politics make life increasingly untenable under the dictatorship of Pinilla, especially with McCarthyism, the Korean war, and the Cuban revolution making Communism seem the biggest threat ever, and Fausto takes up the offer to move his family to Peking for a job teaching Spanish.

Now, up to this point I found the novel a little pedestrian. There was a bit too much straining to fit the Cabrera family’s experiences to seminal historical events to my taste, and I just wasn’t emotionally engaged. This changed completely the moment the family embark on their extraordinary plane journey to Peking in 1968, involving three days confined to a hotel room in Moscow, and stopovers in Omsk and Irkutsk due to technical faults, where they sleep in a freezing shed. Once in Peking, the family are housed in the Hotel de la Amistad, a luxury hotel where foreign workers are accommodated with their families. With its Olympic swimming pool, restaurants and boutiques it represents a sort of parallel universe to the miserable material conditions endured by the Chinese people outside. While Fausto and his wife Luz teach Spanish in the Peking Languages Institute, Sergio and his sister Marianella attend regular school outside the hotel with other Chinese students. From the age of 15, this involves military training for Sergio, including the use of firearms, a bayonet and target practice.

While in Peking, Fausto and Luz hone their Maoist revolutionary credentials. They decide to return to Colombia to take part in the armed struggle there, somewhat alarmingly leaving Sergio and Marianella, aged 16 and 14, behind in Peking. Alarmingly, because this is the eve of the Cultural Revolution, a movement led by school students to propagate the words of Chairman Mao, involving public haranguing and humiliation of authority figures seen as in any way undermining his ideas. There’s a distressing scene where the art and design teacher at Sergio’s school is first criticised, then physically assaulted by his students for saying that the design of an American plane is superior to that of the Soviet plane. School students become members of the Red Guard and sack museums, temples and libraries, seeking to destroy any cultural objects associated with pre-revolutionary values. The schools close down, Sergio and Marianella spend weeks at home, before going off to work in the fields and factories. When Sergio himself becomes a Red Guard, his experience is contrasted with that of a quite different set of teenagers—the children of the diplomatic corps, protected from external political upheavals as they’re whisked from swimming pool to a showing of A Hard Day’s Night, whatever that’s about—Sergio has never heard of The Beatles or their music.

Eventually, Sergio and Marianella are summoned back to Colombia, to Medellín, where Fausto and Luz are both working for the Maoist revolutionary movement, while Fausto is also putting on political theatre. There are tensions between Sergio and his father, who’s quick to criticise his son, and it’s only a matter of time before the two youngsters get The Call.  My heart sank when they’re asked to turn up at the bus stop with a pair of those ominous rubber boots. From my reading of other fiction from Colombia ( The Lucky Ones by Julianne Pachico, This Wound full of Fish by Lorena Salazar Masso), this can only mean one thing: they’re going to join the guerrillas.

There follows a fascinating, if often harrowing, account of their years with the EPL, the Popular Liberation Army, in the deepest and most remote rural areas in the country. They endure considerable physical hardship, walking for days on end in sweltering temperatures with little to eat. What they do eat is what they can hunt—including otters and tapirs—and beg from the poor rural communities they’re working with. Insect bites are a constant problem as well as the threat of serious illnesses such as paludism, and combat injuries, which they’ve barely got the wherewithal to treat. There’s a dreadful emotional toll for Sergio and Marianella too. They’re despised and bullied by their leader Fernando for their educated, bourgeois backgrounds and Marianella is sexually harassed by him, as a result of which she runs away, though we learn that leaving the guerrillas is not so easy, but rather a lifetime’s work.

Some of the best writing is in this long and detailed section. We have fabulous descriptions of the lush and impenetrable jungle, a lucid narrative of the movements and activities of the guerrillas on the ground, but also a moving and intimate account of Sergio’s inner feelings. He has with him the twelve pages of instructions his father gave him before leaving China, his orders on how to behave as a good revolutionary. He consults this regularly, feels constantly guilty that he’s not living up to these high standards, even more so when, as time goes on, he starts wishing he wasn’t there at all.

It’s a relief at times that the intense sections set in China and the jungle are interleaved by occasional passages back in Barcelona at the film festival. We see Sergio mulling over more recent events in his life, his memories triggered by the films, recollecting the places they were first shown, for example the showing of Todos se van in Havana in 2014 when the Colombian Peace Accords were being negotiated and he realises some former guerrillas are in the audience. Then there’s the memories of Bogotá in autumn 2016, when he’s aware of the reservations ordinary Colombians have about the Peace Accords, influenced by the church, by Facebook and Twitter, even then. And these memories mixed with time out spent with his son Raúl, visiting Barcelona book stores and La Sagrada Familia together, talking to him, and eventually showing him family photographs too.

You see, as Sergio tells us, the family never really talked to each other much once they returned from China: they were each busy with their own activities. So it’s as if he’s trying to do something different now with his own son. And though he insists to Raúl that he loved Fausto, who taught him so much about acting, I can’t help feeling it’s significant that neither he nor Marianella go to Fausto’s funeral. There was that thought that would come to Sergio at night in the jungle, and for years after: at what point do parents decide their children would be better off brought up by the revolutionaries than at home with them? So for me, as much as the novel deals with a broad sweep of history—revolutionary movements in China and Colombia—it also digs deep into the personal. It’s a very personal reckoning between Sergio and his father, a reckoning for that abandonment.

Not A River by Selva Almada translated by Annie McDermott

Not A River, shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize 2024, is the final novel in a trilogy about masculinity by Argentinian writer Selva Almada, following on from Brickmakers and The Wind That Lays Waste. The International Booker Prize recognises the skill of both writer and translator by dividing the prize equally between them, and we see the skills of both working together from the start here. The novel opens with a powerful image of three men fishing. They’re in the final moments of landing a huge ray, Enero at first glimpse dominant in this struggle, standing firm on the boat, stocky and beardless, swollen-bellied, legs astride, his physical presence reflected in those short staccato syllables. The masculine narrative voice is there straightaway with El Negro alongside the boat, water up to his balls, extending to the landscape—those hard consonants and dull vowels of the river, pancake flat.

Enero and El Negro, both now fifty-something, have come to the island on a camping and fishing trip, with a younger man, Tilo, the son of their old friend, Eusebio. They hang up the now dead ray on a branch, like an old blanket hanging in the shade .The narrative switches between all three of them, remembering past trips as they crack open the beers. We’re reminded that though familiar with the island, they’re not from there. When El Negro ventures into the woods for kindling, he inadvertently treads on a twig and the noise is deafening….. announcing the presence of an intruder. Their outsider status is underlined further when local man Aguirre turns up with his gang. Seeing the dead ray, he initiates a little rivalrous sparring about how many bullets it takes to kill one, before lighting up slowly and taking position proprietorially on the shore.

Interleaved with the story of the fishing trip are flashbacks, recollections from all three men, that give us some insight into their past. We learn that Enero, El Negro and Eusebio were friends from boyhood, spending long days by the dam, lazing around under the trees, fishing, chatting, reading comics, flicking through the magazines full of naked women and crimes stories. There are scenes from their young adulthood too, their antics now featuring heavy drinking and casual sex. Its consequences are part of their story, when Eusebio tells his mates that he’s having a kid with Diana, when Enero sends the girl he’s knocked up to have an abortion, she miserable and ashamed, Enero utterly indifferent.

After some early foreshadowing, the details of Eusebio’s accident are revealed, and the narration opens up to give us the response of Diana and young Tilo to the tragedy. There’s also a shift in the narration that conveys a sort of whole community response to the tragedy:

Ask around and anyone will remember Eusebio’s accident. The first stirrings: sounds like someone’s gone missing, there’s a search on. Then the panic: what if it was this person or that, plenty of folks were out fishing that weekend, it was a national holiday, the beginning of summer, word was the fish were frolicking in the river like butterflies.

This community, this group response, is echoed elsewhere in the book, when the three main protagonists are identified as a group rather than individuals: their close embrace while drunkenly dancing, their names all beginning with E, the not entirely clear account of who had Delia for a mother, who was brought up by his sisters—I had to reread passages to get this straight. And then there’s the layout of the dialogue on the page, the speaker always coming after what’s said:

Christ, she’s ugly!

Says Enero, slapping his thigh and laughing. The others laugh as well.

Fought us pretty hard.

Says El Negro.

as if any of them could be saying it, as if they’re almost interchangeable. And women, for these men, are interchangeable too. El Negro’s sisters, long hair, tall and slender as herons—even he couldn’t tell them apart.

The women enter the narrative some way in, around the time we learn of Eusebio’s accident. There’s Diana Maciel, who returned to the island to take over her father’s hotel when he died, and her best friend Marisa, Tilo’s godmother. There’s Siomara, horribly beaten by her father when she was a girl, now prone to lighting fires as a way of dealing with her anger. There are two young women, Mariela and Lucy, aged 15 and 16, who turn up at César’s bar on the island and catch the lustful eye of Enero having a beer with Tilo. Things get very sleazy when they start having a flirtatious banter, given that Enero must be old enough to be their father.

From this point, time frames seem to break down. It becomes harder to separate the fishing trip in the main narrative from different incidents in the past. Connections between characters are not immediately apparent and boundaries between the living and the dead are fudged. This seems of a piece with the superstition that’s part of life in this community: Enero has had a scary recurrent dream since childhood of The Drowner, his face pressing against the child’s, the soft grey flesh, cheeks eaten away by the fish so you could see the line of molars.It’s so disturbing that the boys seek help from Gutiérrez, the healer, to ask what it all means.

There’s some wonderful language in this book, and I loved the concision of the imagery: Enero’s feet are plump as empanadas, his mother frail as a leaf in her final days. I admired the clever plotting in the interweaving of the narrative strands. But I did find the misogyny and sexualisation of very young women hard to read. There’s a scene where Mariela is taken to Santa Fé by her uncle to buy a new dress, and all eyes are on her, looking at her with desire, at her uncle with envy. A colleague of Enero’s in a different town in the north was seeing a girl who could’ve been his daughter and she was pregnant with his second kid. I found myself clinging on to the female characters who were in any shape or form resisting the pattern of early sex followed by pregnancy: Gutiérrez’ wife telling Enero sharply to get the snip if you don’t want kids, that girl he abandoned, who then left for Buenos Aires, me, the reader, hoping she’d get some qualifications and a decent job. I realise, of course, that the novel is a critique of misogyny, but I could have done with just a few more signs that things don’t have to be this way. The novel is a very fine account of male bonding and behaviour in a poor rural community, but the misogynistic attitude towards women left a bitter aftertaste for me.

Many thanks to Charco Press for the review copy.

Forgottenness by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated by Zenia Tompkins.

There are two parallel stories in Tanja Maljartschuk’s novel Forgottenness. It’s the story of Viacheslav Lypynskyi, born in 1882, an important figure in the early 20^th century struggle for Ukrainian independence. It’s also the story of the narrator, a young Ukrainian woman, and a writer concerned with the way time consumes everything, not merely disappearing things and people, but leaving no trace of them behind. She reads about Lypynskyi’s death in 1931 in an old newspaper, and becomes intrigued by him, finding echoes of his life in her own. Both lives are explored in alternating chapters, with the struggle for Ukrainian statehood centre stage. And though there is disappointment, loss and misery in both narratives, the stories are leavened by a wonderfully rich vocabulary, by some simple but striking imagery and by that dark humour so characteristic of Ukrainian writing.

Lypynskyi shows his commitment to Ukrainian statehood from an early age. His family are Polish, living in the town of Zaturtsi , north east of Lviv and the young Lypynskyi has been sent to university in the Polish city of Krakow. His family are horrified when he returns from uni, insisting that his first name Wacław be spelled the Ukrainian way, Viacheslav,and, worse still, speaking Ukrainian which wasn’t even a language, just a rural dialect, a hodgepodge of Polish and Russian which they’d never heard emerge from the lips of an educated person, only from the local poor. This is just the beginning of Lypinskyi’s fascination with Ukrainian language and culture. He’s officially studying agriculture at Krakow, but finds himself spending more time in the Ukrainian Studies department, where he impresses his teachers with his grasp of the language. He develops an interest in Ukrainian history, not as far from agriculture as you might think, comments our narrator—after all, both disciplines are concerned with roots!

Truth be told, Lypynskyi is a classic polymath, his interest in history turning later to a passion for the new discipline of sociology, but his pursuit of ideas always in the interest of the cause of Ukrainian statehood. In a few vignettes, we are shown how revolutionary and objectionable this idea was to the Polish upper classes, including to his wife, Kaziemiera, an upper class Polish woman from Krakow. At that time, the territory of present day Ukraine was part of the Russian empire. They too, wanted to quash any ideas of Ukrainian independence and the Ukrainian language was banned in Russia until 1905. Even then, there was censorship. In 1907 when Lypynskyi edited a collection of poetry by the great Ukrainian poet Shevchenko, the Tsar’s censors sentenced him to 3 years’ banishment. Already ill with consumption, he fled west on a counterfeit passport and ended up in a sanatorium in Zakopane in southern Poland.

On the face of it, the narrator says, there are only three things that link her to Lypynskyi: the fact that she visited his home at Zaturtsi, the fact that he spent time in her home town at the end of World War 1 as an envoy of the Ukrainian state, the fact that they share the same birthday of April 17^th.  But there are echoes that resonate across the two lives in more subtle and diffuse ways, sometimes just by the repetition of a word or phrase. So, though she took Ukrainian Studies at university, the subject mattered less to her than the activity of working out information in detail, dividing up knowledge into individual branches and moving along every branch to its roots. (those roots again!). There are some resonances in their love lives. Both meet their future lovers in the university lecture hall. Lypynskyi, now lecturing, is transfixed  by the tall, dark-blonde student, Kaziemiera, rooted to the spot, till the janitor asks him to move aside in order to sweep up his dignity, splattered against the wooden floor. The narrator’s first lover is her lecturer too—the first of three, oddly resembling one another with their golden hair and blue eyes.

There are similarities in their desperate reactions when these relationships fail. Lypynskyi says he has a black abyss in his soul and later gives up salt in his diet, so that he can expel Kaziemiera from his memory, that memory of her emerging from the sea while honeymooning in Venice. He resigns himself to a life sans salt and sans flavour. A life without Kaziemiera. Our young narrator’s reaction is similarly dramatic: she can neither eat nor sleep—though there’s some self-mocking in her suggestion that everyone must have a bout of proper suffering at least once, just to show how big their soul is—XS, S, M or XL? Hers, she claims, is sizeless.  They both suffer breathing problems too: Lypynskyi chronically as a result of TB, the narrator during panic attacks. INHALE-EXHALE is an exhortation that appears regularly in both stories.

It’s well into the book that we learn about the narrator’s family, and are given a glimpse of life in Ukraine post 1931 when Lypynskyi died. It’s almost as if they’re taking up the baton of history, these ordinary people—it’s their turn now to speak. There’s Grandma Sonia, who was left on the steps of an orphanage by her father, telling her he was going to fetch some plum-butter pampushky. He never returned, dying of starvation in the gatehouse of a factory complex. This was 1932 and the start of Stalin’s man-made famine, the Holodomor. There’s Grandpa Bomchyk who grew enormous, weighing 150 kilos when he died. This wasn’t just because he came from a generation that didn’t find it necessary to exercise, but because his body was a receptacle for the accumulation of unutilized laughter. After toiling on the fields all his life, he owned nothing, having handed over his land and livestock to the collective farm after the Second World War. As the reasons for laughter grew fewer and fewer, his body began to increase in size. It simply swelled from a surplus of giggles that had yet to come out.  

Towards the end of the book the historical events come thick and fast, but the writer does an excellent job of outlining the fall of both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and the complex situation in Kyiv, when this seemed a moment for the realisation of Ukrainian independence. Lypynskyi is watching this from Vienna, where he’s dispatched in1918 as the ambassador of the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic. There’s a powerful account of Vienna at the end of World War 1, the grandeur of the buildings along the Ringstrasse contrasted with the desolation and hunger of the people: the green chariots jutting from the roofs of the government structures that lined the Ringstrasse looked like moss-covered crosses in littered, neglected cemeteries. The sombre mood in Vienna matched only by the misery felt by Lypynskyi at the failure of the movement for Ukrainian independence, a feeling of devastation that coated everything around him.

At first glance, this is a story of failed ideals, to be sure. But to my mind, these are dead and not yet buried.  Lypynskyi’s idea of territorialism, the vision of the inhabitants of a common land united in the interests of that land, irrespective of their ancestry, language, faith or occupation is surely still relevant today. I was moved by the narrator’s story, the coupling of her fascination with Lypynskyi with the revisiting of her own family’s stories, the show of strength in her visit to what remained of the Lypynski’s family estate. The discovery that his grave had been ploughed over by a random tractor driver in Soviet times, his bones dispersed. Yet not without trace: in this powerful and moving tribute to Lypynskyi, Tanja Maljartschuk has held him back from the jaws of that gigantic blue whale, Time. She has preserved him from Forgottenness.

This is a moving and compelling account of a tumultuous period in Ukrainian history, brought alive through rich characterisation, and wonderful language thanks to Zenia Tompkins’ flawless translation. But it’s also about the importance of memory. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Thanks to Bullaun Press for the review copy.

La Carte Postale- Anne Berest

On 6^th January 2003 a postcard arrives at the home of Lélia and Pierre. It’s an old postcard of the Paris Opera Garnier, with four names written on the back: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques.  These are the names of Lélia’s maternal grandparents, her great aunt and great uncle, all murdered at Ausschwitz in 1942. At the time, the narrator, a young woman of 24, didn’t have the time to ponder too much on this postcard turning up out of the blue at her parents’ house. It’s only 10 years later, when she’s heavily pregnant, that she starts thinking again about the people on the postcard— as if the awareness of new life somehow makes her feel more connected to those people in the past.

When she asks her mother to talk about the family history, Lélia warns her it’s a récit hybride, a story based on a mixture of documents and hypotheses, not yet complete. And hybride is the mot juste here, because Anne Berest’s book is a mixture of family history and the broader history of the Jews in 1930s and occupied France. It’s an investigation of the narrator’s own Jewish identity, and touches on anti-semitism in France today. But it’s called a roman, a novel, rather than a memoir, because there are sections of fictionalised, imaginary experience which take us beyond the dates and numbers: the child’s intoxication at the exotic sights and smells of pre-war Lotz, the pain and desperation of the women prisoners at Pithiviers as they’re separated from their children. And it’s also a kind of detective story, as the narrator does keep coming back to that postcard, determined to find out where it’s come from, who sent it.

The first section, Terres Promises, Promised Lands, is the longest and most detailed, dealing with the diaspora of the family Rabinovich from Moscow, where Ephraïm was born. After spending time in Riga and Palestine, the family arrive in Paris in 1929, where they settle down, work hard, and are keen to integrate into French society. Ephraïm finds work as an engineer, Emma teaches piano, and the two girls, Myriam and Noémie, enter the prestigious Lycée Fenelon in 1931, aged 12 and 8 respectively. They arrived in France two years previously, speaking not a word of French, and by 1933 are winning the top academic prizes in their year. They have a younger brother, Jacques, born in 1925, who is not allowed to have a bar-mitzvah—Ephraïm is a secular Jew in any case, but has also applied for French nationality, and does not want their application muddied by what he calls des rites folkloriques.

Alongside the family’s successes during the 30s runs the worrying thread of increasing anti-semitism in Europe, particularly in Germany. Ephraïm and Emma are told of the rise of the Nazis there, and large numbers of German refugees appear in Paris, including Ephraïm’s ex-fiancée, en route to New York, who advises him to get out like her. Ephraïm cannot believe that Jews would be persecuted in France and stays put. In 1939 Hitler marches into Poland and by June 1940 France is under German occupation. By October Jews are banned from public office, work in theatres, cinema and the press, and are also required to register at their local town hall.

To some extent life for the two sisters goes on during this first period of the occupation. Noémie continues writing her novel, and Myriam has fallen in love with a handsome young man called Vicente Picabia, whom she’s met in the circles around the Sorbonne, where she’s studying philosophy. But by June 1941 their world is closing down: a numerus clausus is introduced, limiting the numbers of Jewish students at the Sorbonne. The Rabinovitch family leave Paris to go to their country house at Forges, near Evry, and it’s there that Noémie and Jacques are arrested in July 1942. By this time, the Germans are arresting and deporting foreign Jews. Myriam has married Vicente and is registered in Paris. She’s at Forges when her siblings are arrested, but hides in the garden, and they don’t look for her as she’s not on their books. She cycles back to Paris.

Noémie and Jacques are taken to the transit camp at Pithiviers and there’s a harrowing account of the conditions in that camp. Lélia refers to doctor Adélaide Hautval who worked at Pithiviers, survived the war, and wrote a book subsequently called Médecine et Crimes contre l’Humanité. She and the narrator take some small crumb of comfort from the fact that Noémie appears in the book, chosen by the doctor to be her assistant, a role she performed tirelessly and with great compassion: elle marquait les gens partout oú elle passait/ she touched people wherever she went.  But this didn’t save her. Noémie and Jacques are deported to Auschwitz where they die. Jacques is murdered in the gas chambers, Noémie dies of typhus. Their parents, after repeated attempts to locate their two children, are arrested in October and die in Auschwitz in November 1942.

This is the kind of book where you need to build in reading pauses and the end of this section is certainly a place to lay the book on one side while you take a walk in the fresh air. The next section, entitled Souvenirs d’un enfant juif sans synagogue/ Souvenirs of a Jewish child without a synagogue is less harrowing. It takes place in 2019, 16 years after that postcard landed on the mat, when the narrator’s child says to grandmother Lélia On n’aime pas trop les Juifs à l’école/ They don’t much like Jews at my school. Anne ( the narrator) begins to question what it means to be Jewish. She was brought up without religion but with the values of the soixante-huitards, the generation of ’68, equality and human rights for example, and is completely at sea when she’s invited to a Pessah dinner at her new partner, Georges’, where the rituals of Pessah are observed. She talks with friends about their experience of anti-semitism growing up and learns from Lélia that though the camps were recognised immediately after the war, a blanket of silence then descended until the 1980s. Her friend Gerard tells the extraordinary story of a family gathering he attended as a child, where he noticed a row of numbers tattooed on the arms of several older people. When he asked his mother about them, she told him they were the seniors’ telephone numbers, tattooed on their arms lest they forget.

Her child’s comments set Anne off again on the trail of the postcard. She engages the help of handwriting experts which leads her back to the village of Forges and the house belonging to the Rabinovich family, sold on by Myriam in 1955. During her visit there with Lélia there are some tense scenes as they ask neighbours about the family, and what happened to their furniture and possessions after the war—they get the feeling people know more than they’re letting on. And there’s a deeply moving moment when they discover the piano that surely must have been Emma’s in a neighbour’s sitting room. Anne imagines Emma sitting on that piano stool, turning to them, saying, ‘You’ve come at last. What took you so long?’

The final section is titled Myriam and is the most novelistic. It’s set initially in rural Provence, in the free Zone, which only remained free of course until November 1942, when the Germans took over the south and then occupied the whole of France. There’s a lot of interesting historical detail about the growth of Resistance networks, particularly after the introduction of the STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire) but the narrative focus is on Myriam’s life hiding out in a small cabin in the mountains. She’s joined by her husband Vicente and Yves, a distant cousin of his, also in hiding, and the narrative focuses on this unconventional ménage à trois, where the two men spend their days buddying up, rather to the exclusion of Myriam—scenarios imagined, I guess, by the writer, trying to make sense of what later happens to these three characters.

We return to a more historical focus towards the end of this section, with Myriam going north to look for her family. She finds her letters unopened on the door mat of the house in Forges, and goes to the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, which from April 1945 served as a reception centre for detainees returning from the camps. The walls of the hotel foyer are covered with photos of loved ones deported, and the place besieged with those desperately hoping to find their family. Yet the detainees arriving were barely recognisable, emaciated, skeletal, heads shaved, as if beings from another planet. Paris was utterly shocked and unprepared for the condition of those returning and Myriam, of course, never finds her family.  

One of the threads that stands out for me in this novel is the attitude of the French to the deportations and the undercurrents of anti-semitism. There’s the shocking collaboration of officialdom: the French authorities who suggested deporting the children before the Germans did, because they couldn’t be doing with children hanging round in the camps after their parents were taken. Then there’s the mayor of Forges, keen to get the Rabinovich family off his hands. There’s the discomfort of Myriam’s friends when she’s handcuffed and arrested in Paris for breaking curfew, replaced by indifference or resignation as they turn back to their drinks.

There’s a sense throughout of the long after effects of the deportations and murder of the Jews seen here through the character of Myriam, the sole survivor of her family, and her subsequent relationships. Lélia tells Anne that she never once heard her mother utter the names of the four family members that she lost. This silence was damaging to their relationship, as was the fact that Myriam left Lélia with a village foster mother for two years after the war, when she went to work for the French authorities in German Lindau, still hoping to find her family, or at least to find out what happened to them.

But there is a sense that we’re moving on from silence now. When Anne and Lélia return to Forges in 2019, the young mayor tells them that a class of lycéens are researching a school project on the Jewish children deported from their school. He’s aware that the names of the four Rabinoviches don’t appear on the village war memorial and promises to rectify this. And of course there’s this novel itself, telling the story of Ephraïm, Emma, Myriam, Noémie and Jacques, as well as recounting the process of uncovering her family history and what that means for the narrator, Anne Berest. And for those of you who are still wondering who sent that postcard, we do find out in the end. I’m giving nothing away though-you’ll have to read the novel and find out for yourselves. It’s available now in English translation by Tina Kover, the paperback due out in May. The book is achingly sad, though, so I advise a box of tissues and regular walks in between.  

Vengeance is Mine-by Marie Ndiaye, translated by Jordan Stump.

The protagonist of this deeply unsettling novel is Maitre Susane, a young female lawyer practising in Bordeaux, who has recently set up on her own. She’s rather surprised one day to be consulted by a man called Gilles Principaux to act for his wife in a high profile murder case. The wife has been charged with the murder of their three children, and Maitre Susane, a young and, truth be told, under occupied lawyer, is surprised he hasn’t gone to a more experienced colleague.

During their first meeting, she gets the feeling she’s seen him somewhere before, and it gradually dawns on her where that was. She thinks he’s the son of a wealthy woman who employed her mother to do the ironing many years ago. As a ten year old, she went along with her mother, and was invited by the slightly older son into his bedroom while her mother worked. There, something of great significance happened, though she can barely recall exactly what it was. She thinks they had some sort of conversation in which she was rather brilliant, which led to her later choosing to become a lawyer. Though she can’t exactly remember if that was the case, or if indeed this Gilles Principaux was that teenage son. And we learn later that her father has an entirely different memory of what happened to her on that day, in that room.

The theme of unreliable memory is set up from the beginning. Maitre Susane has a close relationship with her parents, who live nearby, and she asks if they can remember that ironing incident and whether the family were called Principaux? They aren’t sure, and her mother’s attempts to recall their name surface several times in confused phone calls to her daughter. At the same time, as she’s preparing her client’s case, there are conflicting accounts of some quite basic facts: were the two police officers who came to the scene a female and male, or two males?

The second thread to the story takes place nearer home. It’s around the relationship between Maitre Susane and her new housekeeper, Sharon. She is presently illegal and Maitre Susane is acting on her application for legal status. She can’t proceed until Sharon provides her with her marriage certificate, which Sharon is inexplicably failing to do. Yet Sharon bends over backwards to make the home welcoming for her boss. Each evening all the lights are switched on, blazing a welcome for her boss’s return, and Sharon produces an array of wonderfully tasty dishes, far too much for Maitre Susane to eat, yet she does so in order not to offend Sharon. There’s an uneasy and shifting power relationship between the two women which is only aggravated when Maitre Susane realises Sharon is bunking off during the day to clean for a couple of other women, including one Madame Principaux.  How should she respond? Is this ok?

Into this second thread—or could it indeed be a third —enters Rudi, Maitre Susane’s ex, with whom she’s on amicable terms. We learn that they met while training, lived together for a few years, but separated because Maitre Susane felt she couldn’t reciprocate the passion he felt for her. He met someone else (whom we readers never meet), they had Lila together and she becomes a sort of step child for Maitre Susane, and rather weirdly, is often looked after by her parents—the granddaughter they never had. Rudy asks if Sharon could look after her one time, they all agree, but we readers feel a growing sense of unease at Lila being looked after by Sharon, especially when she’s taken off to other houses where Sharon cleans, and spends the night with her, almost abandoned by Rudi.

Now by this point in the novel, we’re looking not only at unreliable memory, but at unreliable, often conflicting emotions, which sometimes lean towards distortion. So, in her harrowing statement to Maitre Susane about what happened on the night she killed her children,  Marlyne Principaux talks of their beauty, and in the next breath she describes their death. Maitre Susane herself repeats oh too obviously how she loves her parents, then proceeds to break off with them when her father gets fed up with her obsessing about the Principaux. We know she found it impossible to love Rudi in the way he wanted, and there’s that mother substitute relationship with his child.

And this sort of distortion is expressed in changes in physical appearance too. So Maitre Susane becomes tall and strapping in puberty, cutting off her glorious mane of hair. Marlyne Principaux ‘balloons’ out while looking after young children at home. It’s Lila whose changes are the most scary though—Maitre Susane sees her coming out of the kitchen her skin grey, her body pocked, hammered, as if pushed in, deep beneath the surface of her face. By this time, The Exorcist is coming to mind. Though of course we know too, that Maitre Susane is now suffering some kind of illness/ breakdown, which may explain her distorted vision.

I have to say that I rather lost faith with this book in the latter half when things become more distorted, more surreal. There were several things going on that I just didn’t understand: all those tasty dishes, the importance of names, Maitre Susane’s illness and the sudden transfer of the action to Port Louis. In fact, there was just too much going on altogether for my liking, so the mental state of Marlyne Principaux, caused by her husband’s gaslighting, and the role of vengeance in the ghastly murder got rather lost in my view. This, and the almost unbearable account of the children’s death, mean that this is not a book I’d recommend. But this may well be a matter of taste: Mariana Enriquez praises the book as a disquieting, quietly beautiful novel in her blurb. I agree with the disquieting, not so sure about the quietly beautiful. But don’t let me put you off. The book came recommended on several lists at the end of last year and might well be on the International Booker Longlist. We’ll know on March 12th.

We would have told each other everything-Wir haetten uns alles gesagt- Judith Hermann

I was a keen reader of German writer Judith Hermann a little while back, loving her cool, distanced tone and elegant sentences. After a little gap since Letti Park, she’s come back into my life, through the excerpt of Wir hätten uns alles gesagt in the Granta 165 Deutschland collection, translated by Katy Derbyshire, and then through Tony’s Reading List, where he reviewed her novel Daheim.  I was so taken by the Granta excerpt that I decided to read the book in its entirety, originally conceived as a series of lectures on poetics. The book is indeed about writing, and the connections between life and writing. But it is also about what is said, and what is not said, and in exploring that Judith Hermann goes into her past, her family life and friendship group in a way which she didn’t expect when she started out.

The first section relates a chance meeting with her former psychoanalyst Dr. Dreehüs buying cigarettes in a late-night Späti in Berlin. They greet each other, he then disappears into a bar, the Trommel, along the street, (which her companion G swears they’ve never seen before) and she plucks up the courage to follow him in there. While she’s watching him and deliberating, she’s thinking about her story Träume in the collection Lettipark, where a woman is recommended an analyst by a friend, and once the analysis starts, the friendship breaks down. The story was based on the writer’s own friendship with Ada, a big character described in vivid detail, who arrived in Berlin from Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in those anarchic months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While reflecting on the ten years of analysis she went through, the writer tells us that Dr. Dreehüs  hardly spoke at all. She has more conversation with him over a drink in the Trommel bar than in the entire period of analysis. Though he did show a flicker of surprise when she tells him she wants to end the analysis. This is after the death of her friend Marco from multiple scelerosis, an event so final and real she cannot write about it or him in the same way as she can when writing Ada and controlling the narrative.

The characters Ada and Marco form part of what Judith Hermann calls her Wahlfamilie, her family of choice, the people she chose to spend time with as a young person, in contrast to her actual biological family, whom we meet in the second section. I like the fact that the first section’s focus on analysis primes us a little for this second section, as we’re going in deep here. The writer describes her unusual family, her depressive father sitting at his desk surrounded by papers, her mother earning the family income, working such long hours at a florists’ she wondered if she’d dreamed her, the family held together—just—by her beloved grandmother, who herself had fled Russia as a child in traumatic circumstances. The flat was piled high with boxes, papers and books. No one cleaned. It was a home with ‘an atmosphere’, unpredictable and difficult for a small child to understand, a place she couldn’t bring friends round to after school without seeking permission first. One escape for her as a seven year old was the dolls’ house that her father had made. There’s a beautiful, detailed description of this dolls’ house, which originally housed an entire family of wooden figures, of which only the figure of the girl, Ann, now remains. This house loomed large in the subconscious of the small child as well: the writer relates a dream she had as a child in which the house had secret rooms, wall hangings covering secret doors, all of which she now sees as expressing the family secrets her father kept from her.

The third section takes us closer to the present day. It’s the pandemic and Judith Hermann has moved to the countryside, to a house at a safe distance from the summer house inherited by her grandmother, where she would invite her Wahlfamilie to spend the summer back in the day. (Though as she’s musing on her family not talking, keeping secrets, she also reflects on the fact that in those years spent with her friends, they didn’t really talk to each other, either). She’s quite contentedly spending time on her own during Lockdown, writing. The only person she but does spend time with is Jon, a photographer friend. He’s taking photos of paintings and art works in the local Schloss for a project whereby one of the art works is projected onto the external walls every night during Advent, for the local people to enjoy during Lockdown. I loved this account of people coming together, creatively, to enjoy their community’s treasures. But of course, for the writer it’s also about what’s inside being brought to the outside, to the surface. By now, we readers have learned more about her father’s breakdown, his mental illness and years of hospitalisation. So it feels like a real breakthrough when Judith is finally able to speak to Jon about this and the toll it’s taken on her. And though she describes their efforts to understand one another often as talking past each other, she’s determined to keep trying. That’s what writing and life have most in common, she says, einen neuen Versuch machen—trying again, having another go.

This is a beautifully written and moving book about the connections between life and writing. About how silence and secrets in lived experience translate into writing which has gaps, which has things left out, but which often leave a kind of afterglow, as when someone leaves a room and you can still sense their presence. It’s also a brave account of Judith Hermann’s own upbringing and family life, and the effect of those complex relationships on her and her writing. The Granta excerpt was translated into English by Katy Derbyshire, and I’m looking forward to her translation of the whole book sometime soon.