#6Degrees July 2023 – the Extra Late Edition!

I don’t know if I’m even allowed to still take part in this month’s Six Degrees of Separation meme, as hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best, since I’m a week late in posting this. I’ve been so busy with the Bristol Translates Summer School this week (and before that trying to sort out the Maxi debacle) that I didn’t have time to blog at all.

But now the Summer School is over and I suffer from that painful return to reality, to a world where we don’t quibble for hours over every word and punctuation mark, where we don’t sing out our translated text or discover obscure German writers to explore further. (Well, I do that on Twitter, which is why I’ll be sad to see that platform disappear, but my real-life friends seem oddly unresponsive to such thrilling activities!) And the starting point this month is Time Shelter by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel), which I’ve just started reading and am enjoying very much so far.

I did not get on with the other Gospodinov novel that has been translated into English (also by Angela Rodel), The Physics of Sorrow, perhaps because it reminded me too much of the trauma of growing up in communist times in Eastern Europe, but I’m glad I didn’t write him off completely. So for my first link, I have another author that I didn’t like much on my first attempt but then began to appreciate, namely Max Frisch. I probably started in the wrong place with him, namely the novel Gantenbein, which is very experimental and fragmented (and I was in my mid-teens then), but later on I read his plays, which I liked much more, and then his novel Homo Faber, which I found quite powerful and would like to re-read at some point.

Sam Shepard plays Faber in the film adaptation of the book, Voyager directed by Volker Schlöndorff, and of course he was a playwright and author himself, so my next link is to Sam Shepard’s collection of prose Cruising Paradise, which is so evocative of the wide-open, often desolate American landscape.

I’ll take another meaning of the word ‘cruise’ and my next choice is a book set on a cruise ship, namely the debut novel by Catherine Ryan Howard: Distress Signals. So much more interesting and plausible than another more recent book set on a cruise ship, which I will not mention again here because I really like the author’s other works.

I always mix up the name of Irish writer Catherine Ryan Howard with American writer Catherine Ryan Hyde, although I’ve never read a word by the latter. Another pair of names I mix up fairly consistently, although I have read and enjoyed both of them and know they write very differently, are Penelope Fitzgerald and Penelope Mortimer. So they will form my next two links. Penelope Mortimer’s Pumpkin Eater is a rather unforgettable novel about motherhood and domestic suffocation, while Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels feels youthful and exuberant.

Finally, we cannot talk about angels without referring to Dante’s Paradise, although it does feel at times that Dante gets a little too hung up on classifications of the different orders of angels (just as he does with the circles of the Inferno or the levels of Purgatory). I love the Gustav Dore illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, so I’ll leave you with his imagining of Paradise (which seems the absolute opposite of Shepard’s cynical label of Paradise).