findingtimetowrite

Bristol CrimeFest and Far East in May

I’m not blogging as frequently as I used to, and I even forget to thank people for sharing my blog posts on social media. This is because I’ve been busy with so many things, but at some point I hope things will quieten down again.

Not the best picture, but a really fun panel, moderated in a very interesting and original and humorous way by Stephen Edger (standing)

In the meantime, I went to Bristol on Saturday for a flying visit, to see our Icelandic author Jónína Leósdóttir at Bristol CrimeFest. She was on a panel that might just win the prize for the most uncompromising title ‘Kicking Against the Pricks’ and her fellow panelists were just as fascinating as her: Emma Styles from Australia I already knew from Bloody Scotland and loved her book No Country for Girls. Antony Dunford’s Hunted addresses the subject of hunting and wildlife poaching in Africa, a subject I feel very strongly about. And the revelation to me was David Heska Wanbli Weiden from the Sicangu Lakota Nation, whose debut novel Winter Counts had sold out (so I couldn’t get it signed), but I ordered it as soon as I got home.

Ovidia Yu: The Mushroom Tree Mystery, Constable (Little Brown), 2022.

An author I did not manage to meet in Bristol but could not resist buying a few of her books was Ovidia Yu. As if she knew that I was reading the Far East this month, there is an entire crime series set in her native Singapore. She has a cosy crime foodie series featuring Aunty Lee, but it was the historical series with determined young woman and aspiring journalist Su Lin that captivated me. The series starts in 1936 in a Singapore that was a British Crown Colony and covers the very murky and shameful period when Britain was unable to defend Singapore, but I couldn’t resist reading The Mushroom Tree Mystery first, since it takes place in 1945 just as the war is ending, when Singapore was under Japanese occupation and in very real danger of being utterly destroyed in an attempt to gain more favourable terms for surrender.

You know how much I enjoy crime fiction set in different locations, especially ones I am not very familiar with, and how I love to learn more about the past or the present society while also being entertained. This series fits the bill perfectly and I look forward to reading more. Su Lin is an engaging heroine: very smart, ambitious, able to hold her own despite her youth. Dismissed by most people (and even her own family) as ‘the Chinese girl with a limp’, she is in fact well-educated and multilingual. In this book she is part of a Japanese household that is sheltering a prestigious blind Japanese scientist, who was supposed to build a bomb similar to the atomic one. When the professor’s assistant is found dead, Su Lin herself comes under suspicion as the only foreigner in the household, but there are far deeper secrets going on, not least major disagreements about whether to end the war or not.

Enigmatic characters, an international cast, a vivid backdrop and a good mystery (even if I rather guessed the outcome). Above all, I loved the observations and wry asides of the narrator, Su Lin:

One good thing about the Occupation: there were so many real threats that we stopped imagining what could go wrong. There just wasn’t enough energy to go on worrying about everything. Instead, unless there was actually a gun pointed at you, you got on with your life. And if there was a gun pointed at you? Then either you got shot and died – or you got on with your life.

The Japanese were less aggressive towards Eurasian and Indian locals then they were to Chinese and Malays. It was part of their trying to sow dissent between the different races in Singapore. The Japanese didn’t understand that most or all of use were descended from people who’d left their old ancestral lands to make new lives for themselves. Being a Singaporean wasn’t about having a certain skin colour or religion. It was about whether you were willing to survive, and for your family and the island to survive.

It’s human instinct to want to fit in. If you can’t fit in with the majority, you try to persuade others (but mostly yourself) that you are superior to them. If you try hard enough, you may actually become superior. But you will find you still don’t fit in. The British looked different enough to feel superior just from the colour of their sunburned skin. The Japanese looked more like us so had to work harder to put us down.

There was something of a precocious child and endearing about Su Lin (although she is in her early 20s in this book), which reminded me of Flavia de Luce. I liked her experimentations with growing mushrooms, and the way she mothers the two young houseboys, her curiosity, stubbornness and courage. She is cautious at times and at other times quite impetuous. I certainly look forward to reading more about this place, this period in history and this heroine.

Friday Fun: Blue, Blue, Electric Blue…

As per my favourite colour and my favourite singer… a combination of books and blue shelves and/or decorative accents is irresistible. I may finally succumb to this palette in my next house (where I have no one else to please than myself!).

Blue and white are such a great combination, and white(ish) sofas might work now that I no longer have toddlers with chocolatey fingers. From vanessafrancis.com

A calming look for an office, especially if it’s not in a very cold climate. From Charlton and Park.

If blue bookshelves are not quite your thing, then a blue sofa can inject that spark of colour. From Apartment Therapy.

If you want to make the reading nook even more special, add some blue-and-white porcelain on a high shelf and an adorable furry friend, from FrancesZook.com

No, I’m not sure if that’s a sofa or a bed either, but it certainly would be good for a group read. From UrbanElectric.com

OK, wood panelling all around the walls might be a bit much nowadays, but it does look elegant, doesn’t it? From Elle Decor.

Love the contrast between the blue, orange and browns, design by Cory Connor, from Houzz.com

Far East in May: Kyoto and Shanghai

My reading plan for May was to tackle the rather scanty tomes of Far Eastern literature other than Japanese that I have on my shelves. I have some Chinese authors, but I was hoping to go a bit beyond that – and, although the two first volumes I picked are set in Japan and China respectively, they are written by authors who are originally from Malaysia, so I consider that close enough.

Tash Aw: Five Star Billionaire, Fourth Estate, 2013.

The author was in fact born in Taiwan but grew up in Malaysia, before moving to London. The characters in his novel set in Shanghai are likewise immigrants and wanderers, with links to Malaysia but trying to make a go of it in the megacity of opportunity that is Shanghai. Gary is a pop idol whose career has taken a downturn, Phoebe is an illegal immigrant but hopes to improve herself and snare a wealthy man, Justin is the heir to a powerful estate mogul who suddenly develops a conscience, Yinghui is a former student activist now turned into a successful businesswoman, and Walter is the billionaire who operates from the shadows and has mysterious links to all of them.

It’s an energetic if somewhat pedestrian piece of prose, a fast-paced story that is very easy to read. I have to admit that the mystery element of the story – what links all of those stories together – was perhaps the part that captivated me least – and it felt ultimately quite predictable, a lot of foreshadowing. I mostly liked the individual stories of hustling in the big city, with Phoebe’s story perhaps being the most compelling and sad. The description of Shanghai, the city that chews you up and spits you out, was very well done:

Yinghui recognised a restlessness in the banker’s face, a mixture of excitement and apprehension that people exhibited when still new in Shanghai, in search of something, even though they could not articulate what that something was – maybe it was money, or status, or God forbid, even love – but whatever it was, Shanghai was not about to give it to them. The city held its promises just out of reach, waiting to see how far you were willing to go to get what you wanted, how long you were prepared to wait. And until you adjusted your expectations to take account of that, you would always be on edge, for despite the restaurants and shops and art galleries and the feeling of unbridled potential, Shanghai would always seem to be accelerating a couple of steps ahead of you… You arrived thinking you were going to use Shanghai to get what you wanted, and it would take time before you realised it was using you; that it had already moved on, and you were playing catch-up.

This reminded me of my business trip to Beijing in 2015, delivering training for a major international corporation. There were so many smart young people in that room, but many of them had commutes of 2-3 hours each way and worked really long hours. In the hotel lobby, there were members of staff sleeping in armchairs, because they wouldn’t have enough time to get home before their next shift started. In the noodle bar of a posh shopping centre where I had lunch, I’d come across exhausted workers trying to have a nap during their lunch break. People were working really, really hard for the Chinese economic miracle, and those images stayed with me.

Business opportunities picture of Shanghai produced by WE Communications.

I thought this book described the relentless brutality of this Far Eastern capitalism (and the greedy land grabs in Malaysia for high-rise developments) very well. It was a fun read, if somewhat too long, and with insufficient differentiation between the five voices. But it certainly captures a particular time and place.

Florentyna Leow: How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, Emma Press, 2023.

The author is a food writer originally from Malaysia, who lived in London before moving to Japan. She has lived mostly in Tokyo, but moved to Kyoto for nearly two years with a friend that she didn’t know very well. This book is a sort of memoir, describing the way that she and her housemate grew apart when she thought they were growing closer, and her bafflement about the end of their friendship. But it also a love song to Kyoto and the places there that she was able to make her own.

Kyoto is in many respects the exact opposite of Shanghai – where ancient tradition matters a lot and change and newness are not idolised. It has also, sadly, fallen victim to its tourist status, and the author has a lot to say about the crowded conditions at all tourist sites (which makes my heart sink at the thought that this is what we will face when we go to Japan this summer – when I went there in the early 1990s, it was nothing like that, but it’s been deliberate government policy to increase the number of visitors to Japan)

Another place I grew to dislike was Ryoan-ji, a Zen temple famed for its rock garden. The rock arrangements are supposed to facilitate meditation, but in spring and autumn it feels about as contemplative as an ice cream shop… Arashiyama was even worse. Don’t be taken in by photos that show its famous bamboo forest as a people-free piece of paradise, unless you’re willing to wake up at 5am when no one else is around. None of these places were designed for the sheer volume of visitors to Kyoto today.

Tourist picture produced by Japan Airlines.

There are a lot of interesting points made in this memoir. Leow compares the experience of white people in Japan and foreigners those like herself, who might be mistaken for a Japanese. She talks about the way she strove so hard to blend in that she began to lose her own personality.

Not only did this society encourage blending in, but serving customers was another way I had to learn how to disappear, which only reinforced my propensity for passivity and avoiding confrontation… It would take me years to unlearn the compulsion to bend, to shrink myself, to bow in the face of other people’s needs and desires. It would take many years for me to stop being a doormat.

She expresses the pleasures and frustrations of being a tour guide and making visitors’ dreams come true. She riffs on the many, many words and onomatopoeia to describe the different types of rain in Japan. Above all, she notices the small, neglected details of the beauties of Kyoto, the persimmon tree in the garden, the veins of a golden gingko leaf, the joys of a little jazz kissaten (bar/cafe) where she becomes a regular. It is an enchanting and unexpected portrait of a town that we all think we know so well from the many, many photos we have seen.

#6Degrees of Separation: May 2023

Time for my favourite monthly reading/linking meme, the Six Degrees of Separation as hosted by Kate, and this month we are starting with a book shortlisted for the Stella Prize in Australia, but which has yet to make its way across to this corner of the world. Hydra by Adriane Howell is a bit of a Gothic novel, and there are lots of possible links: Greek mythology or islands, mid-century furniture, haunted houses, careers and marriages imploding…

There is also a neighbouring naval base, I understand, in this novel, so I will choose that to link to C.S. Forester’s Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, the first (and not necessarily the best) in his lengthy and very successful Hornblower series. I can’t really remember which couple of them I’ve read, as they tend to follow a similar pattern of naval exploits set during the Napoleonic Wars.

The mention of Napoleonic Wars makes me instantly think of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, which opens with quite a visceral account of the Battle of Waterloo.

The next book is a bit of a lazy link, perhaps, especially since both of my boys have been reading it recently and talking a lot about it, but it is also French and deals with the consequences of the Napoleonic Wars and the political turmoil and suspicion which followed after the fall of Bonaparte and his supporters, namely The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

Dumas notoriously made a fortune from sales of this book, built a chateau and led such an extravagant lifestyle that he lost all the money again and had to sell the chateau a short while later. Another author who went bankrupt (although thanks to bad investments rather than a profligate lifestyle) was Mark Twain, so my next link is to his lesser-known but very funny work A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. A satire about monarchy and the people surrounding the throne, which feels particularly timely this weekend.

My next link has something to do with the monarchy, one of the few books about the late Queen which I actually enjoyed and which presented her in a whimsical, charming light, which is probably not at all warranted: Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader.

I can’t resist books about books, readers and writers, so the final very loose link is with another passionate reader, the title hero of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, who leads the Bohemian life in Paris (probably based on Rilke himself).

It’s ended up being quite an old-fashioned set of connections, although I have travelled throughout Europe with it. Let’s hope next month I will be more adventurous, right?

#20BooksOfSummer: The Planning Stage

It’s that time of year when Cathy announces her #20BooksOfSummer challenge. It’s quite simply the chance to get 20 books off your TBR list and/or shelves over the months of June/July/August. I have participated in the past but not quite succeeded, because I got sidetracked with other reading projects or shiny new things coming in. However, this year I have a double incentive: I need to get some of my bulkier, heavier books off the shelves as I start thinking about moving abroad in 2024/25 and the task of packing endless boxes of books. Read them and then decide whether to keep or donate.

However, I’m going to be busy with the Bristol Translates Summer School in early July and travelling to Japan at the end of August, so I have to take that in consideration and not get overly ambitious. I also want to take part in #WomenInTranslation month in August, but it may be a bridge too far to try and take part in the Spanish and Portuguese Language Challenge.

So, after an enjoyable rummage through my bookshelves, here are the things I’m proposing (slightly more than 20, so that I can choose according to mood).

American authors

This is a country I tend to ignore on the whole, but each one of these books was acquired in a sudden fit of greed following a recommendation on Twitter or on a blog or podcast.

M.L.Rio: If We Were Villains – theatre, friendships, murder
Mona Awad: Bunny – MFA, rivalry, horror
Katya Apekina: The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish – dysfunctional families
Robert Jackson Bennett: City of Stairs – murder in a sci-fi world
Ling Ma: Severance – immigration, apocalyptic, zombies
Stephanie Gayle: Idyll Hands – murder in small-town America
Hilma Wolitzer: An Available Man – a widower starts dating again
Lidia Yuknavitch: The Book of Joan – a dystopian Joan of Arc
Chandler Baker: The Husbands – the Stepford husbands?

Books Lingering for Far Too Long on My Shelves

Once again, all of these have been recommended by people on Twitter or else I’ve been following the authors on Twitter – this is why it’s such a shame that bookish community is being destroyed by the current owner, who couldn’t give a monkeys about books (other than so-called business improvement ones, I bet).

Luke Brown: Theft – Brexit Britain and class differences
Ali Thurm: One Scheme of Happiness – love triangle and beaches
Helon Habila: Travellers – a mosaic of migrant experiences across Europe
Tom Cox: 21st-Century Yokel – mix of nature writing, memoir, humour and social history

Older Books

All of the previous books are older books too, but these ones were recommended to me not as ‘newly published’, but as ‘modern classics’, while two I acquired a while back in preparation for my Japan trip.

Margaret Grant: Three Eleven – how 5 women experienced the 2011 tsunami in Japan
Michael Booth: Super Sushi Ramen Express – a family journey through Japanese cuisine
Mal Peet: The Murdstone Trilogy – has-been writer makes a Faustian pact
Charles Palliser: Rustication – faux Victorian Gothic and murder mystery
Maggie O’Farrell: Instructions for a Heatwave – many people assure me this is her best novel

On Kindle

For travelling ease, and because I don’t have any books in the lists above for #WomeninTranslation, I’ve also selected a few of my Netgalley/e-book reads, which have really been lurking for far too long on my Kindle.

Yana Vagner: To the Lake, transl. Maria Wiltshire – I actually have the French edition of this in print, but it will be quicker and easier to read it in English on Kindle – a Russian post-apocalyptic novel
Shion Miura: Kamusari Tales Told at Night, transl. Juliet Winters Carpenter – collection of (ghost?) stories, perfect for my Japan trip
Asa Larsson: The Sins of Our Fathers, transl. Laurie Thompson – a Swedish crime novel set in the Arctic circle
Cheon Myeong-kwan: Whale, transl. Chi-Young Kim – Korean novel shortlisted for the International Booker Prize
Ines Pedrosa: In Your Hands, transl. Andrea Rosenberg – Portuguese family saga from the perspective of three women
Marie NDiaye: The Cheffe, trans. Jordan Stump – a culinary life story
Arwa Salih: The Stillborn, transl. Samah Selim – notebooks of a woman from the student-movement in Egypt

25 books to choose from, plus any pitches for Corylus which might come my way, so I think I’ll be pretty busy!

Are you planning to take part, however loosely, in the #20Books challenge and lighten your TBR piles?

Friday Fun: Watching the World Go By…

It has been quite a week, so I think I deserve to just sit and enjoy the spring weather (hopefully), and read a little bit, of course.

Another American porch in the Deep South, from Southern Living

Another traditional porch, from City Farmhouse.

Space in Japan is at a premium, but this house makes the most of its vertical structure to catch a glimpse of Mount Fuji, from Tezuka Architects, Design Boom

A pergola can be just as nice as a porch, from Better Homes and Gardens

And of course any outdoor space is enhanced by a pet, Peter Fudge Gardens, from HomeDesigning.com

May Reading Plans

When I made reading plans for the first six months of the year, I have to admit I wasn’t aware that in the US May is Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders heritage month. So it is a happy coincidence that I was planning to read literature from Asia and Pacific region anyway, although my definition of Asian may be far broader (and at times even slightly tenuous).

I’m not sure I’ll actually get to read all of them, as three of these are chunksters. Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw is all about the Chinese economic miracle, a sort of Silicon Valley set in Shanghai. Drusilla Modjeska is an Australian writer lived for a long time in Papua New Guinea and her novel The Mountain is set in that country on the brink of independence in 1968. Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day is a family saga set in postcolonial Malaysia, a country I know very little about.

The remaining two novels are both set in Japan, but the authors are from elsewhere: Clarissa Goenawan is an Indonesia-born Singaporean writer, while Florentyna Leow was born in Malaysia and lived for a while in London before moving to Kyoto.

Not pictured above is the Korean therapy memoir made famous by BTS I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki by Baek Se-hee, translated by Anton Hur. I was hesitating about reading it, as it feels aimed at a younger audience than me, but I bought it in the wake of my niece’s death, as if it might help me to understand her state of mind more. Plus, I really like Anton!

I’m also hoping to get to read some or all of the above:

The Cartographers is our Crime Fiction Book Club’s choice for May (the theme was art crime), and it’s another chunky book, so I’d better get cracking with it!
Lost for Words is a feel-good read (a cosy crime novel) from the library, which I badly need after the second half of April
Kaska Bryla’s Die Eistaucher (The Ice Divers) was a book that we talked about at the launch of the Austrian Riveter and I had it signed by the author herself, who is a cross-culture kid like myself (Poland and Austria in her case)
Carlota Gurt’s Alone is a Catalan novel and was sent to me by the ever-lovely Daniela Petracco at Europa Editions, and it sounds just my cup of tea…

I also have three more books to read and report back on for Corylus, but, of course, those are all top secret until we make up our minds and then acquire any of the titles.

Monthly Summary April 2023

The month started on an absolute high, with a trip to Quais du Polar in Lyon, my favourite crime festival, then a holiday in the south of France, then Orthodox Easter with my kids and the adoption of a beautiful ball of black fluff whom we named Maximilienne (Maxi), and an outing to the London Book Fair where I got to meet many fellow translators, publishers and even strategise a little with our most recently signed-on author.

I also ended up having far, far more books to read than the eleven above might indicate – most of them sent to me by French, German and other publishers for consideration for translation. I loved many of them but sadly had to conclude that not all of them would be suitable for the Anglosphere: some were simply too long (and therefore expensive to produce and distribute), others assumed too much in-depth knowledge of French or German politics, or had an insufficient sense of place or were not ‘crimey’ enough (as I call them).

From the 19th of April onwards, however, the month took a downturn. My cousin’s daughter, who had been working as a journalist in Romania and whom I greatly admired for her writing talent, was found dead in her flat in Bucharest at the age of just 32. The inquest ruled it suicide: she had been struggling for at least four years with mental illness, sent from one hospital to another, one treatment to another, one suicide attempt to the next. She had distanced herself from the family – which is not surprising, given how they’ve behaved since hearing the news, blaming her for her mental health condition – and I feel guilty that I didn’t make more of an effort to keep in touch with her, as I was perhaps one of the few people from the ‘clan’ who understood her struggles. Sadly, given her profession, her death has also been used by the media to score political points and fling mud and accusations at each other. Romania is still very, very bad at handling mental health issues in a balanced, non-sensationalist way.

I managed to push through my guilt and my sadness at the news because of the delights of having a cat in my life once more, especially such an adorable, inquisitive, super-affectionate and confident one. But sadly over the past few days Maxi suddenly fell ill and is now in hospital fighting for her life. The vets are not sure what it is, probably a pulmonary infection. I’m starting to think that I bring bad luck to the poor cats I adopt.

Nevertheless, I managed to read three books for the #1940Club, all quite esoteric and escapist: The Invention of Morel from Argentina, Miss Hargreaves from England, and The Secret of Dr Honigberger from Romania. I was very moved by the observational skills and unnerving feeling of Something in Disguise by Elizabeth Howard. I thought Black Butterflies (now shortlisted for the Women’s Prize) was quite poignant but a bit pedestrian (it’s a subject I never tire of, though, the war in Yugoslavia, in this case Sarajevo).

Eleven books, eight in translation or other languages, three crime novels (possibly five, depending on your definition), four women authors.

Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table was my book of the month, a quite remarkable piece of non-fiction, a sort of memoir with each chapter named after a chemical element. Not all of the stories are autobiographical, some are like little vignettes or folk tales, and for me those worked less well. The encounters with the former concentration camp head chemist was the most unnerving chapter of all, but I’d like to emphasise that this is an author who seems remarkably restrained and forgiving. Unlike his Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, which was written right after the war, this collection was published in 1975, so there is a certain distance and even humour to quite painful accounts.

My reading plans for May, if I’ll stick to them, will take me on a tour of the Far East: China, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia. And I still have several books to read for professional reasons too.

Friday Fun: Libraries Throughout the Ages

I was recently looking through some mid-twentieth-century libraries and thought how perfect they would be for my needs, but then I decided to go a little further back in time… and yes, I like all of them.

Baroque library in Prague, from smb-sarl.com

Regency library at Stourhead, from Country Life Picture Library.

Victorian library at the Athenaeum Club, from Country Life Picture Library.

Gothic Revival at Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham.

Art Deco, at the French Institute, London. From lepetitjournal.com

Mid-century from Australia, from architecture.au.com

#1940Club: The Secret of Dr Honigberger

Mircea Eliade: Secretul doctorului Honigberger (The Secret of Dr Honigberger)

Before Mircea Eliade became a philosopher and historian of religions, he was primarily known as a fiction writer (and playwright) in his birth country, Romania. 1940 was a bit of an odd year for him – he had recently been released from prison for his support of the right-wing Iron Guard, but was then rehabilitated and even sent to London and then Lisbon as cultural attaché when Romania lurched to the right and later became military dictatorship during the Second World War.

This slim novella was written during this troubled period and perhaps that’s why it contains hardly any references to the politics of its time: it is pure escapism, with the future professor of religions very much in evidence. It is a story within a story and features mysterious disappearances, dusty and potentially dangerous manuscripts, time shifts and surreal/ghostly elements that are now common-place in fantasy literature, but which were perhaps rarer at the time.

The narrator is a young scholar of Oriental Studies (like Eliade himself), who has recently returned from a lengthy trip to India. He is invited to the house of Mrs Zerlendi, a widow, who would like him to examine her husband’s extensive library of Oriental treasures and determine if it might be possible to complete the monography he was writing about Dr Honigberger, who had travelled throughout India and the Arabic countries in the first half of the 19th century and was believed to have attained a transcendental state and special psychic powers.

The narrator is somewhat sceptical at first, and considers the deceased Mr Zerlendi a rank amateur. However, as he grows familiar with the valuable collection and even stumbles across a secret journal, he realises that things are not quite what they seem. Zerlendi did not die, but mysteriously disappeared all of a sudden in 1910, without a word to his family or friends, without taking any of his papers or clothes or money with him. From his journal, it emerges that he was following many of the ascetic and yogic practices described by Dr Honigberger in an attempt to reach the hidden world of Shambala, which some scholars thought was an actual location somewhere in the north of India, but which the narrator is starting to think is something like Enlightenment.

Just as the narrator thinks he might be uncovering the secret, he is suddenly kicked out of the house and library (under the pretext of spring-cleaning and that Mrs Zerlendi has fallen ill). He keeps trying to get past the gatekeeper, the fierce, limping housekeeper, but no luck. And then, when he passes by the house again after a few months, he discovers something very strange indeed: the Zerlendi family (still without the father of the household) in something resembling the future or perhaps an alternative universe.

There is no resolution to the mystery of what actually happened to the narrator or to Zerlendi, and readers often asked Eliade for an explanation, which he refused to give. Clearly the author’s professional interests in esoteric practices got the better of him, for there are far too many lengthy descriptions of those. There are times when the narrator seems to be critical of the fascination with all things Oriental that Zerlendi displays, but I wonder if Eliade the author is aware that he and his narrator are displaying all the same symptoms.

If anyone could manage to make an exciting premise boring (even in a short novella), then it is Eliade here. After he became a lecturer in religious studies, his literary output decreased dramatically. On the other hand, his academic works often read like novels, so…

For an updated and even more intriguing take on this story, with a science-fiction twist, I would recommend Paul Doru Mugur’s short story ‘zerlendi@shambhala.com’, the first in his short story collection Psychonautica, recently published in the US by New Meridian. (And I say that not only because I translated that book).

A translation of Eliade’s novella by Ana Cartianu was published in 1992 under the title ‘Doctor Honigberger’s Secret’, as part of an omnibus edition of Eliade’s Mystic Stories. Probably only worth seeking out if you are deeply interested in the subject or in the author. However, you can see an entirely different (and funnier) side to Eliade by reading his barely disguised youthful memoirs translated and published by Istros Books.

I know that officially the #1940Club is over, but I just wanted to add this fairly obscure book to the list. It didn’t take me long to read but it has taken me far too long to review. More about the reasons for that perhaps in another post.