I know it has become quite fashionable to purchase run-down chateaux in France and renovate them without speaking a word of French and then renting them out to other Anglos for weddings and parties. But there are beautiful manor houses in other countries as well. The ones below are certainly not looking too run-down.
When I went to Quais du Polar in Lyon in 2016, I was asking the booksellers what editions of Pascal Garnier and Jean-Claude Izzo they had (I was stocking up for my imminent departure from France). One of them told me: ‘If you like those writers, you might want to try this new novel by a Belgian author, Patrick Delperdange.’ It’s a sort of rural noir and its title indicates the bleakness of the subject matter: ‘If all the gods were to abandon us’.
Three years later, I finally read the book and it is indeed a very dark yet beguiling tale set in a tiny Belgian village close to the French border. There aren’t very many parts of Belgium that aren’t overpopulated, but this area seems to be remote and devoid of inhabitants. So much so that one of the main characters, a young girl Céline, escaping a violent relationship, walks down the road for miles without seeing another soul. She is somewhat relieved when she hitches a ride with a kindly but fairly taciturn old man Léopold, who offers her a place in his house overnight ‘if you don’t mind ghosts’.
Typical horror story trope, you might think, but in fact Léopold is a widower and the old farmhouse is still full of his wife’s presence. It is also rather primitive, without a proper bathroom, so Céline is grateful for his hospitality but also understandably eager to move on. She leaves the house to continue her solitary journey, but it starts snowing and she gets bitten by two fierce dogs and collapses in the snow. Luckily, Léopold finds her, brings her home and calls in a doctor to tend to her wounds. The dogs belong to Maurice, a bad-tempered local man, and when he finds out that one of his dogs has been wounded, he is furious.
The young girl and the old man start living together in his house, at least until she is able to walk without a crutch again,providing each other some much-needed comfort, without asking too many questions. But of course their situation gives rise to local gossip. One of the people who doesn’t know what to make of the stories is Josselin, Maurice’s younger brother. Regarded as somewhat simple-minded by his brother and by the village community, he is a bit creepy about women (and about Maurice’s former wife, who ran off with a waiter), but nevertheless an excellent observer of all the little human foibles.
The story is told in short chapters alternating between the points of view of Céline, Léopold and Josselin. None of them is quite what they appear to be at first sight, none of them are particularly likeable. They each have a darker back story and this meshing of stories is heightened by the closed-off, suspicious, very drab and grey community that they are living in. Things soon take a turn for the worse, and it does seem indeed as though there is no hope, no salvation, no well-disposed god for these three (very fallible, very pitiful) human beings.
There are indeed elements of Pascal Garnier here: eccentric, ambiguous characters (who turn out to be quite different than you might expect at first), the sombre atmosphere of storm clouds gathering and then the flashes of violence that seem to come out of nowhere, a sense of inexorable fate about the unfolding of the story. There are differences, however. Everything is told in the first person – and, although in many cases the protagonists are lying to themselves, that does make for a more personal and passionate take on things. The ending is also quite ambiguous, as if the author had decided that he wanted to offer a glimmer of hope to the readers after all.
Above all, it is a perfect portrayal of the flat, wooded Belgian countryside, which becomes another main character, without ever being described in great detail: neither beautiful nor ugly, neither welcoming nor hostile, a landscape that is only charming to visitors, a place that seems to promise sanctuary but ends up poisoning you. This is the landscape adjacent to the First World War battlefields, after all.
The book has not been translated into English, but I think it would certainly appeal to readers of Garnier. It would also make for a good film.
114 days or 17 weeks until the 29th of March, which is my self-imposed deadline for the #EU27Project. Yes, by then I want to have read at least one book from each of the EU member countries with the exception of the one flouncing off. I started this project quite a while ago, even before Britain triggered Article 50 in 2017. And, just like Britain, I was not quite prepared and spent a lot of time faffing about and procrastinating. Or doing the same thing over and over, like reading books from France and Germany.
So let’s do some arithmetic, shall we? I still have 15 countries to go through, for which I’ve read absolutely nothing. In the case of some countries (Cyprus and Luxembourg), I am struggling to find anything in translation. And I am likely to want to ‘redo’ some of the countries, for which I didn’t find quite the most satisfactory books (Romania, Greece or Italy, for example). That means at least one book a week from this category. Eminently doable, until you factor in all the review copies and other things that crop up. However, this will be my top priority over the next few months – my way of saying goodbye (sniff!) to the rest of Europe.
Here are some books that I have already sourced and will be ready to start shortly:
Bulgaria: Georgi Tenev – Party Headquarters (transl. Angela Rodel)
Hungary: Miklos Banffy – well, I need to finish that trilogy, don’t I? (Especially in the centenary year of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire)
Slovenia: Goran Vojnovic – Yugoslavia, My Fatherland, transl. Noah Charney – struggled to find something from this country, but this seems to fit the bill: the author, like the protagonist is Serbian/Slovenian and this novel about discovering your father is a war criminal will fit in nicely with my Croatian read.
Croatia: Ivana Bodrozic – The Hotel Tito, transl. Ellen Elias-Bursac – another author and protagonist who experienced the war as a child, considered one of the finest works of fiction about the Yugoslav war.
Estonia: Rein Raud – The Death of the Perfect Sentence, transl. Matthew Hyde, described as a spy and love story set in the dying days of the Soviet Empire
Latvia: Inga Abele – High Tide, transl. Kaija Straumanis – experimental and anti-chronological story of a woman’s life
Lithuania: Ruta Sepetys: Between Shades of Gray – this is not a book in translation, as Ruta grew up in Michigan as the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee, but the book is very much based on her family’s tory at a crucial and tragic time in Lithuanian history
Slovakia: Jana Benova – Seeing People Off, transl. Janet Livingstone – winner of the European Union Prize for Literature
But then I met Julia Sherwood at the Asymptote Book Club meeting, and she has translated Pavel Vilikovsky’s Fleeting Snow from the Slovakian, so I had to get that one as well. So two for Slovakia.
Malta: Very difficult to find anything, so I’ll have to rely on Tangerine Sky, an anthology of poems from Malta, edited by Terence Portelli.
Belgium: Patrick Delperdange: Si tous les dieux nous abandonnent – bought a few years back at Quais du Polar in Lyon, highly recommended by French readers
Denmark: Peter Høeg: The Elephant Keepers’ Children, transl. Martin Aitken – one of the most experimental and strange modern writers – I can see some resemblances to Heather O’Neill, whom I also really like, but they are not everyone’s cup of tea – this one I found at the local library, so yay, finally saving some money! But it is quite a chunkster, so… it might be impractical.
Greece: Ersi Sotiropoulos: What’s Left of the Night, transl. Karen Emmerich – because Cavafy is one of my favourite poets
So, have you read any of the above? Or can you recommend something else that won’t break the bank? (I’m going to try not to buy any more books in 2019, which may be an obstacle to reading my way through the remaining countries, as libraries do not stock them readily).
Final point: I do not intend to stop reading books in translation from all of these countries after the UK leaves the EU, by any means. In fact, I’m thinking of doing the EUVelo 6 cycle route from Nantes on the Atlantic to the Danube Delta across all of Europe and reading my way through each of the countries en route (10 of them). Maybe when the boys leave home, if my joints will still allow me to…
After four months of #EU27Project, I have to admit I have not been the hardest- working reviewer. I have only linked to six books in total (and two of those are from the same country, France, while the rest are : Germany, Czechia, Ireland and the Netherlands), so in reality only 5 of the 27 countries have been represented in 4 months. At this rate, I have little chance of finishing this project this year – but, unlike some politicians, I never thought it was going to be an easy and quick process, so I’m allowing myself time to continue this project next year.
However, I’m pleased to say that other book bloggers have been far busier than me, so, since my last update in March, we have moved from 16 reviews to 41.
France is the biggest mover, from 0 in the first batch to 6 reviews in the current one. Susan Osborne reviews two very different types of books: Marie Suzan’s poignant Her Father’s Daughter and the lighter French Rhapsody by Antoine Laurain. Kate Jackson reviews a book by Sebastian Japrisot, one of my favourite French crime writers, while Karen from Booker Talk considers a contemporary crime novel Hell’s Gate by Laurent Gaudé. I have also reviewed two French books, the not quite satisfactory Men by Marie Darrieussecq and the dark but very funny and musical Les harmoniques by Marcus Malte.
Austria is also a popular choice for us book bloggers (a trend which I heartily approve!). It already featured in the first batch and has notched up an additional five reviews, although, to be fair, three of those are for short stories or novellas by Arthur Schnitzler by Jonathan: Late Fame, The Spring Sonata and A Confirmed Bachelor. Like Chekhov, Schnitzler was a doctor as well as a writer, and very much concerned with the human psyche. He describes perfectly the darkness in the Viennese soul at the turn of the 20th century (and not only then). Kate reviews a book set in the same period, Leo Perutz’ The Master of the Day of Judgement, Susan reviews one of my favourite recent reads, Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist, with a guest appearance from Sigmund Freud.
Reviews from the Netherlands continue to trickle in. Karen attempts The Evenings, but does she like it any more than Lizzy did in the first two months of the project? Meanwhile, Susan found The Boy by Wytske Versteeg deeply unsettling. Ireland also features with two new reviews, a new one for The Glorious Heresies, which makes it the most popular book so far (3 reviews in total), and Anne Enright’s The Green Road.
The last country on the list with two new reviews is Italy, with the crime fiction of Augusto de Angelis and the story of the breakdown of a marriage by Domenico Starnone.
The remaining countries featured in the selection of March and April have been: Norway, represented by Anne Holt – Norway is not in the EU, but we will leave that link there anyway; Denmark with Dorthe Nors’ Mirror Shoulder Signal, Poland with Swallowing Mercury by Wioletta Greg, Czech Republic or Czechia with Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Observed Trains. The French might take exception with Marguerite Yourcenar representing Belgium rather than France, but that was Jonathan’s choice and that country is rather under-represented.
After a strong start in the first batch of reviews, Germany only managed one review in this round, a lesser-known Heinrich Böll oeuvre.
So what will the next two months bring? Personally, I intend to read more in this category. Perhaps two or three in May? I am currently reading the road-trip book by Andrzej Stasiuk (Poland), and will move on to poems from Malta and Pessoa’s pseudo-diary The Book of Disquiet (Portugal). But, as we all know, my plans for reading don’t always work out and I get easily side-tracked.
Special thanks and celebrations for Susan Osborne, Kate Jackson, Jonathan from Intermittencies of the Mind and Karen from Booker Talk, who have been the most prolific reviewers over these past two months, but thank you to everyone who has contributed, read, tweeted about this project.
findingtimetowrite 