Last Few Acquisitions of 2022

And when I say ‘few’, I don’t really mean it!

Let’s take it from left to right, shall we?

As you know, I am always susceptible to book recommendations on Twitter (even though I am rapidly falling out of love with Twitter because of recent changes and furore). I saw Lauren Alwan wax lyrical about Emma Thompson’s diary of the filming of Sense and Sensibility, and I love that film and script, so I thought it would be a good investment.

The following five are all acquisitions from Newcastle Noir. Tony Mott is the author I am currently translating for Corylus (Deadly Autumn Harvest), and she kindly brought other books in her Gigi Alexa series, also featuring seasons in the title (Poisoned Summer and One Last Spring – provisional titles in English). I got talking with author Tom Benjamin who lives in Bologna and has written a series of crime novels set there, featuring an English private investigator, so that he could comment on cultural differences (my cup of tea, as you can imagine!). Passionate about social issues as I am, especially in my crime fiction, I instantly picked up the first in Trevor Wood‘s trilogy featuring a homeless man solving murders almost in order to protect himself. I’ve already read it and it is gritty, moving and quite unlike the run-of-the-mill police procedurals or psychological thrillers that seem to be a dime a dozen. Last but not least, although action thrillers are not my staple reading matter, after hearing author Amen Alonge talk about his book, life choices, stereotyping and the emptiness of vengeance, I had to get his first book in the Pretty Boy series, A Good Day to Die. Experts are saying that literary festivals don’t sell a lot of books anymore, but clearly they have never seen me in action! The only reason I stopped buying was because I had a rather heavy suitcase and a dodgy elbow to contend with on the way back from Newcastle.

I am not immune to book buzz, and I’ve been hearing about the next two books all year, so finally caved in and got them: Stu Hennigan‘s Ghost Signs is an examination of poverty in Britain today, made worse by austerity and the pandemic. And of course everyone has heard of Percival Everett‘s The Trees, shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year.

I have received the first in the 2023 Peirene subscription, History. A Mess. by Icelandic author Sigrun Palsdottir, translated by Lytton Smith, and it sounds intriguing, about an academic who makes a mistake and then is prepared to go to any lengths to hide that.

The next few books are all in German and took quite a while to be shipped over from Germany (and some were quite expensive). I’ve been fascinated with Hilde Spiel since I read her wonderful memoir of returning to post-war Vienna, so I ordered a whole bunch of her fiction in German (she also wrote in English), some of which has not arrived yet, as I hope to pitch her work to various publishers. Same applies to Ödön von Horváth, who is still mostly unknown outside Austria. Meanwhile, the book by Ingrid Noll was once again recommended by someone on Twitter – I’m afraid I can’t even remember by whom!

I’ve read a fair amount of Balzac over the years, but I think I only partially read Lost Illusions (or an abridged version). This is the long winter read for our London Reads the World Book Club, and I hope to find a way to see the latest French adaptation of it as well, because it looks very good (and evergreen topic, don’t you think?).

In addition to the above, there are a few that are still on their way and which might even make it here before 2023: Euphoria by Elin Cullhed, because I can never resist a book about Sylvia Plath; The Mermaid’s Tale by Lee Wei-Jing, because I’ve always been on the hunt for a worthy ballroom dancing partner; and a self-help book, believe it or not: The Little ACT Workbook by Sinclair & Bedman, as I’ve been looking for an alternative to CBT, which may be effective therapy for most people but doesn’t work for everyone.

Disclosure: I have set up my stall on Bookshop.org and if you go there, you will find not only find all the Corylus books available on that site, but also other lists with translated crime fiction that I particularly enjoy or books that I have recently bought myself or would heartily recommend. If you buy via those links, I get a very small commission myself, at no extra cost to you, and all the pennies will be ploughed back into producing better books for you at our tiny, very part-time publishing venture.

Incoming Books and Their Sources (6)

I thought I had the perfect excuse for justifying the vast amount of books that recently joined my household: it’s two months’ worth of incomings. But actually, it’s more like 6 weeks. Time to hit the pause button, I think, especially with the cost of everything going up so much and me contemplating a more part-time role (i.e. lower pay) so that I have more time to write, translate and promote Corylus. In the meantime, however, it’s been inspiration (or greed) galore. And, if I’m honest, book addiction is my way of escaping from all the anxiety that the current news cycle provokes in me.

From blogs and podcasts

I’m naming the culprits here (my daily walks while listening to podcasts are proving terribly injurious to my bank balance):

• Backlisted Pod: for O Caledonia (mentioned in passing) and Stephen Sondheim (a full episode)
• Slightly Foxed for Red Comet (full episode with biographer), although I vowed I had enough books about and by Sylvia Plath
• Late to It for Hilma Wolitzer (although not this particular book) and Kirsty Gunn’s Infidelities
• Book reviews by favourite bloggers such as Jacqui and Susana (who read it in the original Portuguese of course) and in Asymptote Journal for Empty Wardrobes
• Dorian Stuber and his guest Niccie Panetta for the 2021 books of the year round-up which included Blue Remembered Hills and Olga Zilbergourg for mentioning The Man Between about legendary translator Michael Henry Heim.

Sent by the publisher

Someone at Penguin Classics heard my boisterous declarations of love for Mishima’s work, for which I am profoundly grateful. Meanwhile, Clare O’Dea is a Switzerland-based expat writer whom I briefly encountered at Geneva Writers Group and she asked her publisher to send me this fictional account of the very recent (1959) Swiss referendum about women’s suffrage. Finally, I’d been a keen reader of Daniel Hahn’s diary of translating Damiela Elit’s Never Did the Fire for Charco Press, and commented on some of his blog posts, so was kindly sent a copy of the final diary published in book form.

Book clubs and discussions with friends

I have several books of poetry and prose by my friend and fellow Romanian writer who writes in English, Carmen Bugan, but realised that I did not have this collected version of her poems. I had been covetously eyeing Hannah Lowe’s The Kids and finally got the nudge to buy it after it won the Costa Award. I can’t remember exactly whom I had a conversation with on Twitter about the Bloomsbury Group, but I thought it was high time I read Angelica Garnett’s memoir, which puts them all in a less golden light. Meander Spiral Explode has been recommended to me for its exploration of the writing craft for those who are no longer content with the Three Act or linear structure. Finally, for our London Reads the World Book Club in March, we will be reading a Romanian book at last and it’s one of my favourite writers, Mihail Sebastian. I thought it might be helpful to have the English translation to hand, rather than rely solely on the Romanian version I have, and I might end up having OPINIONS about the translation.

From the library

I’ve heard so many good things about this memoir of living with disability A Still Life, shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize, and I’ve been on the waiting list for it at the library for ages. When I finally went to pick up my reservation, I came across this collection of short stories by Dostoevsky and I’ve never been able to ignore anything by him, even when he infuriates me.

Spontaneous purchases

I happened to be in the lovely Marlow Bookshop in real life, and was intrigued about Gail Simmons’ journey across the Chiltern Hills, which recreates Robert Louis Stevenson’s three-day journey across the same landscape nearly 150 years earlier. With HS2 speed railway threatening to destroy this landscape forever, it’s an attempt to capture a place and time before it disappears. I also picked up a British Library anthology there, because crime fiction and books are an irresistible combination. The quest to diversity my bookcase continues with the academic study of London as a migrant city, a science-fiction take on office life by Chinese American author Ling Ma, and two crime novels by Adam Macqueen introducing Tommy Wildeblood, rent boy turned sleuth, against a backdrop of London’s recent history (1970s-80s).

Catnip topics

Communist dictatorships in the former East Bloc countries and the United Nations (or other international organisations) are very triggering for me: in other words, as soon as I see or hear something about these topics, my online buying finger gets activated. The Stasi Poetry Circle is the true story of an attempt to set up a ‘propaganda poetry writing group’ in the German Democratic Republic. As for Romain Gary’s book: as I mentioned in the blog post about Frank Moorhouse’s book, it is a satire about the United Nations (thank you, Emma, for first drawing my attention to it), which Gary initially published under a pseudonym. I managed to find it second-hand on a French website and it got here relatively quickly.

An afterthought

Last, but not least, an online conversation with the same Emma as above, following her brilliant review of the Marseille Trilogy reminded me how much I love Jean-Claude Izzo and how difficult his books are to find over here. But lo and behold, a quick online search produced these two at reasonable prices. They’re both set mainly in Marseille too.

Most Obscure from My Shelves – Anglo Favourites

While bringing down books from the loft, I realised that I had some very ancient, almost forgotten books there, which have travelled with me across many international borders and house moves. Some of them are strange editions of old favourites, while some are truly obscure choices. I thought I might start a new series of ‘Spot the Weirdest or Most Obscure Book on my Shelf’. Although it can also be interpreted as ‘Books which don’t receive the buzz or recognition which they deserve.’ I would love to hear of anything on your shelves which you consider unusual or obscure or deserving of wider attention? How did you get hold of it? Why do you still keep it? What does it mean to you?

On the top of my centre-right bookshelf I have an odd assortment of old editions by favourite authors (many of which I bought second-hand at school jumble sales). Here are three which I have read many times and probably will reread in the future.

Sylvia Plath: Letters Home

This book represents my ‘way into’ Sylvia Plath, who became one of my favourite poets (she still is, by the way, although I am less interested in her biography by now). I found this rather massive book in the English language bookshop in Vienna when I was about 12 and had no idea who Sylvia Plath was. In fact, I thought it was going to be a bit like Daddy-Long-Legs, which was a book I loved at the time (the film too, with Cyd Charisse). Clearly, my parents had no idea who she was either, or they might not have approved the purchase of it for their overly dramatic, moody, poetically inclined pre-teen. But of course, this is the carefully sanitised version of Sylvia that her mother got to see. Nevertheless, impressive enough to make me scoop up everything else she had ever written or that had ever been written about her.

Elizabeth Goudge: The Herb of Grace

This is one of those books I came across at a book sale. Although the cover was pink and yellow (an uneasy combination of colours), I picked it up because I loved the author, having read The Little White Horse aloud to my mother while she was cooking, and also enjoyed The White Witch, The Middle Window and The Heart of the Family (I laboriously ticked all the other books I’d read on the inside cover). Again, I must have been 12-13 at the time and I’m not sure what I got out of this book about post-war trauma, adultery, forgiveness, love and friendship, other than the many references to The Wind in the Willows. Goudge’s style feels old-fashioned and quaint nowadays, has perhaps not aged as well as Barbara Pym or Elizabeth Taylor, but she was my introduction to that kind of writing, which one might call the ‘furrowed English middlebrow with an ironic raise of the eyebrow’. I don’t mean any contempt, by the way, as I love this writing style, although as I grew up I tended to prefer the more mordant wit of Muriel Spark or Nancy Mitford.

Now that I am reading the Cazalet chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard, I can say that this trilogy reminds me of that better-known series.

Lawrence Durrell: Monsieur

Having adored Gerald Durrell’s evocation of his family’s life in Corfu, which we had read out to us in class while we were doing arts and crafts (I was always far more interested in the book than in the crafty side of things), I borrowed Lawrence Durrell as soon as I could from the library (ah, the charms of benign neglect by parents and librarians!). The baroque prose and evocative landscapes of the Alexandria Quartet enchanted me. I soon graduated to the Avignon Quintet, of which this is one, perhaps my favourite, with its description of Christmas in a crumbling chateau in Provence (yep, the love of chateau and France have been a constant in my life). What would I think of it twenty-odd years later if I were to reread it? I now prefer the more pared down style of writing, so would it give me indigestion from all the riches?

Friday Poem: Beauty

Still with an Oriental twist: Chinese traditional beauty on Pinterest.

It’s Open Link Night over at dVerse Poets Pub and it’s been far too long since I was able to read the poems of my fellow poets located all over the world – or since I posted something myself. Looking forward to a fun weekend of reading and commenting!

 

I need someone to make me beautiful

where/when I can’t believe it on my own.

No powdered dab of make-up hand

or magic twirl of mascara wand.

I died for beauty…

 

I need a word or – better still –

a gasp

a pause

an intake of disbelieving breath

when I enter a room

or descend a stair.

Eat men like air…

I need my beauty reflected in the glow

of homecoming eyes.

 

When cameras and scales, dresses and youthful stares

conspire to strip

the dignity of remembered lines

of beauty past,

when flesh once succulent of gestures turns to rust

and spread is more than just another word for jam —

I need someone to notice

the worlds I still contain.

She walks in beauty, like the night…

 

Someone to find the marrow

of memory unsucked, unchanged – in me, in us, in life.