Weekly Summary of Books and Films

Attention span bandwith continues to be quite limited, so, although I’ve been on my own this past week (until last night) and therefore had less of a responsibility for cooking, checking schoolwork and entertaining, I’ve not done an awful lot of reading or writing. Instead, I’ve been hopping and skipping between books and films, abandoning anything that doesn’t fully grab me or that feels wrong at this moment in time.

Films and TV

1. Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (dir. Kawashima Yūzō) is quite a broad farce, very commedia dell’arte or slapstick in its physicality. Set in a three-storey brothel which is a microcosm of Japanese society in the dying days of the Tokugawa period, it’s ostensibly the story of a lazy good-for-nothing who incurs a huge debt at the said brothel and therefore has to remain there to work it off. In fact, it is a great satire about virtually all of the ‘proud Japanese traditions’ (samurai, geishas, honour, filial piety) that tends to put forward as truly representative of Japan. The film was made in the early 1950s and was no doubt a comment on the ‘proud Japanese traditions’ which had led to the Second World War, as well as the hypocrisy about prostitution, corruption and financial greed. Wonderfully funny, a great palate cleanser in these worrying times.
2. Bacurau (dir. Mendonca Filho and Dornelles) is a very recent film about Brazil and its corruption at both local and national government levels. This is satire with a very sardonic bite. It has a Hunger Games or Get Out type of premise: foreigners being shipped in to a remote area of Pernambuco, paying  for the fun of hunting real people. But they haven’t reckoned with the indomitable fighting spirit of the inhabitants of the village of Bacurau. The gradual reveal of the exhibition housed in the village museum is one of the highlights of the film for me personally, but I felt that more could have been made of the socio-political situation and the repulsive local mayor clamouring for re-election.
3. Le Cercle Rouge (dir. JP Melville) I’m not a huge fan of heist movies, but there is a bit of a Jean-Pierre Melville retrospective on Mubi and this has been hailed as probably the best French heist movie, although I for one would argue that Rififi deserves to be on at least level pegging. It has been particularly celebrated for its nearly 30 uninterrupted minutes of silent heist sequence, but I personally preferred the build-up at the start of the film.
4. Autumn Sonata (dir. Ingmar Bergman) – prepare to have your hearts broken, if you’ve ever been a daughter or a mother or both. Flawless performance by the two leads, although I did think that Swedish families are much less likely (perhaps unrealistically so?) to interrupt each other’s introspective speeches. And this quote just killed me:

A mother and a daughter – what a terrible combination of feelings and confusion and destruction. Everything is possible and everything is done in the name of love and solicitude.

Abandoned: Devs; Twins – the high-concept, intriguing premise of the first and the beautiful backdrop of the second were not enough to keep me fully engaged with the rather far-fetched plots.

Books

Still struggling to focus on my reading rather than on Twitter, so I used several different ‘tricks’ to get me to fall in love with books again: I turned to the classics and tried a novel by Henry James which was much easier and frothier than I had expected, I co-read Serena with several other book reviewers to compare reactions and notes and I turned to lighter (not cosy, but more puzzle-type) murder mysteries such as The Iron Chariot by Stein Riverton (hailed as the first Norwegian crime fiction novel) and Peter Swanson’s Rules for Perfect Murders, which is the first novel we will be discussing for our virtual crime book club that is rising up again from the ashes. For more information about the book club organised by crime author Rebecca Bradley and to express your interest in participating, go here.

Abandoned: the rereading of The Ambassadors (one Henry James per month is enough); Maureen Freely: Mother’s Helper (quite fun social observation but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere); Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (maybe some other time, just wasn’t in the mood to read about a pet fretting about his master dying right now); Gerald Murnane’s Tamarisk Row – I’ve heard so many good things about this, but it was a little too depressing for my mood right now.

 

 

Five Things to Sing About

Really struggling to find enough things to be positive about this past week, which has been marred by headaches and insomnia. But as long as I have books, plays and music, it cannot be all bad, right?

1. I tidied up my bedside tables and bookshelves, as the new purchases were interfering with my geographical shelving.

My Russians are now next to Persephone, for some reason…

This is the bedside table I use on a daily basis. It usually looks a lot more cluttered than this, but I tidied it up for the photo. It contains my current reading and library loans, my journal and my all-time favourite authors (Tove, Jane, Virginia, Shirley, Jean)

2. I donated a massive bag full of books to the local library, but I also bought books this week, so my balance is probably zero.

The Malorie Blackman is for my younger son, and I wonder if my older son might be interested in Jean Plaidy – he is currently on a bit of a medieval history reading spree.

You might spot Kaggsy’s nefarious influence here… plus a highly-regarded Greek author about a mother/son relationship (currently a bit of an obsession of mine)

3. Speaking of mother/son relationships, I watched yet another emotionally gruelling play Mother of Him by Evan Placey at the Park Theatre. A play to make the audience think, laugh, cry and gasp out loud! It’s about a family (and especially the mother, who is being judged by everyone) going to pieces when the older son is accused of raping three girls in one night. It should come with a flashing red warning for single mothers of teenage boys – especially when the actor who plays the 17 year old son has the skinny body type of my own 16 year old!

4. ROH Live Encore at my local culture centre: Mozart’s Don Giovanni. One of my favourite operas, can never get enough of it and have watched many a wacky production. This beautiful Jack Furness revival of the Kasper Holten production featured a charismatic Erwin Schrott in the title role, a Don Ottavio I could finally empathise with (Daniel Behle) and an amazing if rather discombobulating set with video projections. It hasn’t quite dethroned my current favourite version: this ‘hipster edition’ live recording from the Festival international d’Art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence in July 2017.

5. Sadly, I didn’t make it to this month’s writing group meeting, but I’ll be taking part in the Charity Write-a-thon we are organising in Windsor on the 16th of November. All the money we raise will go to Mind. If you do feel inspired to sponsor me, please visit my fundraising page here.

Events Summary for September

I started off writing a weekly summary of events for this post and then realised that it is the end of September, so a monthly summary might also be appropriate. But first the weekly bit.

Two rather lovely events this week. First, a literary evening as part of the Festival America events across London, with Canadian writers Heather O’Neill and Michael Redhill at the very beautiful Canada House in Trafalgar Square. They even had a throne under lock and key, made specially for George V when he visited Canada.

The main staircase at Canada House.

Both of them are prize-winning authors in Canada, less well-known over here, but there is such a contrast between the two of them. Heather O’Neill has been on my radar since I stumbled almost accidentally across her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals in the McGill University bookshop while I was on a business trip to Montreal. I was so moved by that story that I automatically wanted to read everything else written by O’Neill. Yet when I got to The Lonely Hearts Hotel, I was equally entranced and repulsed by it. Hearing about Heather’s crazy childhood and parents who ‘had no idea how to function in the real world’, it is understandable that her view of the world is a combination of hardcore cynicism and childish wonder. She is extremely entertaining when she talks about her horrific experiences as a child, but she has clearly turned to fiction as a way to process trauma. As she said ‘Children have no language to express the bad things that have happened to them. My fiction tries to give them that language without taking away any of the nuances.’

She also had interesting things to say about literary prizes, having been a judge on the Giller Prize (the Canadian equivalent of the Man Booker) this year. She said that most of the books she felt strongly about none of the other judges liked – ever the rebel!

Michael Redhill is a poet and novelist, and seems at first glance to fit very much into the mainstream straight white male cannon. I didn’t quite get what he tried to achieve with Bellevue Square, but I thought it was an interesting and brave attempt, like Paul Auster’s New York trilogy. Then you find out that he has also published crime fiction under the pseudonym Inger Ash Wolfe – now I look forward to reading some of those. And there was quite a bit of subversion in the way he talked about literature and literary prizes – in his opinion the books that win most years are the second place vote for everybody. In other words, the book that all the judges mind least if it wins. He said that for him Bellevue Square is a clearing house for humanity, with such an assortment of characters from all walks of life, and he particularly admired how Heather gave such depth of character to the people in her novels – people that we would normally dismiss or avoid or run away from. 

Heather O’Neill (left) and Michael Redhill being interviewed by Georgina Godwin.

On Friday I had the unexpected good fortune to go to an evening of ballet at the Peacock Theatre. The New English Ballet Theatre, who are a young, energetic company very much open to innovation, had a double bill of Remembrance/The Four Seasons and I reviewed it for View from the Cheap Seat.

September has gone by even faster than the previous months, so what have been the highlights?

We started off the month in one of my favourite places in England, Cambridge, then continued with another mother-and-sons trip down memory lane to Vienna. Although it is always bittersweet to go back to the places where you were once so happy, I hope that I’ve inspired a future generation to take advantage of opportunities and expand their horizons.

I had the bestest of times singing and dancing along to one of my living heroines, Janelle Monae. I did a short workshop with Isabel Costello and Voula Tsoflias about developing your resilience as a writer, which made me decide to focus more of my energy on submissions once more. I saw another of my writing heroines, Sarah Moss, and was inspired by the Poetry Book and Magazine Fair. And, alongside all that, I’ve been learning a new (and very counter-intuitive) events management system at work and helping roll out a new initiative, getting the boys settled into their new school year and starting contemporary dance classes. 

October is set to be just as busy, so let’s hope that this sprained ankle which has laid me low this weekend is nothing more serious (X-ray to follow tomorrow) and won’t slow me down at all.

Weekly Summary 16 September 2018

Back to work, school and literary life! I do love September and its routines, although this week has been very tentative about routines so far.

I was still recovering from my trip to Vienna at the start of the week and pleased that my older son is now a Mozart fan as well (thank you, Amadeus the film, despite all your inaccuracies!). On Wednesday night I was blown away by Janelle Monae live. On Thursday I trialled a contemporary dance class and enjoyed running low and artistically from one corner of the gym to another (yep, I’ll be going regularly). On Saturday I attended a workshop organised by The Word Factory and run by Isabel Costello and Voula Tsoflias on developing your resilience as a writer. A very necessary and helpful session, which I hope will act as a kickstarter for me, as I’ve stopped submitting for about a year now, when the double dollop of rejection from writing and job applications got too much. Good news, however, about the one piece I did submit – one of the pieces I wrote during the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol this July, was accepted!

Another news item which made me very happy was that two Asymptote Book Club titles are on the first-ever longlist for the National Book Award for translated literature in the US. That is a HUGE achievement in just 9 months of existence of the Book Club. We clearly have a very wise team of editors who know how to pick the right titles (I can be immodest because it is not me that is involved in the final choice). We are going to be expanding the membership to the EU countries shortly and also organising some events, so plenty of exciting work ahead! If you are thinking of joining or renewing your membership, we have a flash sale going on this weekend. To ring in our milestone 30th issue, sign up for a three-month subscription by 2359hrs today (in your timezone) and get 10% off. And if you are wondering how you can fit in 12 additional books from all over the world to add to your tottering TBR pile, there is also an ‘every other month’ subscription option if you sign up for a whole year (with the corresponding price reduction, of course).

Had to include the Italian edition, because I love the cover.

Last but not least, here are the three books which will be joining my bedside table pile this week.

1. Asymptote Book Club’s August title is Brice Matthieussent’s Revenge of the Translator, translated by Emma Ramadan, which sounds like a postmodern confection of utter delight (a translator tries to justify the changes he makes to the novel’s plot and then blurs the lines between reality and text).
2. Endo Shusaku’s Scandal, transl. Van C. Gessel, is also about a novelist, keeping up appearances and disturbing sexual appetites (it will make an interesting comparison with Leila Slimani’s Dans le jardin de l’ogre, which I’ve just reread for a review).
3. Patricia Laurent: Santiago’s Way, transl. Geoff Hargreaves. A huge hit and prizewinner in Mexico, this one was translated a while ago but hasn’t received much attention here. The blurb makes me think of Zero by Gine Cornelia Pedersen.  “Imagine that all your life you’ve been guided by someone else. Someone who’s steered you away from trouble, taken you across the world, brought you success. He’s called Santiago and he lives in your head—and now he’s turned against you.”

June Is All About Celebration!

June has always been my favourite month: not just because it contains my birthday (and now also my younger son’s birthday), but also because in my childhood it meant the end of the school year (with all the resultant parties, shows and sports days). Plus. it’s the month of Midsummer, long days, nice weather even here in the UK, gardens looking their best…

So I’m determined to ignore any negativity currently haunting the fringes of my life in the shape of one single misguided person and keep June light and giddy with joy! As you know by now, joy usually accompanies cultural events in my case, so this is what I’ve been up to lately.

On the 1st of June, I attended a graduation show at RADA 3 Winters  by Croatian playwright Tena Štivičić. The play has been described as ‘a  family drama that moves between three alternating time periods and four generations of one Croatian family. From the 1945 victory of Tito’s communist supporters, to the 1990 break-up of Yugoslavia, to 2011 and the brink of EU membership – the fortunes of the Kos family are entwined with that of their country as political upheaval mirrors familial struggles. I found the content very moving and the young actors were pretty amazing, it goes without saying, but I also had the pleasure of sitting next to a young woman who was graduating in technical theatre, and specifically in lighting. She was taking notes throughout – that kind of professional dedication just fills me with joy!

I also had a funny experience at the interval. The people behind me were wondering loudly about the historical events mentioned in the play, they didn’t understand the allusions to the Yugoslav War in the early 1990s. It turned out that most of them had been born after that war had started (or even ended). So I couldn’t resist turning around and explaining things to them – a womansplainer, I believe that might be called? To be fair, it was more of a Q&A session, and the young people were genuinely interested (and shocked) and wanted to find out more. Then, at the end of the play, an older lady, who had heard me talk to the audience members at the interval, asked with awe in her voice: ‘Are you the writer?’

On the 11th of June, I had the great pleasure of attending the English National Ballet’s Emerging Dancer competition. Six finalists, three men and three women, showed us their dancing skills in a classical pas de deux followed by a contemporary solo. I thought the women in particular were hard done by with the choice of contemporary pieces, so it was not surprising that a man won: Daniel McCormick. He was, however, very gifted, and his leaps in the Le Corsaire pas de deux reminded me of Nureyev. My favourite ahead of the show was the Romanian ballerina Francesca Velicu (McCormick’s partner in the pas de deux) and she was certainly formidable in both her fast spins and the perfect balance in her slow pirouettes. During the show, I also fell in love with the cheeky charisma of Fernando Coloma (who reminded me of my younger son, so my friend was amused to hear me calling him ‘Cutie Pie’). Above all, it was delightful to see all their friends and colleagues, lots of young dancers, out in force to support them.

I’ve also been busy writing (not my poetry or fiction, unfortunately, but better than lazing around). The story of my inspirational grandmother Troy was published on the Women Who Made Me website.  If you haven’t heard of this initiative, I would encourage you to have a mosey on that website, as it’s all about hearing the hidden ‘herstories’ and finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. I could equally well have written about my other grandmother, the one I am named after, matriarch of the family, mother of seven, who had both German and Soviet soldiers  during WW2 bayoneting the hay in the barn searching for my grandfather (who happened to be the mayor in the village). I used to lap up their stories when I was a child and think that my own life would seem very tame and boring in comparison to my grandchildren. But then I took part in a revolution… So hey-ho, you never know what life will throw at you.

My beloved grandmother in one of my favourite places on earth, the Vienna Woods.

I’ve also recently reviewed the historical novel Savage Liberty (set in pre-Revolutionary America) and Baby Blue (set in post-austerity Athens) on the Crime Fiction Lover website, and my first batch of #20booksofsummer books on this blog. I’ve written an article for the Asymptote newsletter, comparing translations of one of my favourite books Tales of Genji (I had to cut it to half the original size, as I can waffle on endlessly about this topic and own five copies of the book). If you want to subscribe to the free fortnightly newsletter, you can do so here. Even better, do join the subscription-based Book Club to receive a monthly delivery of high-quality fiction in translation. I think it would make a perfect Father’s Day gift [and that’s the only mention of Father’s Day that you’ll get from me this year].

Entirely gratuitous headshot of Aiden Turner here – to turn heads.

The celebrations are set to continue over June and July, both via writing (I am writing three features on: German crime writers, Deadly Summers and When Detectives Go on Holiday, all for CFL) and by attending events. Next weekend, my actual birthday weekend, I’ll be partying in Berlin with two of my oldest and dearest friends who live there and who are also celebrating the same milestone birthday this year. I’ll be seeing the gorgeous and talented Aiden Turner in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, going for a gin-tasting with my local friends, chalking the White Horse at Uffington with a former colleague and our ex-boss, seeing a bilingual version of Tartuffe to celebrate the 14th of July, attending the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol (I’ll be volunteering, to keep costs down) and going to a production of Romeo and Juliet at the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon on my way to a course in Warwick. Interspersed with lovely meals and conversations and cosy World Cup games viewing with my youngsters and cat – and life couldn’t be better!

 

 

 

Cultural Summary 25 March 2018

An extrovert week is followed by a more introvert one, perhaps also coloured by the tumultuous events at work. Students occupied part of our building and impeded access to workspace, training rooms and even fire exits, and we had all the excitement of megaphones, human chains, trying to reason with them and then being evacuated and finding refuge in the library. While I have every sympathy with their fear that universities are becoming too similar to businesses, I am not fully clear what their aims are or how we could help them achieve those. But it does bring back memories of idealistic younger days when we protested against Communism and (sort of) won that battle, and of course there are parallels with the March for Our Lives movement in the US. I hope that this younger generation will achieve something before they get too disillusioned by the inertia and selfish interests of the older generations.

March 20th was the International Day of the Francophonie, so I spent the evening reading some French poetry, which was perhaps my first poetic love (Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire). I have a slim volume which is a good introduction to more modern poetry published by Gallimard: Mon beau navire, ô ma mémoire: Un siècle de poésie française (1911-2011). Gallimard has equivalent anthologies for each century, and this one features both well-known poets (such as Apollinaire, Paul Eluard, Aragon) as well as many poets that I am less familiar with.

This week I discovered the Norwegian crime series in 6 episodes Eyewitness on Walter Presents/All 4. Two teenage boys witness a crime at a sand quarry just outside their town and vow to keep it a secret, with all sorts of repercussions on their community and on themselves. It’s got great build-up of suspense and pacing throughout and manages to also be a love story, a tender mother and son/foster parents and child story, and to show how fallible and flawed even police detectives can be. Recommend, if you can access it. I very seldom binge watch, but I watched all 6 episodes over the course of just 2 nights.

I also succumbed to some bookish temptations. Upon hearing the sad news of the death of Philip Kerr, I borrowed one of the post-WW2 Bernie Gunther books from the library Prussian Blue, to see how Gunther copes with a post-Nazi world. I stuck to Germany when I ordered another novel by Jenny Erpenbeck, whose Go Went Gone I so enjoyed. This time it’s Heimsuchung (translated by Susan Bernofsky as Visitation), about a century of German history seen through the ‘eyes’ of a piece of land outside Berlin and the people who lived on it. Last but not least, the Japan Society left a comment on my review of Japanese novellas, and drew my attention to a dual language anthology of contemporary Japanese writing that they have just published. Heaven’s Wind is translated and edited by Angus Turvill and might help me get back into reading Japanese in the original once more. There will be a Book Club meeting dedicated to this volume on the 9th of April at the Japan Society headquarters in London.

There will be a break in my cultural events for the next two weeks, as holidays and the mountains beckon. However, if you are in France and not skiing, then you really should go to the wonderful Quais du Polar crime festival in Lyon, which this year takes place between 6 and 8 April. It will be my first time since 2012 that I won’t be able to make it, but I am sure Emma from Book Around will tell us all about it.

Happy Days in Lyon

France, Norway, Germany and Japan (plus I’ve just finished reading a crime novel set in South Afrida): where have you been ‘transported’ this week?

Summary of Cultural Events 11th March 2018

Quite easy to summarise the last fortnight of cultural events: there were none! The snow spoiled plans to go and watch tango at Sadler’s Wells (but I managed to change the booking for this coming week). The International Women’s Day event organised by the University of London got postponed because of the UCU strikes. I’ve felt pretty run down and tired this week (also fed up with those everlasting financial disagreements with the ex), so I caught the bug that had been doing the rounds at the office, so I’ve cancelled plans for this weekend.

However, I did go to watch Lady Bird at the cinema just before the Oscars. While it was not the greatest film of all time (but then, how many of them are?), it was a rather delightful coming of age story from a girl’s perspective (we’ve watched so many from a young man’s perspective), with a lot of relatable humour, nuanced observation and characters we all remember from high school (the spoilt popular girl, the elusive poseur, the just-a-shade-too-encouraging married teacher etc.) and a fraught mother/daughter relationship which reminded me a little too much of mine.  I even wrote a thread about that on Twitter (and I normally never do threads – or at least not more than 2-3 tweets at a time). Maybe I was overthinking it because of the lack of other cultural events.

I did get quite a batch of books to add to my March reading plans though. While searching for something else at the library, I found Ödön von Horváth’s Tales of the Vienna Woods in both German and English and thought I would do one of my ‘closely observed translation study’ of it. Horváth was a true child of the Austro-Hungarian empire and learnt German only in his teens.

If you ask me what is my native country, I answer: I was born in Fiume, grew up in Belgrade, Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna and Munich, and I have a Hungarian passport, but I have no fatherland. I am a very typical mix of old Austria–Hungary: at once Magyar, Croatian, German and Czech; my country is Hungary; my mother tongue is German.

Perhaps I can relate to him just a little… For the rest of his brief life, he would write in German – mainly plays, but also essays and novels. He was a keen observer of the absurdities of life and the rise of totalitarianism through indifference and the subjugation of popular culture, especially in the 1930s Germany and Austria. He fled to Paris after the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 and died that same year in a freak accident on the Champs-Elysées. Tales of the Vienna Woods was not only required reading at school, but I also happened to live on the outskirts of town, just about where those woods began, so it felt like he was writing for me. His work is full of quotable moments of flawed humanity:

Actually I’m quite different. But I so rarely have time to show it.

Based on Ann Morgan’s recommendation (it is she who read her way around the world in 2012), I also ordered Tiphaine Rivière’s Tiphaine Carnet de These, a humorous but realistic look at the life of a Ph.D. student. It is now available in English as well (translation by Francesca Barrie) and is a BD, which I really miss. There are comic books and manga available here in England, but it’s not quite the same.

Another local library find was Keigo Higashino’s Journey under the Midnight Sun, which looks seriously chunky, so I will probably have to renew it indefinitely. But you know I can never resist Japanese fiction!

Last but not least, I was sent an interesting crime novel from South Africa (another of my weaknesses), translated from Afrikaans. It is Karin Brynard’s Weeping Waters, translated by Maya Fowler and Isobel Dixon, and to be published by Europa Editions in April.

It’s Been a Week and a Half!

Oh, I can pun with the best of them, can’t I? ‘Cos it’s been slightly longer than a week since my last summary, and also a very eventful week, ha ha!

The most important event was our trip to Ireland. I’ve only ever been to Dublin for business and have previously seen mainly the airport, St. Stephen’s Green and the inside of some banks. This time I visited a good friend of mine from school, who lives just outside Dublin, and she treated us like royalty. She took me and the kids on various day trips to places whose names I struggle to spell or remember: the port of Dún Laoghaire, Malahide Castle and gardens, Trinity College Library of course with the Book of Kells, the Wicklow mountains with their dark scrubland, Bray and Cabinteely, Dalkey and Howth. We were extremely lucky with the weather and the pictures tell the story much better than I could. You may well expect a Friday Fun post on this theme very soon! However, one highlight was seeing my friend’s children and mine discuss Irish history: as a footnote to British history or as a nation struggling to free itself. (Curriculum and biased interpretation in action!)

Before leaving for Ireland, we also went to see the Sondheim musical Assassins at the RADA with their final year students, a play about the best-known successful and unsuccessful assassination attempts against American presidents. Given the school shooting which followed shortly afterwards, the wit seems almost unbearably mordant in retrospect. If Sondheim is suggesting that the American dream is of ‘everyone having the right to be happy’, even if that happiness involves killing others, then yes, it becomes less funny.

Finally, on Monday 19th February, I found myself going ‘just a little bit viral’, as my boys would call it. WordPress have highlighted my feather haibun post as a Blog to Discover. So I have been getting far more than my usual share of visits and likes. Thank you to all for reading and sharing, here’s to hoping that you won’t be disappointed that my posts are usually far more prosaic. I also hope I will get to know some of you better!

Weekly Wrap-Up 11th Feb 2018 (Part 1 – All Swiss)

The weekly wrap-up is a fortnightly wrap-up this time, because  didn’t do that much the previous week. I have more than made up for it this week, however, so brace yourselves, it’s going to be a long one! [In the end, I divided it up into 2 parts, as it was really long and also because I have lost some of my pictures.]

London is the city that keeps on giving in terms of cultural events and certainly reconciles me with the lack of winter sports and beauteous landscapes. I know it’s limiting to speak only of cultural events in the capital, but I can only speak of my own experience. Just like I mentioned Lyon. Morges and Montreux when I was living near Geneva, I can only give my very partial and biased view of events now that I am living just outside London.

Rosie Goldsmith welcoming Alain de Botton at Literally Swiss event.

I will start with the most recent event: a Swiss literary cabaret at a rather unusual venue that I had previously never heard of: The Tabernacle in Notting Hill. This converted church hall was the perfect backdrop for an evening that was actually a series of Q&As and readings featuring 7 authors with links to Switzerland, and hearkened back to the famous days of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich of the Dadaists. Absurdity was far from the agenda, however, although one of the big names invited, Deborah Levy (who did mention the Dadaists and Tristan Tzara), read out a story about a girl who believed she had swallowed a glass piano. Levy’s link to Switzerland was perhaps the most tenuous, as she has never visited the country but has set some of her stories there.

The others had fascinating things to say about Switzerland (yes, they all loved the landscape – can you blame them?), the Swiss, Europe in general, the rest of the world and literature. Pedro Lenz, whom I had met in Morges, writes in the Swiss German dialect, which has been rendered into Glaswegian for English-speaking audiences. I understand virtually nothing of either of the two readings (he performed the original and made it sound like anything but German, while someone else read the translation). Fascinating, because he had to make up his own rules, as Swiss German has only recently started to exist as a written language.

Peter Stamm was my main reason for going there. He was there with his two unimpressed teenage sons, and got a bit miffed when asked what makes him a Swiss writer. He pointed out that he considers his writing to be literature rather than particularly Swiss literature. He also got a big laugh when he read an essay about football nationalism and how the Swiss embrace the European ideals and project to a certain extent. He then paused and said: ‘I know this is a tricky subject here.’

Monique Schwitter was another outstanding performer of a passage about a writer having to give a 7 minute reading, as she is both an actress and a writer. She has been living in Hamburg for many years now, couldn’t wait to leave boring little Switzerland when she was younger, but is now thinking of going back, because she misses walking uphill and downhill. She had the best quote of the evening, from Robert Walser about the Swiss mentality: ‘He takes his heart out of the pocket, examines it, tucks it away again and walks on.’

Nicolas Verdan was the only author from the French-speaking part of Switzerland – I was familiar with his journalistic work, but didn’t know that he was partly Greek and that his crime novel is set in Greece and tackles the refugee crisis there. He made a very pertinent point: how much harder it is for Swiss French writers to get published in the ‘big city’ (i.e. Paris) and be taken seriously, than for Swiss German writers to get published in Germany.

Rather unflattering picture of Alain de Botton. It was dark and my phone is a bit rubbish, what can I say?

I only recently discovered that Alain de Botton is of Swiss origin. Despite sounding quintessentially English, he grew up as a French speaker in Zurich. Obviously from a privileged background, with well educated, very cerebral parents, who sent him off aged 8 to attend a boarding school in England. He spoke very movingly about how he misses Switzerland very much like an eight-year-old might miss a place: the food, tastes, smells (which explains perhaps my over-fondness for Viennese cuisine). He also spoke of his beloved nanny, whom he still visits every year in her remote valley, and how he has always tried to write philosophy that would be accessible to her as well.

The biggest surprise in this utterly delightful evening (with free-flowing snacks and Swiss wine, courtesy of the Swiss Embassy) was Xiaolu Guo , a Chinese-British filmmaker and writer who has had writers’ residences in Switzerland and is now teaching at the University of Berne. She talked so candidly about the differences between the UK and Switzerland – ‘I’m not allowed to say that Switzerland is boring, I’ve learnt to say it is peaceful’ and how she was welcomed as a guest in Switzerland (a visiting author), while in the UK she was a poor migrant. She described how she only encountered the fictional Heidi a couple of years ago and didn’t believe in nostalgia and fairy-tales, because she was raised with good old tradition-shaking Communist values and Soviet-style stories of children vanquishing dragons. I was there with a Russian friend and the three of us had a little chat while she signed my book. Russian, Romanian and Chinese women all have so much in common because of our history and we talked about bringing up children of a different culture, who will never understand the totalitarian world and clash of ideologies that we grew up in. (Thank goodness for that!)

Heidi Happy performing at Paleo Festival in Nyon.

The perfectly named Heidi Happy was performing music at the start of the evening, although she wasn’t getting as much attention as she deserved. I happened to sit next to and make friends with a fun-loving and charming Anglo-Australian couple, Jayne and Jim, with whom I hope to keep in touch. I saw several blogger/publishing friends, although sadly I didn’t get to see the translators I was eager to speak to, such as Jamie Bulloch. I think translators deserve to be feted as superstars just as much as the authors!

Of course I had to buy Xiaolu’s memoir of growing up in China and then moving west Once Upon a Time in the East, Peter Stamm’s Ungefähre Landschaft  (a novel not yet translated into English and set in Norway rather than Switzerland) and Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love and get them signed. I probably would have bought Monique Schwitter and Verdan as well, except that they were only available in English translation and I prefer reading them in the original if I can. (Which may seem to be contradicting the sentiment in the previous paragraph, but not at all. I just love practising my German and French.) Last, but not least, there was also a generous gift of an advance copy of one of the Swiss authors who was not there, Martin Suter’s Elefant, translated by the afore-mentioned Jamie Bulloch, due to come out in May.

Weekly Cultural Summary and February Events

I have been very busy at work this week, so no time for cultural events, other than to note that I posted copies of Asymptote January book club title to all of the UK and Canadian subscribers. Some of you have received them already, and we will be revealing the title next week. It took a little longer than usual to arrive, as it was shipped over from somewhere far, far away. I am very excited about this book, as I have to admit (to my shame) that I have not read anything translated from this language before.

The only other contribution I made this week was to ogle at Silent Witness on TV, which featured my workplace as a stand-in for the American Embassy. I believe they were filming those episodes when I went in for my job interview, so I was surprised that it was swarming with police and uniformed guards.

Senate House, London

There are, however, plenty of interesting events coming up in February that you might be interested in:

French Film Festival

Thank you to Emma from Book Around who made me aware of this. From 19th Jan to 19 Feb you can stream a selection of recent French films. 10 short films are free, 10 feature films are accessible via a small fee. With subtitles, naturellement!

Swiss Cabaret

A literary cabaret on Feb. 9th, featuring obvious Swiss writers such as Peter Stamm, Monique Schwitter, Nicolas Verdan and Pedro Lenz and others whose links to Switzerland might surprise you (as they did me): Alain de Botton, Deborah Levy and Xiaolu Guo. At the Tabernacle in Notting Hill.

Reconsidering the Raj

Programme of monthly lectures organised by the Institute of Historical Research at Senate House, London – through until April. While you’re there, you might also want to have a look at the Queer between the Covers exhibition at the Senate House library .

Imagine Children’s Festival at the South Bank

Focus on Storytelling with guests Jacqueline Wilson, Francesca Simon, Harry Hill and many more, Kids Takeover (programming, organising ticket sales, intercom announcements etc.), Super Hero parties and many free events. WED 7 FEB – SUN 18 FEB

Julian Barnes in conversation with Hermione Lee

On the eve of the publication of his latest book The Only Story, Wednesday 21st February 19:00 at The Royal Institution. Very tempted to go, as I love both of them.

So, after a very long January, February beckons at last (perhaps even with some bulbs in the garden coming to life). What are you looking forward to this coming month?