reading – findingtimetowrite
Posts about reading written by MarinaSofia
https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/e7bf3913bf81e7b362ac7d43f74abbe07a8b4f0b642bc415d42841cd32a2481e?s=32
findingtimetowrite
After a great transition from May to June with Capital Crime, I spent the rest of the month of June (a birthday month for me, my younger son, and many, many of my friends) in rather unproductive, self-indulgent decadence.

Events

I was planning to go out more and do more things, but the trains have been very problematic, so in the end I only saw the stage version of Spirited Away at the London Coliseum (the second part especially was magical!) and went to Oxford for the always interesting and motivating Translation Day. I also really enjoyed the Expressionist/Blue Rider exhibition at Tate Modern. I’ve always dreamt of having a group of artistic friends living together in a village over the summer and indulging in our creative pursuits during the day, giving each other support and feedback, and having glorious meals on the terrace in the evening. OK, those are not the most obvious critical points to make about the Blaue Reiter group, but it’s what I love about them.

Closer to home, I attended a monthly Royal Borough Writers’ Group meeting – which I haven’t been attending all that regularly recently. Not quite Blaue Reiter, but it made me a little sad to think that once I move I won’t be joining their sessions of feedback and fun writing prompts anymore.

The other great joy is that university exams are over and my younger son is back home at last. He’s inherited my more ‘mature’ tastes in food and drink, much to the surprise and mockery of his student friends, so we’ll be indulging in cheese, salmon blinis and cocktails until the older son comes home on the 10th of July.

Reading

For the first time ever in my life, I can understand why some people don’t read as much as I do, because this month I’ve only read six books and struggled to finish even those, although I quite enjoyed them. They were all set in different places and I’ve written about three of them (Poland, Hong Kong and Japan). I wrote a reader’s report for Das Herzflorett by Marica Bodrožić, a coming-of-age story of a Croatian girl joining her immigrant parents in Germany. Chinatown by Thuan was part of our London Reads the World Book Club, set in Vietnam, Russia and France, with a hypnotic, repetitive prose that irritated some of our book club members, but which I found oddly soothing (but did NOT like reading on Kindle, especially when my Kindle died while I was reading it and it took a week or more to replace it). I got Brotherless Night by V. V. Ganeshanathan from the library a week or so before it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and, although it took me several weeks to finish it, I’d have to agree that it was a deserving winner: a family saga with a lot of emotional and social/political history, educating me about the civil war in Sri Lanka. But my appetite for reviewing was even lower than my appetite for reading, so that’s as much as you’ll get about this book.

Five books by women authors, three in translation – not a bad proportion, when the numbers are so low.

So what have I been spending my time on?

I’ve been spending a fair proportion of time getting the house surveyed, decluttering and getting ready to put it up for sale. But, to be perfectly honest, I’ve been continuing my unprecedented TV bingeing. So yes, I can see why people who watch Netflix or other streaming services so much (I rarely did before April) have little time or energy left for reading.

I did this partly because I knew that once my sons came back, I wouldn’t have the time or desire to watch TV much, other than perhaps some films or anime that they might enjoy too. However, it’s mostly because I discovered the gorgeous Korean actor Kim Jae-Wook in Her Private Life and then even younger and more gorgeous in Coffee Prince. So, just like I go down into a rabbit hole and read everything when I find a favourite author, I fell down into the rabbit hole of trying to track down as many of his films and series as possible. He seems to choose his roles carefully, to give himself as much depth and variety as possible, rather than playing the conventional leading man. I particularly recommend Butterfly Sleep, a Japanese film directed by a Korean director, a poignant meditation on ageing, dementia, loneliness and love, but he lights up the screen wherever he appears – that natural rather than manufactured charisma which I associate with Hollywood in the 1930s-1970s. He was previously a model and lead singer in a rock band as well, his hobby is reading and one of his favourite films is In the Mood for Love – so what’s not like, eh?

Of course, after a while, all Korean dramas start to feel the same, with accidents leading to coma, rich chaebol families fighting for succession, would-be lovers failing to talk to each other properly, lots of scenes of drunkeness where one’s true feelings finally come out, dominant and interfering parents (but with an emotional scene of mutual understanding and forgiveness) and a high percentage of orphans being adopted by families in Germany or the United States. Oh, and did I mention that the male protagonists are often portrayed as aloof or arrogant at first, but then utterly committed and caring, endlessly loyal and faithful? I’d have thought it’s obviously a case of wishful thinking, but apparently some women around the world start believing this might be true and travel to South Korea looking for love. This article explodes this myth: and convinces me that my strategy to admire the beauty on display from a distance is the correct one.

Luckily, just in time to avert complete obsession with Jae-Wook, I discovered another versatile and magnetic actor Woo Do-Hwan, in the Valmont-type role of a loose adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses called Tempted. I would have liked to see the TV series being more dangerous and dark, but Do-Hwan did a nice line in sinister brooding which the camera just lapped up. Apparently, he is more like an enthusiastic, smiley puppy dog in real life.

Just in case you thought I was completely wasting my time though, all this Korean drama watching has also given me the idea for a new novel: a sort of tongue-in-cheek fanfiction type thing to start off with, but then getting deeper and darker, as it tackles issues of ageing, loneliness, obsession, being unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality, celebrity culture and online trolling. Not quite like Baby Reindeer though, which I just couldn’t bear to watch to the end.

However, I don’t really need excuses for self-indulgence, as I don’t believe in ‘guilty’ pleasures – they are all just little pleasures that harm no one and make our lives a tiny bit more pleasant amid the collective wreckage.

Plans for July

Time to get back on track with reading, writing, publishing, translating and home improvements this month, as well as spending time with my sons. Harrogate crime festival beckons, and Corylus will be publishing the fourth novel by our best-selling author Solveig Palsdottir. Shrouded is delightfully creepy without being too gory, and it also addresses issues such as ageing (again! do I detect a theme this month?) and preying on vulnerable people, so do consider pre-ordering it if you think you might be interested.

Stu will be hosting the Spanish and Portuguese Lit Month in July, so I’m planning to read mostly from those languages (and Catalan) over the next two month (because August is Women in Translation Month anyway). What do you think of my choices below? I just hope I regain my reading va-va-voom.

I am, as always, fashionably late to the party of Six Degrees of Separation: on the first Saturday of the month, Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best hosts a linking game starting with the same book and then it’s up to us to choose six others to form a chain. This month’s starting point is Butter by Yuzuki Asako, a Japanese novel that I haven’t read yet, but am sure I’ll quite enjoy as it has some murder and plenty of food at its heart (although I have also heard it’s a bit too long and its food descriptions are too detailed).

I’m almost tempted to copy Emma from Words and Peace blog and make it all about Japanese literature this month, but I will start with a double link: another Japanese book that names a food or drink in its title, namely Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Kawaguchi Toshikazu, which I read when it first came out in English translation 2019 and thought was disgustingly sentimental and cloyingly sweet. But what do I know? Because it has spawned several sequels and a TV adaptation and is one of the bestselling Japanese books (in translation) ever…

So let me continue down that ‘bah, humbug!’ path and link to another book that I felt was terribly overrated, and not just because I was an adult rather than a YA when I first read it – the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. I like school stories and I like magic and fantasy well enough, but the prose felt very pedestrian, the characters a bit ‘paint by numbers’. Besides, Diana Wynne Jones, Elizabeth Goudge and Miyazaki’s Ghibli films did it all much better.

And it’s precisely Ghibli-adapted book that I form my next link: namely, the delightful Kiki’s Delivery Service by Kadono Eiko (yes, another Japanese one), about a young witch who has to learn to live on her own in a new town (and discovers she’s not terribly good at her inherited profession).

Kiki has a black talking cat Jiji, so I will now link to another talking black cat, but one that is far from cute and cuddly. Still, I love him: it’s Behemoth of course, from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, who utters that brilliant line that always makes me laugh (the ‘villains’ are trying to gain entry to a writers’ club by pretending to be Dostoevsky):

“You’re not Dostoevsky,” said the citizeness, who was getting muddled by Koroviev.

“Well, who knows, who knows,” he replied.

“Dostoevsky’s dead,” said the citizeness, but somehow not very confidently.

“I protest!” Behemoth exclaimed hotly. “Dostoevsky is immortal!”

I feel I may have talked about both Jiji and Behemoth before on my blog, as I am slightly obsessed by the two of them, so I will make an abrupt switch – I mean, link, of course – to my other favourite animal, namely the elephant. One of the best fictional books about elephants (and the relentless pursuit of ivory) that I’ve read is Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary.

I’ll finish with another Japanese book which describes a hellish experience yet features the word ‘heaven’ in its title: Heaven by Kawakami Mieko, a story about schoolchildren feeling like outsiders and being bullied quite horrifically, but also starting to articulate their own emotions. The more I watch Japanese TV dramas, the more I realise that Kawakami takes a lot of their common tropes and subverts them (in all of her novels I’ve read thus far).

I’ve travelled to Japan (several times), England, Moscow and Chad this month. Do join in and let us know where your Six Degrees of Separation will take you?

Books Read

You can see that I’ve been busy this month with travelling to Berlin, hosting a friend for a week and also still binging a bit (OK, a LOT) on Korean and Japanese TV series. I’ve read fewer books than usual, only eleven, of which at least four were very quick reads indeed.

Seven of the eleven books were either in foreign languages or in translation (two from Japan, two in German, one in Romanian, one from Kazakhstan and one from Spain), while two were part of the Women’s Prize shortlist. I’ve also continued to read different forms of memoir: The Rooster House, Zambind printre nori (Smiling through the clouds) and The House by the Lake, so that I can develop a clearer picture of what I might want to do (or not do) for my own. However, I think Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) fits in more closely with my ideal memoir.

My outstanding reads for this month were Ingo Schulze, Milena Michiko Flasar and Isabella Hammad. Tsurezuregusa was a reread and there’s lots about the stuck-up, uptight, conservative priest Kenko that I don’t like, but I’ve also filled the book with little tabs, it is a monumental, highly influential work in Japanese literature. Four outstanding books and five really interesting ones make up for the two turkeys (sorry, was bored to death of the Romanian and the Spanish book and their endless recitation of sexual conquests and action scenes respectively).

Books Acquired

On the one hand, I’m trying to get rid of a lot of my books in preparation for my upcoming international move, but on the other hand, I can’t resist a good book splurge – a modest one this month (by my standards).

The two Romanian books were given to me at an event at the Romanian Cultural Institute and are part of the University of Plymouth Press series of beautifully-presented translations of Romanian literature with illustrations by renowned artists. I heard Elisa Victoria and Simone Antangana Bekono speak at the European Writers Festival at the British Library this month and they were both extremely eloquent and interesting (from Spain and the Netherlands, respectively) Finally, The Night Parade, The Crying Book and Refuse to Be Done are all recommendations from my memoir course.

Films and TV

I only watched one film in the cinema this month: Challengers, with a story line that I found personally rather irritating, but nvertheless worked well to show the single-mindedness and selfish competitiveness that is required to get to the top of competitive sports – great action shots too.

However, as mentioned above, I now have to get my daily dose of Japanese TV series and have started watching Korean ones too. Of the many I watched, quite a lot were silly, but the more memorable ones are:

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (directed by Kore-eda) – a gentle examination of the world of geishas and Japanese traditions (and which reminded me to cook oyakodon)

Crash Landing on You – a wildly improbable story of a South Korean heiress crashing during paragliding and ending up in North Korea, where she falls in love with a border guard – but contained a fascinating insight into the differences between North and South Korea, as well as a very endearing ensemble cast. Some scenes are set in Switzerland and has apparently led to such a Korean tourism boom in those areas that there are now buses with information in Korean.

Fermat’s Cuisine – another show combining cookery with personal ambitions and complicated relationships, but also an excellent portrayal of inherited ambitions, expectations and trauma

Eye Love You – a sweet comedy about a woman who can read people’s minds who falls in love with a Korean student, whose mind she cannot read because he thinks in his mothertongue. Despite some far-fetched Ainu and Korean shamanic elements, it is respectful and amusing about cultural differences between Korea and Japan, and an indication that the younger generation in Japan is fascinated by Korean food, culture and idols

Plans for June

And here comes June, my favourite month of the year (birthday month for myself, my younger son, and a lot of good friends). By the end of the month I hope to have my sons back home after their exams. I also want to write my own work, as well as produce some more translation pitches and samples. But I also have practical things to do around the house: declutter, repaint the hallway, clean out the gutters and so on, in preparation for putting it on the market, hopefully in September.

After a month of free reading (following a rather challenging month of reading mainly International Booker titles), I am now ready for some more structured reading – although you will laugh at my idea of structure. Still, these below (plus some random mood reads) should keep me busy during the summer months.

It was a great honour and delight to be part of the Shadow Panel for the International Booker Prize this year – although, in retrospect, it was perhaps not the best year to be part of it, as many of us found the official judges’ longlist rather uninspiring. The theme seemed to be very firmly autofiction or, at the most, fiction that felt autobiographical, and, to be perfectly frank, there’s only so much self-indulgent prose I can take…

Our own shortlist differed from the official one. First of all, we only had five shortlisted titles instead of the standard six. Three of our choices also featured on the judges’ shortlist, but will our chosen winner match theirs?

Drumroll please!!!

Our winner is Selva Almada’s Not a River, translated by Annie McDermott, published by Charco Press, which scored 56 points with our shadow panel, being the top choice for five of our ten panellists and second choice for most of the remaining ones, I believe). A short, sparse novel about three men who go fishing on a river in Argentina, it ends up being about so much more, hovering between the past and the present, between the physical world and haunting memories or desires. A book I will certainly want to reread, especially since it was the last to arrive and be read for the longlist and I didn’t even get a chance to review it.

Here’s what the author says about the book:

Not a River is inspired by the territory where I was born and raised, by the people who inhabit that land and who, in many cases, were marginalized by neoliberal policies that condemn the majority to poverty and to an absence of minimum rights such as the right to work, to education and to health. This is my humble tribute to my land: to its rivers, its animals, its trees and the people who live in it.

Our runner-up (quite close as far as points go) was Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, translated by Michael Hofmann, published by Granta Books, another remarkable story about the ghosts of the past – past relationships, countries that exist no more, cities that have been forever changed. This is a book I cannot be entirely objective about, as it feels very personal to me, but I had some thoughts about this on the lovely translation podcast run by Anil.

I love what the author has to say about the book:

How can something that seems right in the beginning, turn into something wrong? This transition interested me. It has a lot to do with language – since language is made to express feelings and visions as much as to hide or betray them. It can reveal something interior, and yet mislead people, or it can just be a blank surface. If you look at the details of what is spoken and where there’s silence instead, you’ll also be able to follow the invisible currents, the shifting power between generations, the techniques of manipulation and abuse.’

But I think our third-ranking title deserves an honourable mention as well, even if it didn’t make the official shortlist. It was certainly the longlist surprise that delighted most of us in the Shadow Panel. It seemed to come out of nowhere, from a tiny micro-publisher who didn’t even have sufficient print copies of it when the longlist was announced. A set of inter-connected stories in non-chronological order, which paint the portrait of a particular time and place, a rural community in Poland in the early 2000s. White Nights by Urszula Honek, translated by Kate Webster, published by MTO Press, is a poetic, moving, strange and exactly the kind of work that should be on the radar of translated fiction readers and prizes.

April was a delightful reading month, improved even more by the #1937Club organised by Simon and Kaggsy and by having finished most of the International Booker Prize longlist, so being free to read as I pleased.

For the #1937Club, I read the rather bonkers but fun Ferdydurke by Gombrowicz, the dreamy but spikey Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb and the much-better-upon-rereading The Years by Virginia Woolf. I read The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone for the International Booker Prize, which I found a very compelling read, although it could have been equally impactful if it had been about a third shorter. I also read two titles from the Women’s Prize longlist, Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy and In Defence of the Act by Effie Black, both of which I initially thought would be too gruelling a read, but both of which I enjoyed in very different ways.

Away from any literary prizes, I read three Romanian language books with a view to possibly translating them (or at least pitching them to some publishers). Two beautifully-written, highly evocative descriptions of growing up in the Moldovan countryside by Lorina Bălteanu and Valentina Șcerbani and one by Gelu Diaconu of growing up gay during the restrictive Communist times in Bucharest. These fictional coming of age stories worked equally as well with my memoir writing course, as the more obvious memoir by Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments.

With all these weighty tomes and topics. I also needed some down time with my favourite crime genre. The postmodern wittiness of Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz, the claustrophobic tension of Sharp Glass by Sarah Hilary and the strong characterisation and twisty narrative of A Stranger in the Family by Jane Casey were just the ticket (in the case of the latter, almost literally – for I read most of it at the airport and on the plane on the way to Berlin).

I had less time to read in Berlin, since I was walking what felt like a million miles every day (I have the blisters to prove it, but that’s my fault for choosing comfy shoes rather than hard-core trainers), as well as chatting non-stop with my friends, but I found the quite intriguing book by Ingo Schulze, which explores how such an apparently ‘nice, bookish’ person as the antiquarian Norbert Paulini from Dresden could espouse a right-wing ideology, something that Germany is clearly struggling with at present. Despite the historical differences, I think it could also explain a lot about those spouting right-wing propaganda in present-day US and UK.

As for Berlin: it charmed me with its summer weather, music, national holiday on the 1st of May, the quality of its housing, its cultural buzz and diverse neighbourhoods, and, of course, my very dear old friends. I have no doubts that it’s the right move for me. Here’s a little reminder of our day out at Wannsee – and now I’m searching for the film Die Wannseekonferenz, shown by the ZDF in 2022, as recommended by several people (although there is also an earlier one in 1984, which also seems to be rated highly).

The theme for this month’s #6Degrees of Separation (book links), as hosted by Kate, is an appealing one for me, because it starts with a travel book. I’ve always loved travelling either in person or via a book, so it’s the perfect combination!

I’ve just done a good clearout of my travel guides, because they are so out of date by now that I don’t think even the charity shops will want them. The ones that I loved most, even as a child, were the slim green Michelin guides, which my father and I took in turns to read out loud at the various sights, a habit that I’ve maintained over the years, much to my children’s embarrassment. Anyone who knows my Friday Fun posts will not be surprised to hear that my favourite guide was the one to the Chateaux of the Loire Valley.

Obvious first link is to a book taking place in a chateau, and my choice is the Les Rois Maudits series by Maurice Druon, the original Game of Thrones, as George R.R. Martin admits himself. It has also spawned two popular TV series adaptations, but also a parody series on French TV called The Damned Do-Nothing Kings, so that’s my link to the next book, which is a parody.

James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories was a quite popular parody of fairytales when I first came to London; in fact it was my first present from the young Ph.D. student who later became my husband. He knew I was a feminist and was trying to impress me. I found the stories quite funny at the time, but they haven’t aged well (fair description of the ex-husband too).

Very simple next link, to another author named Garner, namely Helen Garner and This House of Grief, the first book of hers I read, about a divorced father who drove the car into a dam when his children were in the back. This book focused more on the court case rather than the background to the tragedy and psychological detail or speculation, like in Emmanuel Carrere’s The Adversary, which is my next link, and which has profound personal resonance, since I lived on the street where that tragedy took place.

How can I turn this around from such horrible subjects? By pointing out that there is a delightful and criminally underknown book set very close to the location in The Adversary. It’s a conversation between an out-of-her-depth expat wife and the philosopher Voltaire, who teaches her how to live in her new environment: A Visit from Voltaire by Dinah Lee Küng. The book was longlisted for the then Orange Prize in 2004 (now know as the Women’s Prize), so it’s a shame it seems to have been forgotten.

My last link is to a literary prize winner who seems to have been forgotten (at least outside his home country): Harry Martinson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1974 (jointly with another Swedish author Eyvind Johnson). His poetic cycle Aniara sounds intriguing: it’s about a spaceship that wanders off-piste, destined to float eternally through space.

This has been a well-travelled post, with a bit of a French dominance. Where will your travel book edition of the Six Degrees meme take you?

Sourcing the longlisted books can be an expensive and difficult business, as my local library only has a couple of them, but I have had a chance to read three of the books since the longlist was announced on Monday 11th March, so am hopefully on track to read most of them before the shortlist in April. However, the reviews will be quite short, because I will provide a more in-depth review of the shortlisted titles.

Andrey Kurkov: The Silver Bone, transl. Boris Dralyuk, Collins.

This was the only one of the longlist that I already had downloaded on my Kindle, not because I predicted that it would be longlisted, but because I like crime fiction generally, have been a Kurkov fan since Death and the Penguin, saw him speak a couple of months ago and heard about his struggles to get back into writing fiction when his country is at war.

It’s set in Kyiv in 1919 and is about a very confusing and painful period in Ukrainian and Russian history, in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. There are many details about hunger, violence, ideological contradictions, rapid changes which reminded me of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Moscow Diaries from the same period. But there is also a fantasy element to it, a cut-off ear stuffed in a drawer which can eavesdrop on people, that could have come straight from Bulgakov or Gogol – probably a deliberate choice, since both of those writers have strong Ukrainian links, although they wrote in Russian, just like Kurkov himself.

The two contrasting covers to the book probably show the lack of certainty as to what this book is exactly. The dark cover seems to indicate a noir novel, but it is too slow-paced to satisfy crime fiction aficionados, too full of historical details and descriptions, with a forgettable whodunit element that I really didn’t care about solving. However, as an insight into a particular time and place, it is fascinating – yes, quite anti-Russian, as some reviewers have pointed out, but there are some decent Russian characters there too. There are also satirical strands to it – or rather absurd and grotesque elements, to fit in with an absurd and grotesque period of history – but overall it does not strike me as a humorous or cosy crime book in any way other than the fantasy element of the hidden ear, which is why the white cover feels a bit off. Personally, I’d have preferred a cover featuring a historical image of Kyiv during that period, but publishers probably feared that might make it look too much like non-fiction.

Although it’s competently written and well translated, I’m a bit puzzled why this one made the longlist. There isn’t a single paragraph there that makes me think ‘This is so beautifully written, I want to share it with the whole world’ – maybe it is a sort of recognition of Kurkov’s body of work and because it feels relevant to the present day? It is not one of his strongest or most imaginative novels in terms of literary prizes, but I will certainly continue to read this series as a crime fiction fan.

Ia Grenberg: The Details, transl. Kira Josefsson, Wildfire.

This book, as the cover indicates, is made up of four vignettes, four portraits of important people in the narrator’s life, in non-chronological order, with the narrator looking back on her youthful escapades from a vantage point of twenty-plus years.

Through the descriptions of these people and the relationship they forge with the narrator, we of course get a better understanding of the narrator herself. We are all shaped by the people we come into contact with, or at least the ones we have most loved or hated or been obsessed by. The other way in which we get to know the narrator is through the shared books – the ones that she and her friends/lovers discuss or love or hate.

It’s a quiet, short book, easily read one sitting, with several passages about a procrastinating writer where I smiled in rueful recognition, as well as general ruminations about the world which gradually reveal things about the narrator – in some cases subtly, in other cases more obviously. The author’s approach is captured best in a quote about one of the briefest and most mysterious episodes in her life, the section entitled Alejandro:

…what he told me, the information he shared with me, I carefully committed to memory with a view to recounting it to Sally and others who might ask, and perhaps also for the benefit of future me, but the information was just the container and not by any stretch the details that woke me up the next morning, heart thumping…

It’s these details that the author tries to capture, the unspoken, the gesture, just what it is that makes our heart beat faster when we see a person, or forgive them or abandon them. It’s a perfectly nice novella, with flashes of wit and lyricism, but once again I was slightly puzzled about its inclusion in the longlist. I’ve read many books that were equally as good that would have been eligible for the prize. I’ve also read some Romanian books that were on par with this, but which are not getting translated…

Jenny Erpenbeck: Kairos, transl. Michael Hofmann, Granta.

A love story set during the cusp of transformation in East Berlin in the late 1980s – this was always going to be catnip for me, so I thought I could not be entirely objective about it. And I’m probably not, for I love a blend of the personal and political, and have always felt close to Erpenbeck’s own experience.

I loved all the descriptions of life in the city before and after the collapse of the Wall, and this went a long way toward quashing my reservations about the love story. The masochistic and punitive aspects of the love affair made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I had to remind myself repeatedly that the love story itself – between the authoritarian, gaslighting, egocentric older man and the naive, often passive younger woman – is a metaphor for those of us living under Communism.

Once again, the main protagonist, Katharina, is remembering the past from a safe distance, but there is a final twist which makes her question all her memories – and makes us rethink all that we believe we know about their story.

Of the three I’ve read so far, Kairos is the one that I hope to see on the shortlist, and that I want to analyse in more detail, from the title itself, with its ‘seize the moment, but make sure it’s the right moment’ kind of guarded urgency, to the double disillusionment of both the love affair and the social order (socialism AND capitalism). This is no Ostalgie, but a clever and affecting look at how major historical changes affect two different generations.

I never barge in front in a queue nor gatecrash parties to which I haven’t been invited, but just occasionally it pays off to be a bit bolshy and pushy. When Tony Malone announced the unofficial but long-established International Booker Shadow Panel, I lamented the fact that nobody ever invites me to take part and practically begged to be allowed to join in. And, being a very nice group of people (whose blogs I’ve been reading and appreciating for years), they agreed, so I hope I don’t make a fool and a nuisance of myself. The timeframe for reading books is a little tight: longlist announcement on the 11th of March, shortlist on 9th of April, with the winner being revealed on the 21st of May.

So, let’s start off by trying to predict what the longlist might look like. I wouldn’t call it so much a prediction as a sort of wishlist: partly books I want to read, partly books I’ve read and liked, partly translators whom I know and trust.

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard, transl. Frank Wynne, published by Fitzcarraldo – a tour de force of translation and a very amusing and exuberant introduction to Enard’s work.

2. Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga, transl. Mark Polizzotti, published by Daunt Books – not read, but have been impressed by her previous books about Rwanda

3. The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohammed Mbougar Sarr, transl. Lara Vergnaud, published by Simon & Schuster in US/Canada and Penguin in UK. Is this the only big publisher on my list? In which case, this is definitely wishful thinking. I have this book in French rather than in translation, but it’s certainly a topic that resonates with me.

4. Kinderland by Liliana Corobca, transl. Monica Cure, published by Seven Stories Press – a country (Moldova) and a topic (children of migrants left behind in the home country) that are both dear to my heart, plus I know the translator (last year she won the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize with Corobca’s The Censor’s Notebook, but I find Kinderland is a much stronger and shorter book)

5. Austral by Carlos Fonseca, transl. Megan McDowell, published by MacLehose – fascinating subject about loss of memory (both physical and metaphorical) and revisiting one’s home country and one’s past, this one is in the ‘Want to Read’ category (OK, I guess this is a big publisher too, part of Hachette)

6. The Delivery by Margarita Garcia Robayo, transl. Megan McDowell, published by Charco Press – I love both the translator and the publisher, and this story of a fraught mother/daughter relationship really impressed me and has been my favourite of Robayo’s works in translation thus far

7. A Little Luck by Claudia Pineiro, transl. Frances Riddle, published by Charco Press – can you tell how much I love Charco Press? I’ve also been a fan of Pineiro’s work for many years, before she became more explicitly literary rather than crime fictiony.

8. The End of August by Yu Miri, transl. Morgan Giles, published by Tilted Axis – this is a very long book, so I haven’t started reading it yet, but it’s on my shelves, as I loved the previous Miri/Giles collaboration on Tokyo Ueono Station.

9. The Postcard by Anne Berest, transl. Tina Kover, published by Europa Editions – I haven’t read this one yet, as I sometimes struggle to read about families perishing in the Holocaust, but I know and love Tina’s translation work and the reviews claim that ‘this is an old story that nevertheless feels fresh’.

10. Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro, transl. Cory Stockwell, published by Heloise Press – a bit of a left-field choice, but the description sounds really fascinating: ‘Narrated in the first person by a female captain, the only woman amongst the crew of a transatlantic ship, Ultramarine reflects on the fears, strengths, and insecurities of female authority. In a ghostly, almost dream-like, atmosphere, the captain agrees to break one of her rules, letting the crew take a dip in the middle of the ocean. Something changes during that unprecedented swim; an uncertain atmosphere takes over their journey and the ship’. Besides, it would be nice to see a micropublisher win something or at least get a shortlisting.

11. Out of Earth by Sheyla Smanioto, transl. Laura Garmison and Sophie Lewis, published by Boiler House Press – four generations of women battling for survival in a rural area of Brazil – another book that has had very little fanfare but could potentially be really good. It has just been shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, so perhaps that will raise its profile.

12. My Work by Olga Ravn, transl. Sophia Hersi Smith, published by Lolli Editions- still haven’t read Ravn’s previous book that everyone raved about, so I feel guilty about missing out and she gets the last place on my list on my list of a fair dozen.

In terms of continents, I have four from Central and South America, five from Europe, two from Europe that are tightly linked to Africa, and only one Asian novel.

Yay! Time for a little creative literary linking again, with Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.

The starting point this month is Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, a book I’ve been meaning to read, because I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything by Ann Patchett that I’ve read so far (although, admittedly, that hasn’t been very wide-ranging: Taft, Bel Canto, State of Wonder and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage – I particularly liked this last one, a collection of non-fiction essays). I gather that Tom Lake is not the name of the main character in the book, however, but the name of a theatre company. So my first link is to a book title that sounds like it should be the name of the main character but ends up being something quite different.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison actually tells the life story of a black man called Macon, nicknamed Milkman, from birth until adulthood. There is a brief though pivotal scene in the book of children singing the Song of Solomon in the book, and this scene of children playing takes me instantly to the group of (somewhat feral) children in Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, especially Kolya and Ilyusha, whose back stories try to make sense of their vicious behaviour. You end up feeling sorry for them – and that they are much more interesting characters than that overly angelic Tiny Tim.

Brothers Karamazov famously features scenes of a trial (although we have to wait a fair amount to get there), so my third link is to another book that is all about a trial, and I make no apologies for choosing such a famous one: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

A bit of a far-fetched and complicated link to my fourth book, namely the name of the child character in Harper Lee’s novel: Scout. You may or may not know that the Cub Scouts created by Robert Baden-Powell were inspired by The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, with a lot of the terminology (cub leader, den leader, Akela etc.) I have to admit that, setting aside the imperialist propensities of Kipling aside and the message of obedience to authority (disguised here as ‘jungle law’), I still found those books (I include the Just So Stories) fun to read with my children when they were very young, plus the music from the Disney version is fantastic!

A less tenuous fifth link to another book that has been Disneyfied, namely The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (aka Notre-Dame de Paris) by Victor Hugo. The Disney film might be controversial (not suitable for children, apparently) and generally woefully underrated (to my mind, it has one of the best villains ever), but the book certainly was and remains a great bestseller and an absolutely thrilling story.

My final link is to a book that takes place in a more modern Paris – a wide choice of titles there, as it remains a popular setting, but I’ve chosen The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, after hearing Forsyth talk about his inspiration for that story at ChilternKills Crime Festival back in October. We do know there were allegedly around thirty assassination attempts on Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s.

So this month we’ve travelled from Michigan to rural Russia to Alabama to India and ended up in Paris. Where will your Six Degrees of Separation take you?