Libby

Some books I enjoyed in June and July
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Catching Fire: a Translation Diary, Daniel Hahn
I can speak only English and am fascinated by the abilities of literary translators. They have to pull out the right English word, the meaningful turn of phrase, the tone of the original writing. Daniel Hahn translates from Spanish, French and Portuguese. Catching Fire is a conversation between him and Chilean author Diamela Eltit as he translates her novel Never Did the Fire from Spanish into English.
https://www.danielhahn.co.uk/
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The Wrong Son, Neil Griffths
A memoir by Griffiths, the publisher of Weatherglass Books. He had a difficult childhood and teenage years with a father who lost an earlier son in a road accident and who resented Griffiths for not being that boy. Beautifully written and compelling.
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The Indiculous Grace Dunn, Janette A Owen
This novel by the Den’s own Janette is also strongly written. It depicts a similar sense of loss to that in The Wrong Son and inspires an equal hope that everything will turn out alright in the end. The character Grace Dunn has different experiences from Neil Griffiths but their difficulties have aspects in common.
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Openings, Lucy Caldwell
My second reading of this collection. Lucy Caldwell’s stories of ordinary people, their families and love affairs are always a pleasure.
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Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
Speculative fiction set in a fantastical and fascinating huge house subject to sea tides and flooding. A man’s life and identity have been stolen by forces he initially doesn’t know exist. Apparently the novel makes references to C S Lewis’s Narnia which I haven’t read since childhood and don’t really remember. I didn’t pick up the references but still loved Piranesi.
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How to Write Stunning Sentences: 100 simple sentences from beloved authors to improve your writing style, Nina Schuyler
I’ve been dipping into this book for quite a bit longer than a couple of months. The exercises follow the same format of those in Nina Schuyler’s substack series, https://ninaschuyler.substack.com/ Even if you never do the exercises the extracts are interesting. She uses sentences or paragraphs from published stories and novels and occasionally nonfiction, enabling writers/students to do close readings and try out their own versions. The exercises use the American ‘branching’ method of analysing sentence structure but once I’d got my head round this system it was easy to follow.
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Cinnamon Shops, Bruno Schulz. Translated from Polish by Madeline G Levine
Stories about a single family, in a very different style from Lucy Caldwell’s. Surreal, edging into horror, but with humour too, they were written before Schulz was killed by a Nazi officer in 1942. An example: “…Adela walked over to Father, and with one extended finger made a motion suggesting tickling. Father, disconcerted, fell silent, filled with terror, started retreating…”
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Benbecula, Graeme MacRae Burnett
The Darkland Tales series of novellas presents stories based on true events in Scottish history, as told by various well known Scottish authors. In this one a labourer living on the island of Benbecula in 1857 murders his parents and aunt. The story is written from the point of view of his brother. Not as good as GMB’s novel His Bloody Project, not in the Darklands series but also based on a true story. Benbecula petered out a bit at the end but I still enjoyed it.
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The Story of a Brief Marriage, Anuk Arudpragasam
A beautifully written sobering story of people, particularly one young couple, trying to escape the Sri Lankan civil war.
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Pink Soap, Anju Gaston
A very contemporary novella told from the POV of a young woman who has had a mental illness, who worries she’s upset and insulted people, and who visits her father in Japan. She speaks only English bar a few Japanese words and phrases; he speaks only Japanese. Conversations take place through a neighbour who translates. It’s a delicately realist tale about psychological fragmentation told through a character who finds reality tenuous.

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Eugénie Grandet, Honoré de Balzac
Translated from French by Sylvia Raphael
Talking of literary realism I’d been meaning to read Balzac, one of its founders, for some time and with Eugénie Grandet I got there. I loved it. Life in provincial France after the revolution, for a miser like Eugénie’s father, holds similarities to our own times. The judgemental society, the overbearing influence of money, the underhand ways it can be traded. And then the question: what will happen to Eugénie, who has fallen in love with her cousin.