Vintage, 2007, 202 p. Translated from the Spanish El embrujo de Shanghai (Plaza & Janés, 1993,) by Nick Caistor.

There is a certain quality to translated fiction – or at least to the best translated fiction – which marks it out. That sense of subtle strangeness, other ways of seeing, perhaps even other ways of being, and yet, reading it, the essential qualities of human interactions still shine through.

Shanghai Nights is set in Barcelona in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and both that conflict, and more importantly the then also recent Spanish Civil War, hang over the book, an understated but permeating presence.

Narrator Daniel is a young adolescent whose father never returned from that Civil War, and several of the characters are subsumed by it, most obviously Captain Blay – called the Invisible Man for the bandages he wears to conceal his wounds but also Nandu Forcat, on whose initial furtive appearances everyone expects to be arrested at any moment. How much more so for those characters who are, or have been, in exile in France, at least one of whom is exiled permanently.

Blay is obsessed by a smell he attributes to a gas leak underneath a local pavement and ropes Daniel in to help him canvas for signatures on appetition against the leak and a chimney which spouts noxious smoke. Blay’s ineffectiveness is such that only about 14 people ever sign up.

Daniel falls into the orbit of Señora Anita’s daughter Susana, a consumptive (Marsé makes frequent mention of the Koch bacillus) girl whom Blay wants Daniel to draw as a victim of the smoke from that chimney but whom Daniel sees in a different light. She is the daughter of Joaquim (Kim) Franch, one of those exiles.

Forcat worms his way into Señora Anita’s graces and apparently has some sort of healing/heating powers. He begins to tell Susanna and Daniel a tale of her father’s adventures in the Far East, sent to Shanghai by the exiles to kill a man suspected of being a German Colonel guilty of war crimes in France and to retrieve a book with yellow covers, a book with revealing secrets. This is a lurid tale of unlikely encounters and an attractive Chinese woman named Chen Jing. It is sometimes couched in racial terms, (lousy chink, slant-eyed, a blackamoor) and clichés (dresses slit to the waist.)

Doubt is cast on this story by the appearance of Luis Deniso Mascaró (‘Denis’) a returned exile who has a grievance against Kim and whose revelations and influence alter Susana’s life.

This is a fraction of the contents of a book full of vivid characters such as the above as well as Blay’s wife, Doña Conxa, and the Chacón brothers, and which builds to a climax which is at once sordid but touched with nobility, and entirely true to its essence.

In it we read “everything passes, and it is all exactly the same, masks and the faces beneath, sleep and waking” and “however much we grow and look towards the future, in fact we are reaching back towards our past, in search perhaps of our first moment of awareness.”

Pedant’s corner:- “vocal chords” (vocal cords,) focused (focused,) “‘Denis’s’ parents’ home” (several times the possessive of ‘Denis’ appeared as ‘Denis’s’, surely it must be ‘Denis’’s,) “the waitress’ skirt” (waitress’s skirt,) “to smoothe down” (x 2, smooth down,) “fo’castle” (either ‘forecastle’ or ‘fo’c’sle’, not fo’castle,) “you’ll know you seen so much” (you’ve seen so much,) (Captain Tu Szu’s words” (elsewhere the Captain is always Su Tzu,) “to traffick arms” (to traffic arms,) “shammy leather” (technically it’s chamois leather.) “He was in the Peace Hotel can remember” (He was in the Peace Hotel and can remember.) “It is true then that …….. betrayal?) (Is it true then that …….?) “Contrary my mother’s expectations” (Contrary to my mother’s expectations.)

Penguin, 1995, 541 p.

I bought this because Piercy normally writes SF (or what can be interpreted as SF) but this is a contemporary mainstream novel – for 1998 values of contemporary.

This is the intertwined tale of three women living in Boston, Massachusetts; Leila Landsman, Mary Burke and Becky Burgess. Leila is a professional woman, a college teacher whose theatre director husband has an ongoing philandering streak, serially having affairs with his – always younger – leading ladies.  Mary is Leila’s cleaner but had lived a reasonably comfortable existence until her marriage broke down: she is now homeless but conceals this from her cleaning agency employers and the clients whose houses she cleans. Becky is a working-class woman who has pulled herself up from her origins by getting an education, for which her family made sacrifices, a desk job at a media company and a marriage to Terry, a man of rather better off means but who is lazy as a result and suffers from an unjustified sense of entitlement.

Leila’s and Becky’s lives intersect when Leila is asked to write a book about the court case in which Becky is accused of murdering her husband with the assistance of her teenage lover, Sam Solomon. Becky’s treatment by the press has been unrelentingly critical.

Leila’s and Mary’s stories are unfolded in the present of the novel (with flashbacks memories of their origin stories,) Becky’s is given to us in chronological order as it occurred. This has the effect of presenting us with different pictures of Becky from the two time streams. At first Mary’s story also seems to be divorced from that of Leila but does give us an alternative perspective on her life.

Mary’s is a salutary tale, about how easy it is to fall from security, how necessary it is not to appear homeless – especially when you are. She sleeps where she can – airport lounges, empty buildings – but preferably in her client’s houses when they are away from home and is eternally grateful to the (black) woman who showed her the ropes of homelessness, the ways to avoid danger, when she first arrived on the streets.

There is a degree of character development to Leila as her marriage disintegrates slowly then precipitously. Mary, perhaps hardened by the streets, undergoes less change. Becky’s descent into murderousness is not quite so convincing, though.

This is a decent enough novel which doesn’t reach the heights of Piercy’s earlier books Body of Glass and Woman on the Edge of Time.

Pedant’s corner:- thier (their,) “less alternatives (fewer alternatives,) “Mrs Coreogio” (elsewhere always ‘Coreggio’,) “they dozed of to” (dozed off to,) blond (blonde.) “‘I’m wondering if Sam will remind me of him in person is much as he does when’” (in person as much as he does when,) “cole slaw” (coleslaw,) rendez-vous (this was in the middle of a line, no need for a hyphen; rendezvous,) “Sorts Illustrated” (Sports Illustrated?) “had interviewed murderers and battered woman” (battered women.) “‘I’ll never seen you again’” (never see you again,) “happy to be notied” (noticed.) “They’d hadn’t an ambition among them” (either ‘They’d hadn’t had an ambition’ or ‘They’d hadn’t an ambition’,) “none of the three families were communicating” (none of the three families was communicating,) “in her own behalf” (on her own behalf,) ambiance (ambience.)

Penguin Essentials, 2019, 365 p. First published 2007.

Addressing as it does the Armenian genocide of 1916 (though only in a historical sense,) this was the book that saw the author put on trial for “denigrating Turkishness,” but the charges were eventually dropped.

The novel’s main focus is on the Kazancı family, one with an unfortunate history of its male members dying at a young age. There is a hint of magical realism here, the more sweeping kind of narrative more or less alien to the Anglophone tradition, in any case a nod to the supernatural elements which often appear in fiction from other literary backgrounds. The Kazancıs have a cat named Sultan. (They’re now on Sultan the Fifth. This naming system though, did remind me of Mad Jack’s burro in The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams.)

The chapter titles all relate to foodstuffs – or at least substances which can be ingested; cinnamon, pine nuts, orange peels, etc, though one is water and the last potassium cyanide. For the Kazancıs are a family for which food occupies a central nurturing role. Many Turkish dishes are named or described during the course of the novel.

In the first chapter the then nineteen-year-old Zeliha Kazancı strides the streets of Istanbul wearing her trademark short skirt – which she will not relinquish even in later years. Under harassment she recites to herself “The Golden Rule of Prudence for an Istanbulite woman: When harassed on the street never respond” as that only fires up the enthusiasm of the harasser. (There are also Silver and Copper Rules of Prudence.)

Zeliha is on her way to a clinic to seek an abortion but, perhaps due to hallucinations brought on by anæsthetic or else a subliminal wish to carry the child – though the latter seems unlikely – becomes over-agitated and makes it impossible for the procedure to continue. The bastard of the title (though there is one other metaphorical candidate) could thus be Zeliha’s daughter, Asya, who is brought up among her aunts Banu, Feride and Cevriye, their mother, Grandmother Gülsüm, and the matriarch Petite-Ma. Acknowledging the unusual circumstances of Asya’s origins (in her late teens of the novel’s main timeline her father’s identity has still not been disclosed,) Zeliha is also known as aunty. The only son of the family, Mustafa, long ago left Istanbul for the US and has never returned. The aunts’ father had of course when still young succumbed to the curse on the family males. Even so, by the age of sixteen Asya had discovered that “other families weren’t like hers and some families could be normal,” a twist to that quote from Tolstoy. [https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7142-all-happy-families-are-alike-each-unhappy-family-is-unhappy]

Asya is fixated on Johnny Cash and spends time in Café Kundera, associating with characters identified only by their attributes, the Non-Nationalist Scenarist of Ultranational Movies, the Closeted-Gay Communist, the Exceptionally Untalented Poet and the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, who says the real civilization gap is not between East and West but between Turks and the Turks. “‘We are a bunch of cultured urbanites surrounded by hillbillies and bumpkins on all sides. They have conquered the whole city.’” The Exceptionally Untalented Poet says, “‘We are stuck between East and West …. the past and the future … the secular modernists … and the conventional traditionalists.’” In its own way this is a signal that the book could be read as a ‘condition of Turkey’ novel.* When one of them brings along a new girlfriend we are told of Asya that “When she met a new female she could do one of two things: either wait to see when she would start hating her or take the shortcut and hate her right away.”

Mustafa, in the US, has taken up with Rose, who was divorced from Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, a first generation Armenian American. Barsam and Rose’s daughter Armanoush (Amy,) is the second pivot of the plot, brought up as she was with her father’s family’s constant reinforcement of Armenian memories and attitudes vis-à-vis the Turks. Shafak has some fun depicting Amy’s date with a man she soon finds unsuitable, where they both contemplate plates of food whose arrangements are based on expressionist paintings. To resolve the conflict she feels between her US and Armenian heritages Amy decides to travel to Istanbul to visit her stepfather’s family, where her revelations about the treatment of her ancestors creates at first bewilderment.

“She, as an Armenian, embodied the spirits of her people generations and generations earlier, whereas the average Turk had no such continuity with his or her ancestors. The Armenians and the Turks lived in different time frames.” For Armenians “time was a cycle, the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between.” Even Aunt Cerviye, as a history teacher, was unaware of the details or extent of the Armenians’ tribulations. For the aunts, the history of Turkey only began in 1923, with Atatürk’s reforms. (Such historical forgettings, or forgettings of history, are by no means confined to Turkey, though.)

In another expression of literary apartness, that rebuff to Western fiction’s conventional realism, Aunty Banu has – or claims to have – control of two invisible djinn, one on each shoulder; the good one, whom she calls Mrs Sweet, on the right, the bad one, Mr Bitter, on the left. It is from Mr Bitter she learns the truth about the Armenians’ sufferings. And about Asya’s father, news which she keeps to herself, though his identity is revealed later.

Shafak has her characters make more general observations too. Asya tells Amy, “When women survive an awful marriage or love affair … they generally avoid another relationship for quite some time. With men, however … the moment they finish a catastrophe they start looking for another one. Men are incapable of being alone.”

Curiously, Shafak at least twice used the word wee in the Scottish sense of small, as in “a wee bit.”

Some reviews I have seen online of The Bastard of Istanbul have been a bit sniffy, one even going so far as to say that on this evidence Shafak isn’t a good novelist. I suspect this means that reader had not had a wide experience of fiction from outwith the Anglosphere. Shafak’s writing has a brio, an exuberance, too often missing from that more staid inheritance.

Pedant’s corner:- *Turkey is now officially known as Türkiye; “wrack your nerves” (rack your nerves,) “and her cheeks sunk in” (sank in. There were other examples of ‘sunk’ for ‘sank’,) “as she laid still on a table” (as she lay still,) “phyllo pastry” (filo pastry,) “always on demand” (always in demand,) no introductory quotation mark when one chapter began with a piece of dialogue but there was with other chapters.

Granada, 1980, 138 p

In an unspecified Central American country, a group of men are planning a revolution to restore General Jorge Alvarez to the Presidency. He had been allowed back in to the country after his successor, a mathematics professor named Ospina, decided to curry favour with the US and so promised elections.

The main conspirators are the General, his son José, his friend Peter Nelson, not long ago court-martialled from the US Army (a fact he doesn’t wish to conceal but also doesn’t advertise,) a Frenchman called Charles de Cluny, Colonel Aranha, and priest Father Miguel. They have the backing of the Company of Mr Green, a US citizen whose son George is engaged to the General’s daughter, Elena. Without that support and the implicit promise of US approval the revolution would not be possible.

Elena attracts Nelson’s interest. She decries his description of her father as a former dictator, saying he did good things for the country and the people. She in turn takes a fancy to Nelson, who contemplates sex with Elena thus, “The beast with two backs had still two brains and two identities and it was neither possible nor desirable to fuse them, to lose identity. The act made a momentary union, an instant of sharing, of identification, but this passed in a single second to be recalled later as pleasure and little more. The religion of union was a female doctrine, a false dream, possible only at the risk of sanity: a hypnotic state where reality was replaced for a time by a destructive vision.” (I did wonder if this line of thought was occasioned by the author’s homosexuality.)

Nelson is charged with the training of General Alavarez’s army (rudimentary training at best.) The revolution goes ahead in the country’s second city and Nelson is involved in the fighting. While that goes well enough news from the capital is not so good, with betrayal on top of betrayal and the influence of the Company not what the conspirators had hoped.

Vidal is here explicitly critiquing the US Government’s tendency to interfere in other countries’ affairs; not necessarily to their benefit.

Pedant’s corner:- “General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’ house (General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’s house; or maybe even ‘General Jorge Alvarez’s Asturias house’,) “‘You can see if from the street’” (‘see it from’,) a missing comma – or full stop – before a piece of direct speech, gulley (gully; as it was spelled later,) “(I’d even been in school with them, danced with some of them!).” (an exclamation mark doesn’t need a full stop following it,) a gap between a colon and the preceding word (x 2.) “José unbuttoned his shirt and lay in the sun, eyes shut. A small scapula glittered on the dark pink chest” (how can a shoulder blade lie on a chest?) “Aristophanes’ The Birds” (Aristophanes’s,) an end quotation mark follows a paragraph of speech which is carried on on the next line. The convention is no such mark is required in those circumstances.) “‘Then what do you think about our chances.’” (is a question and so requires a question mark,) two lines of the text were transposed. “‘They wanted to get back him’” (wanted to get him back.) “She shut here eyes” (her eyes,) de rigeur (de rigueur,) “sounded strange on his own ears” (in his own ears.)

Penguin, 2004, 237 p.

One day Glyn Peters finds in his papers an envelope with his dead wife Kath’s handwriting on it, reading, “Don’t Open. Destroy.”

But who can follow such an instruction? Not Glyn. Fatefully he opens it. And there is the photograph. Of five people, two with their backs to the camera. Kath and a man, holding hands out of view of the other three. And the man is Kath’s brother-in-law Nick. There is also a note saying, “I can’t resist sending you this. Negative destroyed, I’m told. Blessings my love,” in what Glyn assumes is Nick’s hand

Glyn is immediately sent into a tail-spin, examining his past life for clues about his marriage, and into a quest for the truth about the affair, and who knew about it.

He starts with Kath’s sister, Elaine, a (very) successful garden designer, who already has beefs with the rather shiftless Nick, whom she throws out. Their daughter Polly, who had adored Kath, finds that something of an over-reaction, especially since Nick dumps himself on her and makes little effort to find a place of his own, despite her increasingly urgent promptings.

The story is told via several points of view, Glyn, Elaine, Nick, Polly, Nick’s erstwhile business partner Oliver, from whom we learn that “being a woman enabled her” (Kath) “to sail through life, setting her own course, following mood and fancy. Because she was a startlingly attractive woman.”  She had once been asked what it was like to be pretty but she laughed it off. But she had also asked Oliver if he was happy.

Clues begin to build that the characters’ knowledge of Kath needs revising; memories of her close relationship with Polly, the fact that she got on well with children generally. “She has become some mythical figure, trawled up at will to fit other people’s narratives. Everyone has their way with her, everyone decides what she was, how things were.”

The marriage with Glyn wasn’t close, both spent time on their own business, Glyn with his landscape expeditions, Kath on various projects of her own.

It’s not until Glyn meets with Kath’s friend Mary Packard, perhaps the only one who really knew her for who she was, that the full tragic picture becomes clearer, but this is withheld from us till late in the book. But, of course, this is when Glyn speaks with her properly for the first time.

At the end Oliver thinks about how something always set Kath apart. “Behind and beyond her looks, her manner, there had been some dark malaise. But nobody ever saw it back then. …. All you saw was her face.”

The different characters’ narratives – some rendered as one half of a dialogue – are all distinctive and compelling, revealing of their flaws and misapprehensions.

The Photograph is a demonstration of how difficult it is to truly know someone, even someone close to us, how impossible it is to detect their inner struggles, especially if we do not recognise the clues.

Pedant’s corner:- “squares and triangles and rectangles and oblongs” (A square is a special case of a rectangle so that’s fine; but an oblong is any non-square rectangle, so is not different from a rectangle that isn’t a square,) “Glyn Peters’ appointment” (Peters’s,) “regale lilies” (usually written as ‘regal lilies’, though the botanical name is lilium regale.) “‘Didn’t Kath use to go to…’” (Didn’t Kath used to go to…,)

Gollancz, 1963, 190 p. Translated from the Russian, Один день Ивана Денисовича, (Novy Mir, Moscow, Nov 1962), by Ralph Parker.

I bought this many (many) moons ago but had resisted reading it so far it as I thought the subject matter may have been too depressing. Reading about life in a labour camp is not overly appealing after all. It was still familiar, though. There are many similarities here to Primo Levi’s account, If This Is a Man, of being in Auschwitz.

Despite those reservations I found One Day (as the book’s spine has it) remarkably readable – a testament to the original writing and to the translation. This is also true of Levi’s books.

Ivan Denisovich Shukhov has been imprisoned for ten years in effect for being captured by the Germans. The main aim is to get through each day with as little friction or attention as possible. This particular day starts with Shukhov feeling unwell and thinking of reporting to the sick-bay but the day’s quota of the ill has been filled and he has to return to work.

He is in the 104^th squad and, despite the novel being relatively short, the relationships between its members are carefully illustrated. Even (especially?) given his circumstances he still takes pride in doing a job well (today’s is brick laying which can be tricky as the mortar is liable to freeze) – though it helps that if seen to do so they may get extra food – Shukhov is careful to savour, or husband and hide for later, each item of food.

There are petty indignities such as the incessant counting at roll-calls to be endured, the fact that even thoughts aren’t free as they always cycle back to the same things. Each small achievement, that extra item of food, the finding of a piece of metal which might be fashioned into a knife, is a victory, but you must never set your sights beyond what is in front of you.

Pedant’s corner:- “sleepy heads propped again their rifles” (against, surely?) “fivefifty grams” (fifty five? [And grammes if we’re British],) “tommy-funs at the ready” (tommy-guns,) [this next was in a footnote] “a percentage of the plan t amounts to” (of the plan it amounts to,) a missing end quotation mark at the finish of a piece of dialogue.

Hamish Hamilton, 2024, 292 p.

This is the third in Barker’s Troy series. Unlike the first two, which were narrated by Briseis (the former princess of Lyrnessus, a town sacked by the Greeks before they ventured on to its ally Troy, with Briseis being given to Achilles as a prize of war,) this novel’s main narrator is Ritsa, a friend of Briseis, but now a possession of Machaon, physician to Mycenean King Agamemnon, and body-slave (or, as she puts it, catch-fart) to Troy’s Princess, Cassandra, herself Agamemnon’s bed-slave, though they had gone through a form of marriage.

Cassandra is famed for her gift of prophecy; a gift bestowed on her by the God Apollo, whose priestess she was, but also cursed by him never to be believed since she refused his advances.

Ritsa’s tale is narrated in first person past tense but some chapters of the book are in the third person present tense from the viewpoints either of Cassandra or of Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra. This is useful authorially as of course Ritsa cannot have access to scenes where she is not present.

The book’s title is, of course, ironic. The home they journey to was never that of the Trojan women; only of the Greeks who took them captive. It is also slightly inappropriate in that the sea voyage to Mycenae is over before the book is even halfway through – though less so in the sense that by the novel’s end Cassandra’s journey home is utterly complete.

Some of the prose and dialogue is in a modern register which might jar with the ambience of myth which Barker is dealing with. But in looking at these events/stories with a modern eye (Barker’s controlled indignation, even rage, at the treatment of women in these tales, while not getting in the way of the story she tells, is never far away) an up-to-date treatment is absolutely appropriate. There is also some inter-sexual politics at play when Ritsa notes that, “She” (Cassandra) “was speaking in a Daddy’s-little-girl voice, the kind that some men find mysteriously attractive and makes every woman within earshot want to slap you.”

Ritsa bitterly contemplates Cassandra’s question about a description of the ship’s figurehead Medusa (another misrepresented woman?) as a monster, “Who decides who the monster is?” and Machaon’s reply, “The winner.”

Medusa did not win, and neither has Ritsa, whose monsters lie in front of her: the Greeks who have the temerity to call Trojans barbarian, while themselves being the purveyors of savagery. Only the Medusa’s captain, Andreas, treats her as worthy of respect. (Or is that only because he has always fancied her?)

Agamemnon is prime monster, even if he is haunted by visions of his daughter Iphigenia, sacrificed to the gods to secure fair winds for the voyage to Troy. (His palace in Mycenae is also haunted: by the hand and foot prints of his cousins, killed by his father, Atreus, and their bodies fed by him to theirs, Thyestes, with their feet and hands shown to Thyestes to prove he had eaten them. Greek myth is a horrifically bloody edifice.)

But the heart of this story doesn’t lie with either Cassandra or Ritsa; nor Agamemnon. This is Clytemnestra’s time of reckoning. Ten years ruling in Agamemnon’s stead – and ruling well – only to be ignored the moment he returns; ten years worshipping her dead daughter, erecting a temple in her honour which no-one arriving by sea could avoid seeing; ten years devising a calculated, elaborate revenge for Iphigenia’s death. A dish served cold, with relish.

But every action has its conseqences. Revenge begets revenge. Clytemnestra’s remaining children, Electra and Orestes, will be sure to avenge their father.

Not that Ritsa will be around to see that. Barker instead contrives a more hopeful fate for her.

Pedant’s corner:- Three sentences of Ritsa’s narration are for some reason given in the present tense. “Achilles’ child” (Achilles’s; most names ending in s were given only s’ rather than s’s when possessives, Aegisthus’, Andreas’, Orestes’, Iras’, Briseis’, etc,) “more like, a bowl of barley porridge” (doesn’t need that comma,) “that some men find mysteriously attractive” (ought to be ‘that some men mysteriously find attractive’,) had never showed” (had never shown.) “The guard come toward us” (The guard came towards us.)

Polygon, 2018, 241 p, plus vii p Introduction by Brian Morton and iv p Foreword. First published 1976.

Some people swear by Spark. For myself I struggle to see what the fuss is about. There is just something about her writing that strikes me as off.

I suspect this one was meant to be a comedic novel. Its tone would certainly suggest that. However, its bittiness and lack of characters with whom the reader can be sympathetic – the book is peopled with an assortment of chancers, frauds, swindlers and charlatans – make it something of a chore to read.

Hubert Mallindaine claims to be a descendant of the union between the Roman Emperor Caligula and the goddess Diana. He is renting a villa at Nemi from Maggie Ratcliffe, fairly recently the new Marchesa di Tullio Friole, who also has a house in the vicinity as well as residences elsewhere. Maggie is much exercised by her collections of jewellery and valuables – paintings, Louis XV chairs etc. The local Italians are not too pleased about these foreigners having houses in the town.

Maggie wishes to evict Hubert but he has various ploys to avoid this, among them setting up a religion based on his claim to be descended from Diana. He treats his secretary Pauline contemptuously and is also systematically replacing Maggie’s paintings and chairs with copies/reproductions.

Maggie meanwhile is having sex with her factotum, Lauro, who is, Brian Morton’s Introduction tells us, “a priapic opportunist” (for which read ‘all-but rapist’) “and kleptomaniac.” In addition, Lauro has fathered a child on a local girl (but blames her as a calculating bitch) and without warning jumps on Maggie’s daughter-in-law Mary, giving her little choice but to succumb to his advance. He tells her that next time she should relax. Not one to brook dissent.

That Introduction describes the motley crew of thieves and conmen surrounding Maggie as, “All as respectably dressed and gentlemanly as the Devil must be in a Scottish narrative.”

Things get murkier as the narrative proceeds; it seems there are other claims on the land the houses are built on, while a dodgy financial adviser worms his way into Maggie’s affairs.

There was a review and article – one each – in The Guardian Weekend supplement on both Sat 07/06/25 and 14/06/25 about the latest biography of Spark (Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark – The Enigma of Muriel Spark. Personally I find her the complete opposite of electric.) The review comments on her elision, “Spark knew what to leave out.” Perhaps it is those “odd gaps” which I find so problematic about her œuvre.

Pedant’s corner:- More than a few USian usages, vide infra.

Inter alia pantyhose (tights,) “a vodka-tonic” (vodka and tonic,) boy-friend/girl-friend (several times: both all one word; boyfriend/girlfriend,) station-wagon (estate car.)

Otherwise; “as if treading a mined field” (why not ‘minefield’?) “set at nought” (set at naught. Nought is the number, zero; naught has the meaning of ‘nothing’,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2.)

Grove Press, 1966, 407 p. Translated from the Spanish, La ciudad y los perros, (Editorial Seix Barral, S A, Barcelona, 1962) by Lysander Kemp

(I don’t usually remember exactly where I bought a book but with this one I do. It was in the Netherlands; in a charity shop/warehouse which had a large selection of books, one case of which were publications in English. I think it cost me one Euro, though it might have been €1.50.)

This was Llosa’s first novel and it is set in the Leoncio Prada Military Academy, among the cadets/pupils there, not all of whom are destined to join the army.

It depicts the everyday lives of the inmates, their raggings, joshings and bullying, their constant efforts to evade the rules – such as smoking, gambling, going over the wall at night, or even during the day – and to keep things secret from the officers. Some scenes are set in the surrounding city; illustrating memories of the inmates’ pasts or the intricacies of their love lives.

The plot revolves around the stealing of the text of a Chemistry exam the night before it is due to be taken. The designated cadet, Cava, makes a mistake and a window pane is broken. All passes are cancelled. In order to receive a pass to see his girlfriend a cadet nicknamed the Slave reports Cava to the officers. Later, the Slave is shot during a military exercise. The officers are at pains to insist it was an accident and ignore evidence and testimony to the contrary.

This is almost entirely a male environment; the dialogue often displays the prejudices of its time and place – especially with regard to the casual use of racist terms and to misogyny.

In their encounter the Slave’s father says to Alberto, “‘When you have a son, keep him away from his mother, There’s nothing like a woman to ruin a boy for life.’”

In the main we have here is an examination of the perennial battle of youth against authority, of the pressure to conform and of the constant tendency of institutions to cover up unfortunate happenings so as not to be shown in a bad light.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. I note La ciudad y los perros actually translates as The City and the Dogs. Otherwise; “tooth paste” (toothpaste,) “brief case” (briefcase,) “girl friend” (girlfriend,) “boy friend (boyfriend,) “on the double” (this military term is usually rendered as ‘at the double’,) “Montes’ bunk” (Montes’s.)

Picador, 1979, 174 p. Translated from the Spanish El Colonel No Tieme Quien Le Escriba (Aguirre Editor, Colombia, 1961) by J S Bernstein.

This contains the novella, No One Writes to the Colonel (El Colonel No Tieme Quien Le Escriba) and several shorter pieces, Tuesday Siesta, One of These Days, There Are No Thieves in This Town, Balthazar’s Marvellous Afternoon, Montiel’s Widow, One Day after Saturday, Artificial Roses and Big Mama’s Funeral all collected under the umbrella title Big Mama’s Funeral (Los Funerales de la Mama Grande, Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico, 1962.)

They illustrate life in the town of Macondo familiar to those who have read the author’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Indeed the memory of the character of Colonel Aureliano Buendía hangs over each of these stories.

The titular Colonel is living a life of less than genteel poverty while travelling to the wharf every Friday to see the post come in. He is waiting for the pension promised to him for his part in the revolution many, many years ago. But no one writes to the Colonel. His is something of a bleak tale. The rest of the stories are beautifully written vignettes or longer pieces all with a touch of oddness about them. The big mama of the last tale was so notable that even the Pope came to her funeral.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. “The women examined him” (there was only one woman,) a missing opening quote mark before a piece of direct speech, the early part of page 152 is also printed towards the bottom of page 114 after the end of Balthazar’s Marvellous Afternoon, “rusted zinc” (x 2, zinc does not rust, only iron does that: ‘corroded zinc’ unless the zinc was rust-streaked,) “and leaches to her kidneys” (leeches,)