Harper Perennial, 2003, 301 p.

Presented as a memoir (of sorts,) this tells of the relationship in the early 1960s between Christa (Kit) Malone, a nascent US poet, and Russian refugee poet Innokenti Isayevich Falin.

Kit’s life has been peripatetic as her father flits from job to job (or post to post: there are hints he works for the government in some sort of secret capacity.) As a result, she is very close to her brother Ben, so much so that when he leaves home to join the army she is all but devastated. This leads her to an unwise decision to lose her virginity. Her resulting pregnancy would have been bad enough at the time for any young woman but her family is Catholic. The child though, when born, is severely incapacitated and dies. Hence Kit is enabled to go to college where she meets Falin and enrols in his class. Their rapport through poetry soon builds. She learns Russian and they begin to collaborate on translations of his work. She later makes her name as a translator of Falin’s poetry.

Part of this story is told as a kind of retrospective when she travels to post-communist Russia to a celebration of the 75^th anniversary of Falin’s birth, and of his life and poetry, in St Petersburg, 1993, where her main interlocutor is Gavriil Viktorovic Semyonov. Through him she gleans even more of the conditions under which Falin had lived before his exile.

Living in the Soviet Union taught you to be invisible, not to bring attention to yourself. Falin had begun life (or at least his memories began) as one of the besprizornye – ragamuffins/urchins, lost or orphaned children – which throughout its history Russia has thrown up in profusion. Gavriil Viktorovich tells her, “We were all besprizornye. The whole society. We were all torn away from common bonds that we had been born into. All had to rely on others, on those we found around us, yet never trust them.” Not, then, examples of New Man as Soviet doctrine had it, but self-preserving individuals. “All against all.” Falin had said something similar to her.

Semyonov reflects on the post-Soviet era. “In her dark time Russia was kept alive by the poets. Perhaps now in the new time” of biznesmeny and konsultante “they will pass …. cease to be souls, or persons, and become only books.”

The campus scenes here reminded me of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and, because of the Russian and poetry connections, there were resemblances to Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.

The background to them is the Kennedy Presidency and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kit has a sort of friendship with Jackie Young of the People’s Socialist League. The Fair Play for Cuba Committee march with their Hands off Cuba banners and encounter discontent.

On an occasion when Falin is away and Kit is looking after his house a man called Milton Bluhdorn intrudes on it. Falin it seems is suspected of being a plant (they didn’t let Pasternak out so why him?) and Kit is invited to spy on him. Instead, she tells Falin of the approach.

But most of their talk is of poetry. Falin says of poems, “You cannot translate. You can only make other poems.” He also contends that countries have greater and lesser angels. The lesser angel is all that the greater angel isn’t but sometimes prevails. It is left open to the reader to decide whether or not Falin and Kit are lesser angels of their countries.

While leaning into the ramifications of the Kennedy assassination and its associated conspiracy theories, The Translator is a work about the moral responsibilities of the individual and the operations of the agents of the state. But most of all about the importance of poetry, words, and personal relationships.

Pedant’s corner:- occasionally questions in dialogue are not followed by a question mark, “the Ukraine, the Crimea” (nowadays just Ukraine, Crimea.) “Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov” (in British transliteration, Viktorovic.)

Canongate, 2026, 316 p.

A third outing for Welsh’s Rilke, auctioneer at Bowery Auctions in Glasgow – and sometime private investigator. On page 1 – no messing here – he discovers a body on the auction rooms’ back premises. This is Mandy Manderson, a Bowery Auctions client, killed with a hatpin pushed through his eye; a hatpin which Rose Bowery, the auction rooms’ owner, had been brandishing before television cameras as a potential murder weapon only hours earlier. To protect Rose, whom he knows is not a killer, Rilke removes the hatpin, cleans it up and restores it to the auction lot before calling the police.

Rilke thereafter is treading a fine line between the SIO, Inspector Murchison, son of a well-known judge, and crime boss Ray (Razzle Dazzle) Diamond, who has taken displeasure at Rilke’s childhood pal Les, recently out of jail, but wants Rilke to find the killer since Manderson had been on his payroll.

Throw in Rilke’s homosexuality, dodgy cop Thurso Scanlon (Les’s nemesis and also on Rilke’s case,) a connection to Gallowhall, a former boys’ home with a bad reputation, and the pot is well stirred.

This is the usual accomplished offering from Welsh, with rounded characters, a cast of suspects, the sense of Glasgow as a city, a well-placed hint of the perpetrator and some red herrings to follow up.

Pedant’s corner:- “A table of actors …. were engaged in” (the subject of the verb here isn’t actually actors but table; ‘a table of …. was engaged in’,) “Jetpacks’ ribs” (Jetpacks’ several times; Jetpacks’s.) “A selection of sandwiches and shop-bought cakes were sweating beneath clingfilm” (a selection … was sweating,) “Mary, Queen of Scots’ final walk” (Scots’s,) “Tam Shepherds Trick Shop” (Shepherd’s, surely?) sat (x 2, sitting,) Panetella (x 3, that type of cigar is a Panatella, panatela or panetela.)

Penguin, 2024, 249 p. Translated from the Japanese お探し物は図書室まで (O-sagashi mono wa toshoshitsu made, literally “Please go to the library for what you are looking for,”) POPLAR Publishing Company, 2020, by Alison Watts. Illustrations by Rohan Easson.

This book’s title is surely designed to appeal to book lovers. Yet, in a sense, it must be preaching to the converted. Book lovers will all have used libraries and, crucially, already read books and thus need no encouragement to pick one up.

There are five stories within, all with a similar trajectory. Each of the lead characters has a reason to visit the Hatori Community House situated by a local school and gets drawn to its library where the librarian, Sayuri Komachi, recommends books to them and at the same time proffers a gift of a felted toy from the many she spends her time making.

The viewpoint characters are:-

Tomaka, a sales assistant in womenswear at Eden, a Department Store.

Ryo, who works in accounts for a furniture manufacturer but yearns to start an antiques business.

Natsumi, a former magazine editor moved sideways to a less fulfilling role on having had a child.

Hiroya, a thirty-year-old NEET who has neglected his talent for drawing.

Masao, recently retired and feeling a lack of direction.

Unfortunately, this all involves a lot of repetition of information as each character relates the details of their first visit to the Community House in very similar terms. There are also some instances of the relaying of characters’ internal thoughts or reactions which are rendered far too colloquially thus breaking readers’ suspension of disbelief.

There is discussion of the content of the borrowed books (in one case it’s not borrowed, since it’s too heavy to carry far, but rather consulted,) publishing details of which are appended in the Bibliography.

Special pleading for the utility of reading occurs when one of the narrators tells us “Books belong to everybody: the creators, the sellers and the readers.” Similarly, Ms Komachi says to another, “Readers make their own personal connections to words, irrespective of the writer’s intentions, and each reader gains something unique.”

It’s all very easy to read and undemanding but somehow feels inconsequential.

Pedant’s corner:- Uses British spellings but has the occasional USianism – sidewalk, sneakers, schoolyard, some schoolchildren are said to be in third or fourth grade. Otherwise; “inside in my stockings” (either ‘in my stockings’ or ‘inside my stockings’,) “I did use to talk with him” (did used to.)

47 North, 2015, 227 p, plus 3p Author’s Historical Note, 2 p Acknowledgements and 3 p Bibliography.

This, Charnock’s second novel, (after A Calculated Life, chapter one of which is appended here following the Bibliography,) has a tripartite structure. Succeeding chapters tell the stories of Toniah, a woman from a parthenogenetic family living in 2113, adolescent Toni from the book’s publication’s present in 2015, and budding female artist Antonia Uccello in 1469 Florence.

Toniah lives with her sister and niece in London – all born parthogenetically, as was Toniah’s mother. She has recently been employed to reassess the work of Gauguin by a firm which specialises in historical revisionism – usually from a feminist perspective. In particular she finds antecedents to Gauguin in the paintings of Émile Bernard, but which also reflect back to Italian renaissance art.

Toni and her father are still trying to recover from the death of Toni’s mother in a car crash. Her father is an artistic copyist, working legitimately. A commission from a Chinese client leads them to spend some time in Shanghai.

Antonia’s artistic talent has been recognised by her father Paolo Uccello, a pioneer of linear perspective in the Italy of the time, who is teaching her both to read paintings and to paint herself. Her mother does not keep well and is haunted by the necessity to find a husband for her daughter. Antonia’s aunt’s life in a convent bears implications for her future.

All three lives are connected by the painting Antonia executes of her ill mother.

The speculative content – cloning of females – is presented as an unremarkable aspect of life one hundred years hence. The lack of recognition of female artists through history is not laboured but rendered subtly.

Pedant’s corner:- “she wishes her father were stood by her side” (wishes her father were standing,) “her father is stood at” (her father is standing at,) “she looks through a grill (a grille.)

A Jessie Kesson Companion, Black and White, 2000, 204 p, including 13 p Commentary; plus ii p Contents and xii p Introduction.

This is a collection of Kesson’s shorter works, encompassing stories, poems and radio plays, though a lot of her work for radio has, it seems, been lost. While most pieces are in fairly standard English with some Scots phrases the second story here, Ferm Deen, is written fully in an uncompromising Scots – and all the better for it.

Editor Isobel Murray has chosen to emphasise Kesson’s troubled upbringing (born to a single mother who engaged in prostitution to try to make ends meet and found solace in drink; taken off to an orphanage for being “neglected”; denied the fuller education she desired and later literally farmed out to smallholders as a kitchen helper before spending a year in a mental hospital.)

This is not a perverse choice, Kesson’s work (especially her early work) reflects those childhood experiences, the loss she felt, the longing for what she had considered a loving home and the compensations she managed to find. But, despite her writing successes, she never lost regret for the life she could have had had she attended University.

All the pieces are well written and poignant with a sharp eye for character and ear for phraseology.

Pedant’s corner:- swop (swap.)

Cassell & Co Ltd, 1898, p, with nine illustrations by W Hole.

This is the third of Barrie’s Thrums trilogy, all narrated by the dominie (schoolmaster) in Glen Quharity, which lies four miles from Thrums. Unlike in the first two instalments, though, here the narrator is finally named as a Mr Ogilvy.

The meat of the story is in the early incumbency in Thrums of new Auld Licht Minister, Mr Dishart, young, keen, well regarded by his congregation, and a joy to his mother Margaret since he has fulfilled her wishes for him. Mr Ogilvy takes more than a normal interest in the little minister since he knew Margaret in his own youth. It is apparent from his remembrances that he has carried a torch for her ever since but he takes care not to let her know of his presence nearby since he feels she would not be happy to be reminded of him.

Plot kicks off when a detachment of soldiers is sent to the town to round up weavers who had taken part in a recent riot against changes in their conditions. Forewarning of the soldiers’ mission is brought to the town by a young woman they call the Egyptian (their name for a gipsy) whose intervention allows the suspects to evade capture. Dishart tries to stop any violence and in doing so encounters the woman. He cannot understand why her influence makes him do things he would not have otherwise; things such as not denounce her to the authorities or throwing a ‘divit’ at one of the soldiers. The word divit here is an example of many Scots usages sprinkled through the book, especially in dialogue. This very strong Scottish flavour may be a barrier for some. The Egyptian’s facility both with Scots and standard English is another source of confusion for Dishart as in many respects she behaves and sounds like a member of the monied class.

It is readily apparent that this will be a story of star-cross’d lovers whose circumstances present seemingly insurmountable difficulties to their relationship. Dishart’s parishioners will not countenance a union between their minister and a gipsy; the Egyptian (we later find she is named Babbie) is betrothed to the elderly Lord Rintoul, for whose benevolence towards her she feels an obligation, and the wedding is imminent.

That dour Scottish strain of Calvinism is illustrated by Ogilvy’s reflection that “A minister with a smile on his face would never have been called to the Auld Licht kirk, for life is a wrestle with the devil and only the frivolous think to throw him without taking off their coats.”

However, the dominie’s own outlook is somewhat brighter, “Love, it is said, is blind, but love is not blind. It is an extra eye, which shows us what is most worthy of regard. To see the best is to see most clearly, and it is the lover’s privilege,” if also nuanced, “Not to attempt a gallant deed for which one has the impulse may be braver than the doing of it.”

Pedant’s corner:- a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2.) “A detachment of the soldiers were marching down the Roods from the north” (a detachment was marching,) a missing full stop.

Doubleday, 2026, 193 p. Translated from the Japanese 木曜日にはココアを (Mokuyōbi ni wa kokoa, literally Thursday Cocoa,) Takarijamasha Inc, Tokyo, 2017, by E Madison Shimoda.

This is not so much a novel as a series of linked short pieces (calling them stories is not quite accurate) each with some sort of connection to the Marble Café in Tokyo.

The server in the café, who one day simply asked the owner for a job, has a yen for the woman who comes in on Thursday and always has a hot chocolate. The owner is known as Maestro, has a mole in the centre of his forehead and another business selling/promoting art.

After the first, each chapter then proceeds with one of the characters from the previous one carrying on with their own story. Every chapter has its own title and a (different) colour designation.

The scenes range as far as Sydney in Australia, though. In one of these a character tastes Vegemite and reflects it “looks sweet but is actually salty – isn’t that what life is like?”

Another character thinks “We’re all intertwined in each other’s lives without even knowing it” which corresponds a bit too much to what the structure of Hot Chocolate on Thursday is like.

An unusual feature of the publication is that at the top right-hand corner of each odd-numbered page is an illustration of a cup and what looks like a teapot (but may be supposed to contain hot chocolate) at first poised to pour but, as the chapters progress, pouring liquid into the cup until it is full and giving off condensed vapour. (I refuse to call this steam. Steam, pure steam, is a colourless gas, not white.)

The book has an addendum titled Matcha on Monday (月曜日の抹茶カフェ, Getsuyōbi no matcha kafe, literally Monday Matcha Café) on which the café, normally closed on a Monday, is open – but only to sell matcha.

Aoyama’s writing is fine enough but overall Hot Chocolate on Thursday feels a little inconsequential.

Pedant’s corner:- octopi (the English plural is ‘octopuses’, the Greek ‘octopodes’.)

Vintage, 2003, 301 p. Translated from the Japanese 羊をめぐる冒険 (Hitsuji o meguru bōken, literally An Adventure Concerning Sheep,) Kodansha Ltd, Tokyo, 1982, by Alfred Birnbaum.

This is a strange concoction. It starts off as a kind of boy (okay man) meets girl (ie woman) story where our unnamed divorced narrator notices a model’s ears in a photograph his advertising agency has used and develops a penchant for them. When they meet he discovers she habitually keeps her ears hidden except when modelling (or having sex.)

Then it morphs into a quasi-noir type tale when the agency publishes a pamphlet for a life insurance company containing a photograph of grazing sheep against a mountain background which attracts the attention of a representative of “The Boss,” a power in Japan’s political and economic circles. Our narrator is tasked with withdrawing the publication and then finding a distinctive sheep shown in the photograph on pain of his business being dissolved. A turn to the unusual occurs when the chauffeur taking him to a meeting with the Boss says he has a telephone hotline to God given him by his employer.

Along with his now girlfriend, whose ears have a semi-supernatural sensitivity, our narrator travels to Hokkaido to try to find the sheep. Hence the book’s title in English.

All this is linked in with his acquaintance with a character called the Rat whose whereabouts are unknown but with whom the narrator has held an intermittent correspondence. (I note from Murakami’s Wiki page that A Wild Sheep Chase is in fact the third in a trilogy featuring the Rat. Unfortunately, I have not read the previous two books.)

The novel becomes a travelogue, a part history of the area of Hokkaido where the distinctive sheep is to be found, and a fantasy of possession whereby sheep take up residence inside a person. (This once happened to the Boss.)

Along the way the narrator muses, “Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”

A crucial encounter with a hotel owner’s father known as the Sheep Professor, who once also had the sheep inside him, leads them to an isolated house in a backwater beyond even remote, where the narrator assumes the Rat has been living. Then there is the Sheep Man dressed in a sheep costume (an illustration of whom appears on its own page) who may or may not be the Rat.

If all this sounds as if it might be confusing it actually isn’t when reading. On the page it all makes sense – of a sort.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. Otherwise; “which may have been reason why” (been the reason why,) “the herringbone lay of the oak floorboards” (the herringbone lie of.) Chapters starting with dialogue are missing the opening quotation mark (this may be publishing convention but I hate it,) “why she treated me special” (‘why she treated me as special’,) snowslide(s) (x 4. Has the translator never heard the word ‘avalanche’? Is ‘snowslide’ a USian usage?) “if worse comes to worse” (if the worst comes to the worst,) “the lay of the grass” (the lie of the grass.) “‘It is special sheep’” (a special sheep.) “Only the the cicadas” (has one ‘the’ too many,) pull-ring (x 4. USian for ring-pull I assume,) “the overture to the The Magnificent Seven” (the overture to The Magnificent Seven.) “October laid heavy on the town” (October lay heavy,) buildiing (building,) “the lay of the land” (it was not a song: ‘the lie of the land’,) “the rotary” (I assume USian. To me ‘rotary’ is an adjective, not a noun. The appropriate word for this piece of road architecture is ‘roundabout’,) “corrogated iron” (corrugated,) “the rest the wine” (the rest of the wine,) “the lay of the house” (the lie,) “the word ‘free will’” (‘free will’ is two words; the one word would be ‘freewill’.) “The cords come out of four holes” (the rest of the passage is in past tense; ‘the cords came out of’.)

Jonathan Cape, 1971, 249 p. Illustrated from drawings by Pat Marriott.

Sixth in “The Wolves of Willoughby Chase” sequence, (though seventh if counting The Whispering Mountain which acts as a prequel to the series,) The Cuckoo Tree sees Dido Twite returned to England with Captain Hughes of HMS Thrush, carrying a warning to the Admiralty of a Hanoverian plot to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral during the planned coronation of Stuart King Richard IV.

Their carriage is wrecked and Captain Hughes badly injured. Did has to solicit help from a group of men she meets on the road, who point her towards Tegleaze Manor. (The men are smugglers, using canals to ferry their wares to London, a route later used by Dido.)

At the manor Dido is treated with some disdain by Lady Tegleaze but befriends her mollycoddled grandson, Sir Tobit. Lady Tegleaze allows Captain Hughes to be housed and nursed in a tenant cottage by the unlikeable and hostile Mrs Lubbage.

Dido wants to send the Captain’s dispatches to London but mistrusts the post and goes to the smugglers’ rendezvous at The Cuckoo Tree to enlist their help. There she meets orphan Cris, a slightly uncanny child who plays a part in thwarting a plan to swindle Sir Tobit out of his heritage. Mixed up in all the shenanigans is Dido’s Pa, but Dido’s presence gives him some pause.

This is all good adolescent fun, featuring adventure and mishap, locals with malapropistic speech, mind altering sweetmeats called Joobie nuts, long lost siblings etc, with authorial touches to appeal to adults; a firm of solicitors named Pickwick, FitzPickwick and Wily, the valuable family heirloom, The Tegleaze Luck-piece, a painting by P Breughel stolen in order to be sold to the Margrave of Bad Fallingoff.

However, why King Richard is portrayed as Scottish, with a Scottish accent and speech patterns is beyond me. He would certainly have been brought up as an English gentleman. (I noted this about his father here.) That his coronation takes place in St Paul’s Cathedral rather than Westminster Abbey is excused by the fact it’s an Altered History.

Pedant’s corner:- Bruegel (Brueghel, [used later],) “nobody could take if from him” (take it from him.)

Polygon, 2025, 145 p, plus 25 p Afterword and 1 p Acknowledgements.

The sixth in Birlinn’s Darkland Tales series, this is the story of the murder in Liniclate on Benbecula of three members of his family by Angus McPhee. as told in retrospect by his brother, Malcolm who, with his sister Marion, was out gathering seaweed when the fatal events took place.

Angus had always been a reluctant worker on the family croft but had spent time on a neighbouring island and on return shown signs of mental problems. The local community had thereafter had such concerns at his behaviour that they had him examined for possible confinement in a lunatic asylum but family pride and a reluctance to pay for such provision precluded this.

Life in Liniclate, as in much of rural Scotland in 1857, was harsh, more or less hand-to-mouth. It provokes in Malcolm that dour attitude to life exemplified by Calvinism’s Scottish expression. “Hope serves only as a buttress to misery. It is better all round to accept one’s lot in life and not entertain notions of a less onerous existence.”

Malcolm also has a cynical view of human nature. “I do not suppose that many among you would have the least interest in the incidents I have thus far related were it not for the fact that they serve as a prelude to violence. When a tale promises bloodshed no one leaves their seat.”

The murders blighted Malcolm’s life. The remaining family was all but ostracised by the locals and Marion and youngest brother John left the island (though Marion wasn’t seen to board the ferry,) while Malcolm withdrew into himself. He harbours dark thoughts about the Mrs MacLeod who comes in weekly to see to his welfare and ensure he bathes every month or so. Such is the tone of his reflections that the reader wonders if Malcolm has not succumbed to madness himself and, indeed, if his account is reliable in any sense.

This is another well written addition to the Darklands series but its resemblances to Burnet’s earlier novel His Bloody Project make it seem less original than the others.

Pedant’s corner:- in the Afterword; “none of whom were married” (none of whom was married.)