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.)

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.

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,)

Penguin, 2015, 446 p. Translated from the Turkish Bit Palas (Meris Yayinlari, 2002) by Müge Göçek.

This, Shafak’s debut novel, has similarities with Aala Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building – both are concerned with the inhabitants of a block of flats – but was originally published in the same year so these will be coincidental.

From the outset it is clear that things will not be entirely straightforward: the narrator – accused of having a fanciful mind; ie talking nonsense – riffs on the differences between truth (conceived of as a horizontal line,) deception (a vertical one,) and nonsense (a circle.) This is as a way to approaching story, a circle can be entered anywhere; but it isn’t a beginning, nor is it an end.

We are then given the history of the building, Bonbon Palace, from ‘Before’ and even ‘Before Before,’ it was built on the site of an old Christian (Armenian) cemetery.

The inhabitants of the various flats within the building are Musa, Meryem and Muhammet; Sidar and Gaba; hairdresser Cemal and Celal, twins who were not actually brought up together; The Firenaturedsons family; Hadji adji Hadji, his Son, Daughter and Grandchildren; Metin Chetinceviz and HisWifeNadia; Me; The Blue Mistress; Hygiene Tijen and Su; Madam Auntie.

Already that running together of words in Firenaturedsons and HisWifeNadia signal the otherness of the narration, that heightened sense which comes from a slightly surreal take on fiction and can be a signature of non-Anglophone literature. The whole thing would seem to be narrated by the ‘Me’ occupying Flat 7 as his are the only sections written in the first person. Chapters of the book focus on and return to the flat-dwellers’ various lives in no particular order. The circumstances under which he wrote this account are not revealed  until the end.

Another surreal touch is that Bonbon Palace has an accumulation of rubbish around it which keeps being added to despite the attentions of bug fumigator Injustice Pureturk. This forms the core of the plot as, in an attempt to prevent people adding to the rubbish piles, ‘Me’ paints on the enclosing wall a sentence declaring a saint is buried inside the premises.

All serious novels are attempts to sum up the world in microcosm. Limiting the story to such a small part of the world highlights this. Not all of human life is here but a good portion of it certainly is.

An initial surprise to me was the use in the translation of the word wee in the Scottish sense (‘a wee bit of clarification,’ ‘one wee bit,’ ‘a wee bit of sadness’) – and the fine British term nutter (‘a good-for-nothing nutter’.)

Peppered throughout are some adages such as, “Men committing adultery find quality significant: they enjoy receiving from another woman love that is in essence different from what they receive from their wives. Yet women committing adultery find quantity significant: they enjoy receiving from another man love that is more than that which they receive from their husbands.”

The narrator’s assertion that “Life is absurd, at its core lies nonsense” is as good a justification for the deployment of magic realism – or exaggerated reality – in a novel as you could get.

Then again he says, “Deception turns truth inside out. As for nonsense, it solders deception and truth to each other so much so as to make them indistinguishable.”

So does fiction.

The Flea Palace is as accomplished a debut novel as anyone could wish to write – or read.

Pedant’s corner:- the print looks  as if was photocopied and on some pages is slanted, quantative (quantitative,) “raise to the ground” (raze to the ground,) sprung (several times, sprang,) “café chantants” (cafés chantants,) “she had suddenly ran screaming” (she had suddenly run screaming,) sunk (sank,) “the gage of their nature” (gauge. ‘Gage’ for ‘gauge’ appeared once more,) a missing full stop, “you might may well start to believe” (has a ‘might’ or a ‘may’ too many?) “where he had laid down” (lain down,) “in spite of our eating in hoards” (in hordes,) “as they silently drunk” (drank,) “of the ‘The Oleander of Passion’” (that first ‘the’ is not needed,) “had all ended up in flop” (ended up as flops,) “a unfussy end” (an unfussy end,) “raised to the ground” (razed to the ground,) shrunk (x 2, shrank,) tealeaf (tea leaf,) dopey (dopy,) “he would lay in the corner” (he would lie in ….,) “as if hadn’t been him” (as if it hadn’t been him,) “they always go through their houses as if they had never gone through it before” (‘houses’ therefore ‘them’ not ‘it’,) “chaise long” (chaise longue,) “and before you it, know” (before you know it,) gamma-amino-butiric-acid (it’s not spelled butiric, it’s gamma-amino-butyric acid,) “no sooner had they given their consent that an objection was voiced” (than an objection,) “the saints existence” (the saint’s existence,) “he fished from the thrash” (from the trash,) “the end of last the century” (end of the last century,) “I laid next to her” (I lay next to her.) “All though this period” (All through.)

Michael Joseph, 2017, 75 p; including 3 p “A few words before the rest of the words.”  Translated from the Swedish Ditt livs affär (Helsingborgs Dagblad, 2016,) by Alice Menzies.

This is a short, but powerful, illustrated tale of a very successful business man’s attempt to make sense of his life; and amends to his neglected son.

He has terminal cancer and in the hospital room next to his is a young girl who tries to make friends with him and has coloured one of the chairs red using a crayon, “‘You’re allowed to draw on the furniture when you have cancer,’ the girl suddenly exclaimed with a shrug. ‘No one says anything.’”

His plight has caused the unnamed narrator to reflect on his life, and his story, as written, is an apology of sorts to his son. “But the vast majority of successful people don’t become bastards, we were bastards long before. That’s why we’ve been successful.” Also, “Weak people always look at people like me and say, ‘He’s rich, but is he happy?’ As though that was a relevant measure of anything. …..  Happy people don’t create anything …. All leaders, all of your heroes, they’ve been obsessed. Happy people don’t get obsessed.”

All his life he seems to have been followed around by a greyly dressed woman with a folder, even from when he was born as the only survivor of a set of twins. When he finally intercepts her and calls her Death she demurs. “I’m not Death. It’s the job.” And the job has rules. You cannot just exchange one life for another; yours must be erased. He cannot save both the girl and himself; or, rather, he cannot save the girl and his life as he lived it.

This is an all but perfect meditation on home and family and the things that, in the end, are important.

Pedant’s corner:- No entries.

Europa Editions, 2022, 135 p. Translated from the Italian L’Amore molesto (Edizioni e/o 1999) by Ann Goldstein.

Troubling Love was Ferrante’s first novel. It is narrated by Delia, whose parents’ marriage had always been troubled by her father’s jealousy of her mother Amalia’s attractiveness to men, in particular to a man named Caserta who acted as selling agent for the cheap pictures, mainly of gypsies, which Delia’s father painted for a living.

The events of the novel range over decades taking in Delia’s memories of her life growing up but mainly describe the aftermath of Amalia’s death by drowning – apparently suicide – clad in only a new bra. This aspect puzzles Delia since her mother had not been one for indulging in new clothing; make do and mend was one of her characteristics.

A cache of new clothes (possibly bought for her by Caserta) in her mother’s apartment is all the more puzzling because they seem to have been intended for Delia to wear but show signs of Amalia having at least tried them on.

All this sends Delia off on a quest to find Caserta; and the truth about her mother and father’s life. There are foreshadowings here of Ferrante’s later and more famous Neapolitan Quartet (see reviews, here, here, here and here.) A certain claustrophobia in the setting, dark goings on in normally deserted parts of buildings, an interest in older men but in this one Ferrante displays more of a lack of squeamishness about bodily secretions. There are visceral details about Delia’s unusual bodily reactions to stress.

Unlike in the Quartet though, Troubling Love is about the difficulties of shaking off the influence – and inheritance – of parents. For a first novel it is very accomplished indeed.

Pedant’s corner:-  Translated into USian, “sawed off” (sawn off.) “I let each stitch become unsewed” (unsewn.)

Vintage, 2000, 235 p. Translated by Nick Caistor from the Spanish Rabos de lagartija.

This is a striking novel. It is told from the viewpoint of an unborn child (though as if being remembered from enough years later for that child to be able to write.) Any objections to such an unlikely story teller are forestalled by the sentence, “It’s precisely because I didn’t see it that I can imagine it much better than you.” (Imagining it is, after all, what novelists do all the time.) Scenes and times shift abruptly but always comprehensibly. Later events (even those subsequent to the narrative) are treated proleptically, but then again, to the narrator they will already have taken place. There are conversations – envisioned or hallucinated – between characters who have not met, the contents of which are not given quotation marks.

The present tense of the book is set in an area of Barcelona just after the Hiroshima bomb. The main protagonist is David Bartra, the brother of our child narrator, but the plot centres round his pregnant mother, Rosa, whose hair colour means she is most often referred to as the red-head.

David’s peculiar pastime is cutting off the tails of lizards to present to his friend Paulino Bartolet. The lizards’ diminished bodies keep on going, (which reads as a metaphor for Franco’s Spain.) David is plagued by a continual hissing noise in his ears and has conversations in his head with not only his father and our unnamed narrator but also an RAF pilot, Flight Lieutenant Bryan O’Flynn – of Irish descent via Australia – depicted surrendering (but in David’s mind maybe about to be shot) in a page from a German propaganda magazine, a photo displayed on David’s wall. O’Flynn spent a lot of time in the Bartra household and, by implication, as it is never fully spelled out, he and Rosa became close. The reader is left to conclude of this situation whatever he or she wishes.

The Bartras live in the abandoned surgery of Doctor P J Rosón-Ansio, one of whose rooms has a giant poster of an ear, which David thinks of as always eavesdropping on his conversations; an entirely understandable belief in an authoritarian state. (Big Brother is not only watching you but also listening.)

Rosa has been left behind by her husband, Victor, most likely because he was an opponent of Franco. Victor had to make his escape by sliding down a gully near the Bartra house; an escapade in which he ripped his trousers and buttocks on a piece of broken glass. In David’s (and our narrator’s) imagination he always appears with a bloodied handkerchief attempting to bandage the cut. As a result of his activities – which included helping smuggle Allied POWs out of France during the war, one of whom was that same RAF pilot who later returned to duty only to be shot down and captured again (hence the photo) the Bartra household has received the attentions of Police Inspector Galván.

The Inspector begins to ply Rosa with gifts either because he is trying to suborn her for information about Victor’s whereabouts or has really formed an affection for her. But he is a nasty piece of work as two incidents reveal. In his conversations with him, David, under the influence of films he has seen, usually calls the Inspector bwana or sahib.

David resents Galván’s attentions to his mother and his adoption of an old dog provides another source of conflict with the Inspector, who maintains the dog should be put down.

Added to all this is Paulino’s relationship with his abusive uncle and an illustration of police immunity from redress when an officer takes advantage of a girl who is trying to help David get Galván into trouble.

Lizard Tails is an example of a certain sort of literature which emanates from totalitarian societies, stories in which everything seems to be said obliquely but is all the more powerful for it.

Pedant’s corner:- smoothe/smoothes (several times; ‘smooth/smooths’,) an unnecessary line break after ‘hand’ in ‘with a hand on my backside’. There was space left on the line for ‘on my’,) atomical (just ‘atomic’,) Morris’ (Morris’s,) “Captain Vickers’ sure shot” (Vickers’s,) “‘A 12-cylinder Rolls Royce Marlin 61 engine’” (Spitfire engines were Rolls Royce Merlin ones,) “as the suns starts to set” (sun,) lungeing (lunging,) “the clothes line” (clothes’ line?) staunch (stanch,) “Señora Vergés’ backside” (Vergés’s.)

Arcaia Books, 2014, 742 p, plus 9 p Dramatis Personae. Translated from the Catalan, Jo Confesso, (Raval Edicions SLU, Proa, 2011,) by Mara Faye Lethem.

How to describe a book that is so unlike anything else I have read yet at the same time has echoes of so much I have? Simultaneously a history, a biography, a love story and a tale of friendship; with moments of joy, moments of sadness, moments of betrayal, moments of horror. Twisting, shifting and refusing categorisation, it contains multitudes. Humanity in all its guises, many of them unappealing.

Confessions is a long, complex, but nevertheless still easy to read, novel, ostensibly the life story of Barcelona native Adrià Ardèvol, whose misfortune it was – as he tells us in the novel’s first sentence – to be born into the wrong family. He describes it as an unforgivable mistake. This is not quite a paraphrase of Tolstoy’s aphorism about families but it does prepare us for the frosty nature of his relationships with his parents, neither of whom he thinks ever loved him, or each other. Indeed, he wonders why they bothered to get married in the first place.

Possibly as a result of this coldness the young Adrià personifies his toys, Sheriff Carson of Rockland and the Valiant Arapaho Chief, Black Eagle, who act as a sounding board for his thoughts and conscience since they talk back to him – sometimes even initiating the conversation. This discourse diminishes through time but never entirely disappears.

Adrià’s father was a dealer in manuscripts, incunabula, antiquities, curios etc (given the unprincipled nature of his transactions I hesitate to call them objects of virtu – but of course the objects themselves would be blameless) and kept a shop in Barcelona. One of his gifts to Adrià was a Storioni violin, made in Cremona in 1674, whose sound is better than a Stradivarius. The novel is also the story of that violin, named Vial, of its creator and its ownership.

The narrative is frequently addressed to “you”, and at first this “you” might be assumed to be the reader but then it is found to be Sara, the love of Adrià’s life, to whom he is relating his life story – and his sins. The text contains repeated instances where the word confiteor is repeated as a single sentence.

That love is Sara Voltes-Epstein, an illustrator of artistic talent, who is a Jew and incurs the suspicions of Adrià’s mother, who think she is after the Ardèvol family’s money and hence scuppers any chance of Adrià marrying her. Here the familiar arc of boy meets girl boy loses girl takes shape and indeed the two do get together later – years later – but that strand, though the central tragedy of Adrià’s life, is only a small part of this voluminous book, one of whose historical scenes implicitly draws parallels between the mediæval treatment of Jews and its ultimate expression in the Holocaust. That Sara is Jewish is central to Adrià’s story and his ultimate anguish.

The narrative is not straightforward, slipping between first and third person (I and he/Adrià) seemingly at random, conversations switch from direct to reported speech then back again with no punctuational signals, descriptions within them of past events are presented as a historical account of what those speakers would have said (or did say.) The setting can change years, decades – or centuries – within a single paragraph or even sentence. Often someone’s speech is suddenly cut off midline by an interruption. We witness the same scene from several different viewpoints sometimes hundreds of pages apart. Yet this all seems organic, all natural. Everything flows.

It is the violin which ties the whole together, acquired by Adrià’s father for a knock-down price from a former SS officer who took it from its rightful owner inside the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, given to Adrià to play – but he has no desire to have a career as a violinist. In contrast his friend Bernat does do so but in turn wants to write stories which Adrià tells him have uninspiring prose and he should stick to the violin. All interleaved with the unfolding of Adrià’s life, we see scenes of the violin’s construction from a cache of uniquely treated wood and its subsequent passing down through the generations, the shutdown of the monastery of Sant Pere del Burgal in the 15^th century, the significance of the number 615428, the resonance of the Urgell painting in Adrià’s childhood home of the Sant Maria de Gerri monastery receiving the light of the sun setting behind Trespui and much, much more. Occasional, highly intermittent, sections are rendered in italics, apparently written by Bernat which in the end cast an utterly different light on what we have been reading before.

This might all seem too elaborate a construction to balance but Cabré is entirely in control of what he is doing and is not afraid to show it. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad” is a straight quotation from Gabriel García Márquez though Adrià does not actually face a firing squad – except metaphorically. The nearest literary comparison to the effect Cabré creates that I can think of is Kurt Vonnegut, but Vonnegut is more off-beat, more fanciful. Confessions deals entirely in the human sphere. “Evil existed before the war and doesn’t depend on any entelechy, but rather on people.”

There is a comment on the changing of attitudes over time when a lecturer says, “‘In the eighteenth century, if you weren’t wearing a wig, makeup, stockings and high heels, they wouldn’t let you into the salons. Today, a man wearing makeup, a wig, stockings and heels would be locked up in prison without any questions being asked.’” This was in Franco’s time in Spain, which Adrià – and Cabré – experienced. That dictatorship is only lightly touched on in the text but adds an undertone of colour.

Adrià tells Sara through his memoire, “you will continue living in these lines every time someone reads these pages,” but it is his overall story of greed and hate, but also friendship and love, the enduring constants of human interactions, that will linger.

Confessions is a tour-de-force.

Pedant’s corner:- On the inside cover blurb “reaches a crescendo” (reaches a climax.) Otherwise; “which much hve been immense” (which must have been,) Mrs Canyameres’ (Canyameres’s.) “Even thought I was very young” (Even though,) “wile away my time” (while away,) “the only thing that kept him in Cremona were the attentions of the dark, passionate Carina” (the only thing … was the attentions,) “having caught me in fragranti” (in flagrante,) “but the silent was thick” (silence,) “off of” (x 2, no ‘of’, just ‘off’,) “inside of me” (no ‘of’, just ‘inside me’.) Obersturbahnführer (Obersturmbahnführer,) Fèlix Morlin (elsewhere always Félix Morlin,)  “inside out fatherland” (our fatherland.) “‘Who knows.’” (Who knows?) Planas (Plensa?) “worse for the wear” (no ‘the’, just ‘worse for wear’,) “you mouth dropped open” (your mouth,) the perfect place to sooth the torments” (to soothe; to sooth would be a different thing entirely,) “the strict silence that accompany the twenty four hours” (accompanies,) Complin (Compline,) insuring (ensuring,) Germany (German,) “his licence exam” (his driving test.) Strumbahnführer (x 4, Sturmbahnführer?) “‘Where’d you get that come from?’” (‘Where’d you get that from?’ Or ‘Where’d that come from?’,) “as if she had shook off a few years” (shaken off.) “Kamenek, with a smile, slide the microphone towards” (slid the microphone,) “to stab he who pauses” (to stab him who,) forrage (forage,) “for a several years” (no ‘a’,) “to be hear it for myself” (no ‘be’,) consierge (concierge,) an extraneous quotation mark. “I was wracked by my bad conscience” (I was racked by.)

An Epic.

Vintage International, 1997, 486 p, plus xii p Introduction by Brad Leithauser. Translated from the Icelandic, Sjállfstaett fólk, by J A Thompson. First published 1946.

This is the book which established Laxness as the most important contributor to Icelandic literature since the sagas and paved the way for his Nobel Prize. It is the story of the life of Bjartur of Summerhouses, (Gudbjartur Jonsson,) a traditional poet, dedicated to both internal and external rhyming – unlike the new-fangled modern stuff with its simpler structures – and his interactions with family, neighbours, local merchants and the authorities in his determination to be an independent man. His most important relationship though is with his sheep. He is obsessed by them: so much so that he even looks a gift cow in the mouth. Independent People is in part a threnody to a lost way of living, an intense attachment to the land, a frugal kind of existence (in turf-roofed huts with no furniture unless built-in and rotting tables nailed to window ledges) that had lasted over a thousand years.

There is also a crossover element of fantasy as Summerhouses is thought (by all but Bjartur) to be haunted by the legendary fiend Kolumkilli, and his handmaiden Gunnvor or Gudvor. On the way to Summerhouses from Utirausthmyri there is a cairn to Gunnvor where the credulous leave a stone in propitiation. About halfway through the book there is an apparently supernatural act of violence upon Bjartur’s flock. Laxness does not resolve the nature of the culprit one way or the other though there is the later thought that “Supernatural phenomena are most unpleasant for this reason: that having reduced to chaos all that ordered knowledge of the world about him which is the foundation a man stands on, they leave the soul floating in mid-air, where it does not rightly belong.”

The book proper starts with Bjartur, after serving out his time at Utirausthmyri, bringing home his young bride, Rosa, from where she had been in service to the Bailiff. She demands to stop at Gunnvor’s cairn but Bjartur will have none of it. Rosa’s existence at Summerhouses is miserable, not helped by Bjartur’s suspicions that her pregnancy predates their marriage and that therefore he cannot be the father of her child. Rosa’s secret killing of a ewe to provide her with the sustenance which Bjartur does not, precipitates a tragedy and the novel’s central relationship. Bjartur goes out looking for his lost ewe (he knows every single one) and strays too far in a winter storm. When he gets back Rosa is dead and her new born child all but; kept alive only by Bjartur’s dog having kept her warm. He names the girl Asta Sollilja and brings her up as his own.

At the funeral someone recites a version of the Lord’s Prayer which sounds remarkably Scottish in tone, “Our Father, which art in Heaven, yes, so infinitely far away that no-one knows where You are, almost nowhere, give us this day just a few crumbs to eat in the name of Thy Glory, and forgive us if we can’t pay the dealer and our creditors and let us not, above all, be tempted to be happy, for Thine is the Kingdom.” The assembled company converses about the state of Iceland and the loss of youth “to a land even more remote, America, which is farther than death.”

Bjartur marries again and has children of his own but the relationship between himself and Asta Sollilja is strong, endangered only once when on a trip to the nearest town they stay over in the communal sleeping quarters. Asta Sollilja’s fear of the other is such that she huddles close to Bjartur and he nearly succumbs to the temptation of her flesh. His sudden withdrawal and departure to fetch their horse leaves Asta Sollilja wondering what she has done wrong.

Bjartur is so set on independent ways that he will have no truck with the new-fangled co-operative societies and keeps his trust in the merchants he has always used even though they may be fleecing him.

Bjartur’s son Nonni thinks to himself of the adult topics of conversation, “everyone competing with everyone else to get a word in somehow, so as to get at least a little attention, everyone grumbling about parish paupers and the burdens of old folk, who never seemed to die off at a respectable age. And the taxes these days, man alive! They complained bitterly of the extravagant habits of young women, the migration of youth to the towns, the difficult times, the high price of corn ….” It was ever thus. Bjartur himself, “disliked tears, had never understood them, and had sometimes lost his temper over them.”

To these Icelanders the Great War comes as “the most bountiful blessing that God has sent our country since the Napoleonic Wars saved the nation from the consequences of the Great Eruption and raised our culture from the ruins with an increased demand for fish and whale-oil.” The price of sheep and wool increased. Good times arrived.

So much so that Bjartur builds a new house – a project which turns out to be with fraught with problems, doors too small to allow furniture in, no hinges for them in any case, a lack of insulation so that they all freeze in the winter. Such are the trials which assail the man who strives to be independent.

In among all this I was struck by the apparent central importance of coffee to Icelandic hospitality.

The good times pass and a starving man about to take part in a protest tells Bjartur, “Capitalism punishes people much more for not stealing than for stealing,” and Bjartur himself goes on to think “The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty. He will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man’s protector, but his worst enemy,” and that, “In its own way misery no less than revelry is varied in form and worthy of note wherever there lurks a spark of life in the world.” In a consideration of life’s inequity we have, “it is utterly pointless to make anyone a generous offer unless he is a rich man. … To be poor is simply the peculiar human condition of not being able to take advantage of a generous offer.”

In a reflection of Bjartur’s times we are given his thought that “Housekeepers differ from married women in this respect: that they insist on doing as they please, whereas married women are required to do what they are told. Housekeepers are continually demanding things, whereas married women may think themselves lucky for getting nothing at all. Most things are considered by housekeepers as being beneath their dignity, but who bothers listening to a married woman if she starts grumbling? No one is any the worse for it but her … and it’s hard, surely, to have to marry a woman just to be able to tell her to keep her trap shut.”

The novel’s title is of course ironic. Bjartur’s story is that of a man who sowed his enemy’s field his whole life. In its relentless unfolding of that life it is a story that will linger in the memory.

Aside: the text somewhat jarringly mentions dollars, a dime, a quarter, even two quarters, terms which jarred with me. I wondered; why not use the names of coins circulating in Iceland (which, being a dependency, actually used Danish currency till 1914)? Usage of Scottish words – bigging, kennings, muckle – made me wonder if the translator was Scottish. I discovered he was born in Berwick. Close enough. Such terms are perhaps appropriate. I have perceived before the similarities between the Icelandic and Scottish experience as expressed in the fiction they produce. In particular description of landscape as here is one of the notable features of the Scottish novel.

Sensitivity note: reference is made to the Negroes of Darkest Africa.

Pedant’s corner:-  quartrain (quatrain,) apothegm (apophthegm,) “waked up” (woken up. Thompson invariably uses ‘waked’ for ‘woken’,) plus points though for ‘homœopath’, insured (ensured,) Guthvor (misprint? Or another variant spelling of Gunnvor/Gudvor?) “Jesus’ names” (Jesus’s,) “this new motive” (motif? It was embedded in a musical metaphor.) “Many a little makes a mickle, as the saying goes” (the saying – in Scotland anyway – is ‘mony a mickle maks a muckle,) “a house build of stone” (built of.)