I haven’t posted about books in a while because I was struggling with the ones I had, and unless a book catches me like a resting kite by the wind or just gives me an ornery turn, I don’t see any point in wasting our mutual time opining about them. In fact, I don’t care to opine much at all anymore. I’ll probably just show a book, say this and that, and leave it up to you.
 
Anyhows, I ended up exchanging the duds for this one at a store in Siem Reap and got me a kite with tails. That this celebration of the well-intentioned impecunious and the naturalness of sociability found me in Cambodia was apt, I have to say. On every street in the country and on Cannery Row, a family cohesiveness makes getting on together the thing to do.
 
Personally, I go strongly with this man Steinbeck’s poetry of the ordinary, his giving a voice and pages to the odd and the damaged. When you love like this, you don’t need to romanticize, just let the “cats drip over the fences” at first light and frogs blink on the Carmel river. The tragic, too, has its place and is admitted. It is a world where violence is apportioned without ugliness. When Doc has punched Mack, he pours him a beer, and after the ruckus at the party, the ejected tuna boat crew are welcomed back in, such a good fight it has been.
 
For the ending, Steinbeck pulls out all the stops and lets sound all the music his people deserve.

American culture and alienation are not a natural match, which I think explains what makes this such a strange read. There’s something strange as well as understated about it all the way through.
 
We get to know Binx Bollinger as a law-abiding professional in New Orleans, around 1960, whose casual approach to this, that and everything is gradually shown to indicate a hollowness that most probably has to do with this war experiences in Korea, although the malaise feels constitutional to his being. He suggests a commitment to a personal “search” of some nature, but search me if there is one. He remains directionless, uncomplaining, drifting across the surface layer of life.
 
The plot is quite uneventful and it’s our gradual perception of the narrator’s inability to want anything badly enough, his absence of emotional conviction in any normal sense, that make the impression. He’s no rebel. If he goes along with American social norms, it is simply that he lacks any belief system that might question them. The strongest character is his cousin, Kate, whom trauma really has broken. Binx’s active concern for her, a kindred spirit, seems a deflection from his own existential predicament. We see him playing a part for others, but never get to know who he really is. Maybe there’s just this sad estrangement and that’s the point.
 
I did and I didn’t like it. It left me with the sensation of an oddly unwelcome dream that you can’t make sense of on waking and are glad to put behind you.

[English version below]

Un libro sobre el abismo en el que nos puede sumir la muerte, sobre la terrible pérdida, sobre la memoria, que explora en busca, si no de sentido, al menos de significado. «¿Qué puedo entonces esperar salvar del desastre?», escribe la protagonista del libro, Marie Curie, justo después de que su marido falleciera en un accidente de tráfico.
 
El tono, a la vez íntimo y austero, encaja con la personalidad de Curie, mientras transmite la intensidad de una experiencia que compartieron la autora y la científica, a saber, la muerte prematura de sus amores: Pierre, el de Curie, y Pablo, el de Montero.
 
Al escribir sobre el dolor y las luchas de la otra mujer, Rosa Montero parece encontrar una forma indirecta de superar su propia pérdida, recordarlo y, esperemos, encontrar algún tipo de cierre y paz.
 
Marie Curie y su vida son retratadas, entonces, con una especial cercanía y empatía, poniéndonos en la piel de una mujer polaca desfavorecida en la sociedad supremamente patriarcal del París de fin de siècle. Las presiones sociales que se acumulan sobre Curie y que ella interioriza y asume o combate son a veces señaladas por Montero con hashtags para enfatizarlas con claridad  #HonrarALosPadres #HaceLoQueSeDebe #Culpa
 
Mientras el polonio y el radio radiactivos asolan las células de su cuerpo, en el diario que Curie dirigió a su marido inmediatamente después de su fatal accidente, vemos bajo la superficie pública el corazón apasionado de una mujer totalmente comprometida con su amor y su esfuerzo común. Es bueno hablar con los muertos a los que queremos, porque son parte de nosotros.
 
Este diario, reproducido al final del libro, complementa la propia historia de Rosa Montero, una canción de amor que suena discretamente de fondo, al tiempo que conecta con la universalidad de los lectores, pues ¿quién no ha experimentado la terrible desaparición de un ser querido, a quien jamás volveremos a ver?
 
“Breve es nuestro día y la noche es inmensa.”
 
                                                                                       ***************
 
The Ridiculous Idea That I Will Never See You Again – Rosa Montero
 
A book about the yawning abyss into which death can drop us, about the dreadful loss, about memory, exploring in search of, if not sense, then meaning. “What, then, can I hope to salvage from the disaster?” writes the book’s principal subject, Marie Curie, just after her husband is killed in a road accident.
 
The mood, at once intimate and austere, matches Curie’s personality as it transmits the poignancy of an experience that author and scientist shared, namely the premature death of their love: Curie’s Pierre and Montero’s Pablo.
 
By writing about the other woman’s grief and struggles, Rosa Montero seems to find an indirect way to work through her own loss, remember him and, one hopes, find some kind of closure and peace.
 
Marie Curie and her life are portrayed, then, with a special amity and empathy, putting us in the shoes of a disadvantaged Polish woman in the supremely patriarchal society of fin de siècle Paris. The social pressures piled on Curie that she internalizes and assumes or battles are sometimes flagged by Montero with hashtags for emphasis and clarity #HonourThyParents #DoYourDuty #Guilt
 
All the while radioactive polonium and radium are eating away at her body cells, in Curie’s diary that she addressed to her husband immediately after his fatal accident, we see beneath the public surface the passionate heart of a woman utterly committed to her love and their common endeavour. It is good to talk to the dead that we hold fond, for they are part of us.
 
This diary, reproduced at the end of the book, complements Rosa Montero’s own story, a love song which plays understatedly in the background, while also connecting with the universality of readers, for who has not experienced the terrible disappearance of a close, loved one, who we will never see again?
 
“Brief is our day and the night is immense.”

As editor Sam Boyce wrote: this is a comic masterpiece. Comic in the sense of being composed of cut-up phrases and images from 1960s women’s magazines, pasted onto the page, and comic, also, in the sad and funny way of such unique works as A Confederation of Dunces. Masterpiece, because of a story that emerges to exceed all reasonable expectations.
 
The prim and correct milieu of suburban, middle-class 1960s England is prime breeding ground for subversive hilarity and that, reader, is what you’re going to get. But be prepared for the comedy to acquire a dolorous depth.
 
Our heroine, Norma, aspires to nothing more than being the ideal woman as personified within the pages of Woman’s World and other fashion and lifestyle magazines. Her proud enthusiasm for the advertised products and domestic virtue is an unending source of humour, especially if your memory stretches back that far.
 
That she seems to live largely confined to her room, looked after by Mary, whom she refers to rather confusingly as her housekeeper or else her mother, soon introduces an element of uncertainty. At some point in the past, there appears to have been a road accident. The first-person narrative keeps us guessing. It would be a crime to give spoilers and I will refrain, but rest assured, you won’t be disappointed.
 
The book is unusual, Norma is unusual, and Rawle’s turns of phrase in her mouth can surprise by departing from cliché with poetic frills or outright impropriety. “September rain soon passes. It leaves nothing unlovely,” Norma observes, but she also sees in her mind’s eye: “an old man, so entranced by my sophisticated yet coquettish demeanour that he forgets his manners and goes to the toilet in his trousers.”
 
The collage of cut-up magazines means that a word will suddenly be unnecessarily HUGE, which only emphasizes the comic effect. Added to these are occasional commercial images of a lipstick, or a brassiere, or Lux soap flakes.
 
I was drawn to the novel—and it is that: a complete and moving story—by my enjoyment of Graham Rawle’s superb “Lost Consonants” cartoons. With this book, his surreal humour enters another dimension. It is a tremendously satisfying success.

Ambler`s 1938 thriller might not have the cynical, worldly investigator of the type that Chandler invented in that era, still less of Hammett’s hardboiled detective novels, but that’s what makes it work.
 
When Charles Latimer, more at home in the ambience of the English country house murder novels that he makes a living from, wanders out of his comfort zone while in Turkey, his overconfidence and inexperience entice him down a path that he is too mesmerized to turn back from.
 
Ambler leads Latimer gently out of his depth until, a little less than halfway through, Mr Peters overturns Latimer’s expectations and hotel room and the standard plot is simple no longer.
 
There’s a sound structure to the story, which is needful when a variety of places, time sequences and events are involved. Fairly early on, Ambler has Latimer note down the bare bones of the Dimitrios chronology so that we can all refer to it whenever we want. It’s a neat move.
 
Ambler can draw a striking new character—Muishkin, the madame—out his hat and conjure them up in just a few phrases. As for his principal creation, Ambler clearly enjoys fleshing out his portrait of the flabby Mr Peters, whom he describes as “loathsome”, in particular his pained, sweet smile. First conferred upon Latimer like “ a spiritual pat on the head”, it later reappears “as if some obscene plant had turned its face to sun.” It reminds Latimer of “the greeting of an old and detested acquaintance.”
 
The major reveal is one that the reader strongly suspects all along. It has the effect of confirming Latimer’s ingenuity and vulnerability, so that the danger is heightened. Ambler is then good at writing suspense in the moments when Latimer must wait.
 
The only downside of the novelist-gentleman’s simple nature is that it gives us a less than interesting protagonist. The time and place of writing are worth recalling here: the world on the verge of war. Latimer is an Englishman of the old school, venturing into a European wolves’ den, just as the credulous Chamberlain was about to fall victim to a dictator’s artifice in Munich.

This autumn’s outstanding find for me.
 
Ursula Le Guin sent her last set of poems to the editor just a week before she died in 2018. Intimate, self-aware, mature and cast with her gentle touch.
 
I have an affinity with Le Guin that I have with no one else. The way she writes, the worlds she creates, the values she espouses, the serious creative playfulness that runs beneath the surface of what she does.
 
You’ll find a dragon poem and six short quatrains with the delicate suspense of Oriental verse. Depth in earth and light and McCoy Creek captured in sound.
 
In her ninth decade, there is a sense of a voyage on a sea that is unknown, yet becoming familiar. A loosening of identity and an awareness of the impersonality of the all.
 
One of the poems, “An Autumn Reading”, was on a postcard that the author sent me.

At Bloomsbury’s Conway Hall, home of South Place Ethical Society, where Orwell once spoke, the Poison Girls sang and whose proscenium arch exhorts “To Thine Own Self Be True”, I mingled with a very particular collective, producers of rare, recondite and marginal publications.
 
Here, uniformly anomalous, were creative ephemera, limited edition etched linocuts, esoteric and hybrid poetics, experimental and conceptual, stone lithographs, reconstructed images, single-story chapbooks, a “purveyor of slow dissemination” and hand-stitched, rubber-stamped paper pulp.
 
I rather liked the celebration of oddness. It made this one-man publishing enterprise, i.e. me and my books, who am incapable of defining my own genres, feel positively mainstream. They still did a better trade than me that day.

Three young women, a lone scientist dedicated to saving snails and two sisters who will try any means to win back their mother, have signed up as supposed nubile prizes in a bridal agency for visiting foreigners. The women’s impulsive kidnapping of thirteen bachelors using Yeva’s laboratory van is temerarious enough, but this is Ukraine, it’s February 2022, and as the old vehicle rumbles through the forest, the already off-kilter romance tour is sucker-punched by Russia’s full-scale invasion. And the narrative slides off like the van on winter ice.
 
This is, in effect, what happened to Maria Reva’s novel satirizing the exploitative trade in—allegedly—traditional, submissive Ukrainian brides.  She had to decide, halfway through the story, with the country of her birth suddenly at war, how to continue writing. The book, unsurprisingly, takes a radical turn. The narrative is abandoned, replaced by fictional correspondence between the author and her editor, with a magazine that objects to the gallows humour of an essay when this is precisely faithful to the conversations taking place in Kyiv’s air raid shelters, and a surreal conversation with Yurt Makers. Reva even tosses out a derisory happy ending and an Acknowledgments page, before the original story is taken up again, with the difference that everything has changed.
 
Russian tanks and infantry are streaming towards Ukraine’s major cities, already under aerial bombardment. Meanwhile, Reva still has Yeva and the two sisters with a bunch of foreign men locked in the campervan. And Yeva has a particular obsession with a unique snail for which she seeks a mate, lest it become one more endling. An endling being the very last living example of a species. Yeva, being asexual, knows what it is like to feel the end of a certain evolutionary line. The metaphor of the danger of independent Ukraine being eradicated does not need spelling out.
 
War is a natural habitat for the absurd. As the van lurches from one direction to another, so does the fate and narrative of its characters, including the hopelessly romantic Pasha, one of the trapped bachelors, a native-born Ukrainian who (like Reva, the author) has grown up in Canada.
 
Fragments of memory, or imagined memory, alternative versions of their attempt to rescue a grandfather in besieged Kherson, who refuses to leave his apartment, remind us that this is and can be is no normal storytelling. Is he the grandfather of the two sisters? Or of the owner of the bridal agency? Those who have read about her will know that we are really reading about Maria Reva’s own desperate concern for her own grandfather in that city, bombed and occupied by the Russians, before being liberated, and fighting still for its survival.
 
The changing versions of the story reflect the real uncertainty. What is certain is the women’s “shared blood” and a bond amidst the emergency.

Son muchas las cosas que me han gustado de este libro.
 
En el pasado, me ha costado mucho encontrar escritores españoles con los que conectar. He empezado libros en español y los he encontrado inaccesibles, demasiado literarios, o que intentaban impresionar demasiado, pesadamente irónicos, floridos o simplemente decepcionantes. Probablemente porque mi español no estaba a la altura. Con este libro, he encontrado a alguien y un estilo de escritura con los que me entiendo. Rosa Montero tiene claro lo que quiere comunicar. Tiene ritmo. Funciona.
 
Si me sitúan en un mundo que recuerde remotamente a Blade Runner, mi mente tiende a crear su propia atmósfera. El título por sí solo me atrajo, citando el inesperado y trágico discurso de Batty al final de su lucha, y la cita del Eclesiastés que precede la novela se reflejaba en las últimas palabras del humanoide (y me recuerda, de mi propio panteón personal, de mi propia memoria poco fiable, Take It As It Comes de The Doors: “Time to die.”)
 
De hecho, hay muy poco del desolado mundo de Deckard aquí, pero se mantiene la fuerte premisa de los replicantes con una esperanza de vida limitada que no les permite envejecer, acompañada de la igualmente poderosa y fértil imagen de los implantes de memoria y las preguntas sobre la identidad. Creada como una replicante de combate, Bruna Husky será a la vez formidable y vulnerable. También es detective solitaria, inteligente y escéptica pero empática, justo el tipo de personalidad que sabrá guiarnos por la acción y el razonamiento a lo largo de las páginas. Se tratará de supervivencia, intrigas, misterio, valentía y amor.
 
En lugar de Los Ángeles, tenemos un Madrid reconocible, que para mí es aún más íntimamente familiar. Montero hace muy bien una cosa en la que muchos autores de ciencia ficción caen en detrimento propio y ajeno. Tiene cuidado de no sobrecargar el entorno futurista—ni al lector—con demasiados cambios tecnológicos y sociales que pueden hacer sentir que el mundo es una fantasía privada del escritor que no tiene nada que ver con nosotros. Hay elementos e incluso seres nuevos, pero son pertinentes para la trama. Del mismo modo, los neologismos se mantienen dentro de una cuota manejable y comprensible.
 
Como muchas novelas sobre tecnohumanos que conviven con humanos normales, el libro tiene un ambiente algo existencialista y un tema subyacente sobre el racismo, por lo que Rosa Montero, naturalmente, aporta seriedad a la historia, pero sin ser tendenciosa.
 
 Confieso que tengo dudas sobre algunos detalles, sobre todo en el desenlace y el final, pero la historia y la caracterización son más que suficientes para que salga bien. Me quedo con una larga e interesante lista de vocabulario desconocido que buscar (palabras maravillosas como
engruñar, repantigado, oquedad, beodo, rezongar, quincallería!) y con ganas de leer el próximo reto de Bruna en El peso del corazón.
 
                                                                            *          *          *
 
There is so much I liked about this book.
 
In the past, I have had real difficulty finding a Spanish writer I can get on with. I have picked up books in Spanish only to find them inaccessible, too literary, or else trying too hard to impress, heavily ironic, or flowery, or just disappointing. Very probably because my Spanish just wasn’t up to it. With this, I found someone and a writing style I could connect with. Rosa Montero has clarity about what she wants to communicate. It has pace. It works.
 
Put me in a world even remotely reminiscent of Bladerunner and my mind tends to produce its own atmospherics. The title on its own drew me in, quoting Batty’s unexpectedly tragic, dying speech, and the prefaced quotation from Ecclesiastes was echoed by the humanoid in his final words (which always brings to my mind, from my own personal pantheon, from my own unreliable memory, The Doors’ Take It As It Comes:  “Time to die.”)
 
There is, in fact, very little of Deckard’s desolate world here, but the strong premise holds of replicants with a limited lifespan that will not allow them to grow old, accompanied by the equally powerful and fertile image of memory implants and questions about identity. Created as a combat rep, Rosa Montero’s Bruna Husky will be both formidable and vulnerable. She is also a lone detective, smart and sceptical yet empathetic, just the kind of personality to lead us by action and reasoning through the pages. It will be about survival, skulduggery, mystery, bravery and love.
 
Instead of L.A., we have a recognizable Madrid, which for me is even more intimately familiar. Montero does one thing very well that many SF authors indulge in to their and our detriment. She is careful not to overload the futuristic environment—or the reader—with too much technological and societal change that can make one feel that the world is a writer’s private fantasy which has nothing to do with us. New elements and even new creatures there are, but they are germane to the plot. Similarly, neologisms are kept to a manageable and comprehensible quota.
 
Like many a novel about technohumans coexisting with regular humans, the book has a somewhat existentialist ambience and an underlying theme about racism, and so Rosa Montero naturally lends gravitas to the story but without being tendentious.
 
I confess to some doubts about a few details, particularly in the denouement and ending, but the story and characterization are more than strong enough to bring it off. I come away with a long and interesting list of unknown vocabulary to look up (wonderful words such as engruñar, repantigado, oquedad, beodo, rezongar, quincallería!) and a desire to read Bruna’s next challenge in El Peso del Corazón.

Unless there are redeeming features (such as humour or splendid characters), I tend to find stories of horror and sentimentality redundant and typically distasteful. They foist on us cheap, shallow emotion that disturbs while teaching us nothing. The Kite Runner is light on the horror, but makes one insistent tug on the heart strings after another.
 
Once Amir the boy and his particular unpleasantness were left behind and he was grown up and in courting in the USA, I managed to warm to him briefly, but not to the book.
 
I hadn’t bargained for all the lachrymose parallels and coincidences: the tragic family deaths, the return of Aseef, the sexual assaults, the split lips, the noble generosities, the motherless sons, the fated return of the bloody kite.
 
By the time I reached the end, the corny inevitability of what was going to happen was unbearable.