Following the revelation that only about a quarter of literature translated into English is written by women, the book world has decreed August Women in Translation Month. (I seem to have done only slightly better with over a third of the novels on my Goodreads translated fiction shelf being by women.) This post contains reviews of the two translated novels by women I’ve read this month, one from Israel, the other from Spain, and reminders of my two favourites from the five qualifying novels I’ve reviewed earlier this year.
First and foremost, he thought of himself. He wasn’t supposed to see it. He wasn’t supposed to know about it. As if someone had left the cover off a street sewer and the shit had risen and flooded everything. The shit was always there, everyone knew that. But not in their faces, not right in front of their eyes … Not that he didn’t want someone to deal with it. He was willing to invest public money and he was willing to vote for someone who promised that such things would not happen. But it wasn’t willing to have it shoved in his face. (p317)
After a disastrous disagreement with his mentor, Eitan Green, a promising neurosurgeon, has relocated with his wife and two young sons from Tel Aviv to the culturally and geologically dusty city of Beersheba. One night, instead of going home after an exhausting shift at the hospital, he takes his SUV for a drive in the desert. He’s admiring the moon in a remote area when he knocks someone down. Seeing that the man, a migrant from Eritrea, although not yet dead, is beyond help, Eitan drives off.
He is still battling his guilt when, the following day, the victim’s widow comes knocking at his door. There’s a price for Sirkit’s silence, to be paid not in money, but in sleepless nights running a makeshift hospital for illegal immigrants, which will risk his health, his marriage, his official job and, eventually, his life. Meanwhile, his wife, Liat, the police inspector tasked with investigating the hit-and-run case, finds him increasingly alienated from her and the family.
Waking Lions is an engaging novel about the lengths to which we go to evade our responsibilities towards our fellow human beings. We all have the capacity to stand by while others suffer, to blame the victims for failing to fight back (as, disturbingly Eitan and his schoolmates seemed to do on a trip to Auschwitz). While we might all hope that, unlike Eitan, we would never flee the scene of an accident, we’re still complicit in the deaths of the poor and desperate (p92):
each one of them could save the life of a starving African if they contributed only a fraction of their monthly earnings … Food for babies, purified water. Nevertheless, the money remained in the bank. That was where it belonged, and the moral discussion remained around the living-room coffee table, where it belonged … Everyone hits and runs. But he’d been seen. He’d been caught.
The characters are finely drawn, with vivid back stories and intriguing foibles. Sirkit is a particularly complex character, hardened by a harsh life, and the interplay of hate and attraction between her and Eitan is skilfully realised. Although I felt the author lingered a little too long in their thoughts, and drew our attention a little too strongly to the inaccuracies of their assumptions about each other (with lots of bracketed authorial asides which I didn’t particularly relish), and I had mixed feelings about the segue into the thriller genre with the climax around drug trafficking, I found this a cleverly-plotted novel with a strong moral and highly contemporary sociopolitical theme. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Waking Lions is the author’s second novel and published by Pushkin press who provided my review copy.
After a disastrous disagreement with his mentor, Eitan Green, a promising neurosurgeon, has relocated with his wife and two young sons from Tel Aviv to the culturally and geologically dusty city of Beersheba. One night, instead of going home after an exhausting shift at the hospital, he takes his SUV for a drive in the desert. He’s admiring the moon in a remote area when he knocks someone down. Seeing that the man, a migrant from Eritrea, although not yet dead, is beyond help, Eitan drives off.
He is still battling his guilt when, the following day, the victim’s widow comes knocking at his door. There’s a price for Sirkit’s silence, to be paid not in money, but in sleepless nights running a makeshift hospital for illegal immigrants, which will risk his health, his marriage, his official job and, eventually, his life. Meanwhile, his wife, Liat, the police inspector tasked with investigating the hit-and-run case, finds him increasingly alienated from her and the family.
Waking Lions is an engaging novel about the lengths to which we go to evade our responsibilities towards our fellow human beings. We all have the capacity to stand by while others suffer, to blame the victims for failing to fight back (as, disturbingly Eitan and his schoolmates seemed to do on a trip to Auschwitz). While we might all hope that, unlike Eitan, we would never flee the scene of an accident, we’re still complicit in the deaths of the poor and desperate (p92):
each one of them could save the life of a starving African if they contributed only a fraction of their monthly earnings … Food for babies, purified water. Nevertheless, the money remained in the bank. That was where it belonged, and the moral discussion remained around the living-room coffee table, where it belonged … Everyone hits and runs. But he’d been seen. He’d been caught.
The characters are finely drawn, with vivid back stories and intriguing foibles. Sirkit is a particularly complex character, hardened by a harsh life, and the interplay of hate and attraction between her and Eitan is skilfully realised. Although I felt the author lingered a little too long in their thoughts, and drew our attention a little too strongly to the inaccuracies of their assumptions about each other (with lots of bracketed authorial asides which I didn’t particularly relish), and I had mixed feelings about the segue into the thriller genre with the climax around drug trafficking, I found this a cleverly-plotted novel with a strong moral and highly contemporary sociopolitical theme. Translated by Sondra Silverston, Waking Lions is the author’s second novel and published by Pushkin press who provided my review copy.
Two sisters return to their grandfather’s house in the village of Tierra de Chá in Galicia which they left in 1936 as children. At first they keep to themselves, quickly establishing a routine of taking the cow up the hill to pasture, but eventually joining in with their neighbours in the festival. Saladina, the “ugly one” gets new teeth from Mr Tenderlove, having lost her own through eating bread baked with stones during the Civil War. Dolores travels to the Catalonian coast to act in a movie as a body double for Ava Gardner. There’s a secret to keep regarding why they returned to the village and what happened to the man Dolores was foolish enough to marry. And there’s also a mystery regarding their long-dead grandfather’s project to buy up the neighbours’ brains.
I wish I could say I’d enjoyed this more, but I found the prose flat and the story elusive. If, as I assume, it was meant as a comedy, I must confess I never once laughed. While I was reminded of The Looking Glass Sisters, for the love and hate between the sisters, The Museum of Things Left Behind for small-town culture, and The Story of My Teeth, for the teeth, I couldn’t find in The Winterlings any of the pleasure I’d found in those. I hadn’t known about the Basque children evacuated to England during the Civil War, as Saladina and Dolores were, but the novel makes only a passing mention of this.
The Winterlings is translated from the Spanish by Samuel Rutter. Thanks to Scribe for my review copy. Fortunately I enjoyed another novel they published in the same week, The Summer That Melted Everything, much more.
I wish I could say I’d enjoyed this more, but I found the prose flat and the story elusive. If, as I assume, it was meant as a comedy, I must confess I never once laughed. While I was reminded of The Looking Glass Sisters, for the love and hate between the sisters, The Museum of Things Left Behind for small-town culture, and The Story of My Teeth, for the teeth, I couldn’t find in The Winterlings any of the pleasure I’d found in those. I hadn’t known about the Basque children evacuated to England during the Civil War, as Saladina and Dolores were, but the novel makes only a passing mention of this.
The Winterlings is translated from the Spanish by Samuel Rutter. Thanks to Scribe for my review copy. Fortunately I enjoyed another novel they published in the same week, The Summer That Melted Everything, much more.
Cousins Roland and Edgar have grown up together, although they’ve never seen eye to eye. But they find their paths crossing as they hide out in the forest of their native Estonia, on the run from the Red Army. When the Nazis drive out the Communists, Roland goes deeper into hiding, mourning the mysterious death of his fiancee, Rosalie. Edgar reinvents himself with a new name, and post in the new regime, while his wife, Juudit, finds the love that Edgar has never been able to give her in the arms of Helmuth, an officer in the German army. Roland, however, preying on her past friendship with Rosalie, thinks she can be of use to him in helping members of the resistance escape to safety …
(Click on the image to read the full review of this Finnish translation from Atlantic books.)
(Click on the image to read the full review of this Finnish translation from Atlantic books.)
At four and a half, the child is blissfully content in the Paris apartment she shares with her mother. The war means little to her and, while her grandmother disapproves of her freedom to do as she likes, her mother always takes her side. The only cloud in her blue-sky world is the lie told by the two older women when they insisted the baby sister she’d seen presented to her mother in a Normandy hospital was a figment of her imagination. Now the war is coming to an end and the father she’s never met will be returning home. The child is unable to share her mother’s excitement. She meets him first on a hospital ward but, all too quickly, this stranger has taken over the apartment. His standards are exacting, his rage when they are not met terrifying …
(Click on the image to read the full review of this French novel from Peirine Press.)
(Click on the image to read the full review of this French novel from Peirine Press.)
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