The Promise by Damon Galgut

I was happy to see a Europa Editions book selected for the Booker prize: The Promise by Damon Galgut. If you follow book news, you know this wasn’t the first time Galgut was nominated. It’s the first of his novels that I have read. The Booker judges call The Promise “a strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself that can best be summed up in the question: does true justice exist in this world?” If that’s the driving question of this novel I guess the answer is not clear cut. It’s not a book that ties up all the loose threads by the end. Characters who act in ways that are just and those who don’t both suffer in this book. But the two characters who seem to care for others and each other more than themselves are not ruined by suffering and loss in the way that the self-centered, immoral, uncaring characters are, which could be described as a kind of justice, perhaps?

The story begins in 1986, on the day Amor Swart’s mother dies. Her unkind aunt and uncle pick her up from boarding school and take her home to the family farm outside of Pretoria, South Africa. Her newly widowed father promised her mother, in Amor’s hearing, that he would give the family’s maid, a black woman named Salome, the house she lives in. Amor is still enough of a child at thirteen to believe that adults’ promises will be kept. But her father, deeply influenced by the local evangelical preacher and by the apartheid system he has benefitted from all his life, has no intention of keeping the promise. Which would have been a gift in name only in 1986 anyway, as Salome wouldn’t have legally owned the house even if it was given to her.

Amor’s eldest sibling, her brother Anton, is serving in the army to protect white South Africa from the unrest of apartheid’s last years. He comes home for their mother’s funeral, the first of four Swart family funerals in the book. He’s both a perpetrator and, to a much lesser extent, a victim of violence. But as the book unfolds it becomes clear that Anton actually begins to lose his life from the moment he takes another’s. Despite (or maybe because of) his confused thoughts about his recent violent incidents, Anton goads his father about the promise Amor overheard. The third sibling, Astrid, is only on the periphery of the conflict at the time of their mother’s funeral, but we learn enough to see she is self-absorbed and hungry for a more glamorous life.

From this beginning, the novel threads its way through the siblings’ adult lives. In fact I’m realizing Amor gets her first period at her mother’s funeral at the beginning of the book and is experiencing menopause at the end. Key moments in South African history — Mandela’s presidency, the 1995 rugby World Cup, the AIDS epidemic, the Mbeki and Zuma presidencies, the recent infrastructure issues and water shortages — are the backdrop to the Swart family’s dramatic unraveling. The novel’s structure includes patterns and chronology (the historical timeline, the family funerals) but the narration is unusual and a little less clear. The narrator is sometimes inside characters’ minds and sometimes observing. Likewise, the narrator sometimes seems to be reliably describing events and is sometimes clearly imagining them. For example, towards the end of the book, when Amor is living in Cape Town, we read: “She has a cat curled up on her lap. No, she doesn’t, there is no cat. But allow her a couple of plants at least, growing greenly in their tins on the windowsill.” Which makes it hard to know: what has been real and what has been imagined? You might think you know, but do you?

The story is tragic but the majority of the characters are pretty hard to feel badly for. The ones that do evoke some empathy appear less frequently, away from the main action, and Galgut doesn’t reveal much about them. All in all a unique read, one I’m still thinking through today after finishing the book last night.

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Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin

It’s been some time since I read a Europa Edition novel, but if you go back through the years of posts here on bookconscious you’ll find that I have read many titles from this wonderful publisher. Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin, translated by Hildegarde Serle, reminded me why. Europa consistently brings interesting voices to print, and good reads.

Fresh Water for Flowers is the story of Violette, a woman who grew up in foster homes and marries at 18, has a daughter, and soon realizes that she is going to have to support her family while her husband chases other women. They work (well, she works, Phillipe fools around) at a “level crossing” — she goes out multiple times, day and night, to lower the barrier so cars won’t cross train tracks when the train goes by. Her little daughter waves to all the people on the trains.

A series of events leads Violette to move with Phillipe to another part of France, to become cemetery caretakers. Again, Violette does all the work. She takes the job after the previous caretaker, Sasha, has taught her everything he knows about gardening, and entrusts her with tending his extensive garden and caring for the people who work in and visit the cemetery. One day, a detective named Julien comes and tells her he needs to know about a man buried in the cemetery, a prominent lawyer named Gabriel, because Julien’s mother Irène has left instructions that her ashes are to be interred with Gabriel’s.

Julien reads about the man’s funeral in Violette’s records, and later returns with Irène’s journal. It becomes clear that Julien not only wants to lay his mother to rest, but also to help Violette solve some mysteries that can help her move on in life — with him. I’m trying not to give away any of the intriguing plot. It’s a lovely book, full of sensual details like the kinds of scent and clothing the different characters wear, the types of flowers, vegetables and herbs Violette grows, wonderful descriptions of food, and many musical references. There are also many details about the places the characters inhabit. It’s vivid and evocative.

It’s also very emotional — there are some relationships that are sad and harsh and hurtful, and there are beautiful friendships and deep kindnesses. At the cemetery, Violette’s circle of coworkers become a family of sorts for her. I loved the descriptions of meals in her kitchen or garden, conversation flowing, and the many cats and a dog the gravediggers and Violette have taken in swishing around the humans. I could see many scenes in my mind and read somewhere that there is already a deal in the works to adapt the book to television.

One of the intriguing things about Fresh Water for Flowers are the chapter epigraphs — every one a little poem of sorts, like this one: “November is eternal, life is almost beautiful, memories are dead ends that we just keep turning over.” Perrin uses a mixture of dialogue, narrative, and journal entries to unspool her story. In the end, I felt I didn’t want the book to end, as Violette says: “I close Irène’s journal with a heavy heart. The way one closes a novel one has fallen in love with. A novel that’s a friend from whom it’s hard to part, because one wants it close by, in arm’s reach.”

A terrific escape.

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Red Joan by Jennie Rooney

I wasn’t able to see the film version of Red Joan while it was playing at my local indie theater, so when I went to Los Angeles I downloaded the Europa Editions novel by Jennie Rooney. I enjoyed it, although the ending didn’t do much for me. Still, a quick skim of the film reviews indicates the book was better, although Judi Dench gets good reviews for her part as the main character.

Joan is in her 80s, taking ballroom dancing and watercolor classes and enjoying living in England near her son and his family after many years in Australia. In the first few pages of the book, she reads an old friend’s obituary and MI5 agents come to her door to take her away for questioning — not in his death, precisely, but in relation to new evidence they have from a Soviet defector that Joan and her friend were spies.

Joan’s thoughts make it pretty clear — as does the title — that she was. Rooney uses the questioning, which takes place over a few days, as the mechanism for going back to Joan’s youth, her days as a physics student at Cambridge in the late 1930s, and her romance with Leo, a Russian emigre, and friendship with Leo’s cousin, Sonya. The cousins take Joan to communist meetings, which she points out to her interrogators was pretty common in those days; lots of intellectuals in Europe admired, at the very least, theoretical communism, and Stalin’s crimes were not yet fully understood. She never joins the party, even though Leo calls her his “little comrade.” The war comes, Joan decides to do her part, and Leo gets her a job at a metals lab in Cambridge, where she meets Max, the lab director, and an unhappily married man.

As Joan recalls her life, prompted by documents shown to her by the MI5 agents, her son, Nick, who conveniently happens to be a lawyer, finds out she’s a suspect and rushes to help her. As it dawns on him that she really did pass secrets from Britain’s nuclear program he is incensed. This conflict allows Rooney to slowly spin out the story of Joan’s loves and friendships, the way she was manipulated, and the choices she made. I appreciated that she is presented as neither purely a victim nor purely a traitor. For Joan, whose father lost a limb in WWI, and who lived through WWII, nuclear deterrence means peace, while for Nick, it is madness. While much has been made of the fact that Rooney credits a news story about an 87 year old English woman revealed to have been a Soviet spy as inspiration, she says in the author’s note that there is little else her character and the “granny spy” share and that she was also inspired by other historical events and people.

While as I said the ending wasn’t my favorite, overall this was an interesting read. I enjoy historical fiction and I felt like Rooney hit all the right notes. The ideas the characters grapple with are more nuanced than the usual good versus evil that often appears in books set in or after WWII. There is much for a book group to discuss, starting with the fact that Joan acts according to her values, believing that she is “sharing” secrets, not stealing them. I was intrigued enough to want to read late over the weekend to find out what happened.

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The Hazards of Good Fortune by Seth Greenland

After wasting two evenings on a book I could not get into (One Part Woman — unlikeable characters, glacial plot), I turned to another Europa Editions book: The Hazards of Good Fortune by Seth Greenland. It’s a page turner, unlike many of Europa’s titles. In fact, last night I put my iPad down and tried to go to sleep and then tossed and turned for a long time, wondering what was going to happen and why the main character couldn’t see what was happening.

This book has a LOT of moving parts. It’s mainly the story of Jay Gladstone, a very wealthy real estate magnate and NBA owner, and how his life — and all his good fortune — falls apart. But woven into Gladstone’s story are many smaller stories, casting a bright light on a number of unsavory aspects of modern American society.

There’s an ambitious DA who wants to run for governor and makes decisions on two cases of white men killing black men based only on her electoral calculations, and not on justice. There is a ridiculous, expensive liberal arts college where people create their own majors and children play at being revolutionaries — until it isn’t play anymore. There is media that is out only for the sound of its own highly amplified voice, regardless of whether the stories it reports are true in any way. There are callous, spoiled rich wives, conniving family members, a hacker for hire, a radicalized ex-con Imam, overpaid athletes and the entourages they support. There is racism, anti-semitism, and all the other tensions and biases our culture holds around gender, sexual preference, class, power and its lack.

Jay Gladstone is a pleasingly complicated character, but he’s a man who truly tries to be good, and for a fair bit of the book I was waiting for him to be vindicated. Yes, he’s a little pompous, and a little too sure of his own position in life, and he blunders around making things worse, but it seems like his being brought low might have caused a transformation. Readers, however, don’t get to see what happens when he hits bottom, for reasons I can’t explain without giving too much away. Still, watching him fight to hang onto life as he knows it is a challenge (I found myself telling him to wake up and stop being stubborn), given that his rotten, conceited, dishonorable, selfish cousin seems to get away with his most grievous transgression.

A villain worth despising, a hero who isn’t perfect but makes the reader want to root for him, some terrific supporting characters you’ll love to love and hate. The frothy world of the rich and influential, with enough regular people to draw a contrast. It’s a novel Jane Austen could love — full of references to culture and society and brimming with the vagaries of human nature.  I enjoyed it, even though I thought the end was a little rushed, and a bit of a let down. But overall, a smart, sharp-eyed, entertaining, engrossing story.  Just don’t read it right before bed, or you’ll be mulling over which twists and turns Gladstone should have seen and what he could have done differently until late into the night.

 

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Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet by Amara Lakhous

I read Amara Lakhous’s Clash of Civilizations Over An Elevator In Piazza Vittorio in 2011, when I was first exploring Europa Editions in earnest. So when I saw Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet in Hoopla earlier in the week, I figured, why not? It’s also from Europa Editions. I had planned to possibly digress and try some other books but ended up sticking with my Europa streak. In between, I did try One Part Woman, which is the much discussed novel by a Tamil author, allegedly “charming” but I found the two main characters equally disagreeable and gave it up.

Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet is set in Turin, and the main character, Enzo Laganà, is a “southerner” – a man whose family comes from southern Italy. He is a reporter, but doesn’t seem to like it very much. He’s thirty-seven and showing no sign of settling down with a wife and having kids, so his mother hounds him, employing one of his neighbors and a housekeeper as spies, chiding him to eat what’s in his fridge (she has an inventory), and lamenting his careless life.

Enzo lives in the San Salvario neighborhood, a multiethnic place where he doesn’t feel as much like an outsider. His neighbor, a Nigerian named Joseph, has a little pig named Gino who wears a Juventus scarf. One day Gino ends up in the mosque, causing outrage. Enzo is also friends with the imam, and is well acquainted with an older man who runs an anti-immigrant neighborhood group. and has an old high school friend who is a committed animal rights activist, so he ends up conducting complex negotiations amongst the many parties who want to decide Gino’s future.

Meanwhile, bored at work and busy in Marseilles with a beautiful Finnish woman instead of on his beat in Turin, Enzo invents a story about Albanian and Romanian gangsters having a feud and files it with his paper, to cover the fact that he’s not there to investigate a string of murders. His editor eats up his “Deep Throat” story and Enzo is soon spinning the story further, attracting all kinds of attention, good and bad. As Enzo invents further, he begins to hear from another source, Very Deep Throat, who claims to have the real story of who is behind the murders.

Will Enzo’s mother leave him alone to fritter away his midlife? Will Gino’s happy ending be assured? Will peace be restored in San Salvario and the murders stop? Has Enxo stumbled on a real story while making one up? And what about the beautiful Italian woman who wants him to work on a TV series with her as a result of his newspaper stories?

An amusing novel with serious undertones. Very Deep Throat suggests Enzo interview a sociologist who explains how gentrification helps the mafia control real estate by “infecting” and “cleansing,” ratcheting up crime so people get scared and sell for low prices, and then moving their operations elsewhere and charging bonus prices when hip people want to move into the newly safe areas. His friends are from many cultures, national origins, and legal statuses. But despite the serious topics, Enzo’s story is absurd and that makes this a fun read.

 

 

 

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The Penalty Area by Alain Gillot

I read another Europa Editions book over the weekend, The Penalty Area by Alain Gillot. It was a sweet read, veering near, but not succumbing to, saccharinity. The hero, Vincent, coaches the somewhat promising but mostly uninspired U16 team at a French soccer club. He is a loner, estranged from his mother and sister, Madeleine, because of his dysfunctional upbringing and abusive father. When Madeleine shows up and leaves his nephew, Leo with Vincent while she chases a crazy opportunity to improve her life, Vincent finds the boy strange, but they form a bond. In short order, he discovers that what makes Vincent different is Asperger’s and that it also makes him a brilliant soccer goalie. The different parts of the story aren’t all that challenging and are a little predictable, but the book is still different enough to be appealing and I enjoyed it. Vincent is fumbles with inept relationship skills, is forced to face his past (and inevitably, his sister and mother are as well), struggles to adapt his life to loving people and letting them in. I needed a relatively simple read, and I like soccer. If it sounds like I’m apologizing for liking this book, it’s because I know “heartwarming” has a bad name in literary circles. But I wanted to read about decency and kindness and people who’ve had a hard time finding a little happiness. The book doesn’t have a definitive tied-in-a-bow happy ending, but it ends on a positive note, leaving the reader feeling things will more than likely work out for the characters. I needed that. The Penalty Area is charming, and it’s easy to imagine it being a film. If you need a bookish boost, you can’t go wrong with this story.

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The Golden Age by Joan London

This week I returned to reading Europa Editions (that said, my library got a shipment of new books and it’s possible I won’t stick to E.E. only for the rest of the year). I’ve said before here on bookconscious that one of the pleasures of reading Europa Editions is finding authors who aren’t well known in America, but are in their own countries. Joan London is a good example — she’s an award winning author in Australia, but not as well known here. The Golden Age is her fifth book and third novel, and the first of her works re-published by Europa Editions.

This book holds the memory of some really important 20th century history, for people everywhere, and not just in a particular country. The title is from the name of a rehabilitation home for children in Perth who survived polio but need physical therapy and specialized care before they can return home and go back to school and life. The main characters, Frank and Elsa, are the two oldest children at the Golden Age, on the brink of young adulthood. They form a bond that seems both simple — first love — and extraordinary — who but these two can know what it’s like to live as they do? So in part this novel is a book about the generation that survived polio and lived in its aftermath.

Frank’s parents, Meyer and Ida Gold, are Hungarian Jews, survivors of WWII who had to fight in order to live, and who were resettled in Western Australia. Ida was a classical pianist before the war and still thinks of herself as European. Meyer seems more at ease with himself in the world, aware of his difference, but still able to see the possibilities of their new existence than Ida can. And London shows us, but by bit, how Meyer is stretching away from the past and towards the light and warmth of his new country, imagining a good life, while Ida seems to continue to suffer her new home, accepting her fate but not embracing it. In this way The Golden Age is also about the aftermath of the wars that tore the 20th century apart, the Holocaust, and the postwar migrations that led people to adapt in ways they hadn’t thought possible.

Elsa’s parents are also interesting, although we don’t get to know her father, Jack Briggs, as well as her mother, Margaret. What we learn is that Jack is under the influence of his domineering sister, and that Margaret appears to others as stereotypically feminine (emotional and fragile), but her backbone will carry Elsa into the future she dreams of. Margaret is really representative of womanhood on the cusp of liberation from old roles, old rules. She sees a different future for her daughters, even as she contents herself with keeping house and keeping herself out of the way.

These three themes dominate, but the book is also about other things — Sister Penny, who runs the Golden Age, is another woman on the edge, of old and new ways, of choices previously unknown to women. She is also “truly good” as Meyer thinks of her. But she doesn’t wear this goodness comfortably. She is struggling to be true to herself and still adhere to outside expectations. So that’s another idea in this novel. Also the transformative powers of both nature — which seems to nourish certain characters — and art, which Ida still longs for even if it’s not the same in her new life, and which leads Frank into his own future, when he meets a young man just a little older than he is who introduces him to poetry.

And the writing is a delight. Here’s a passage, late in the book, where Meyer has pulled his drinks truck over near the beach, where Sister Penny has been spending a day off:

“‘Now I know why the ocean was ir-res-istible today,’ he called, walking towards her along the kerb, his hands turned up as if a message had come down from the heavens, almost hating his European charm. The winter sun suddenly emerged from behind a bank of cloud, a white brilliance that engulfed them, so blinding it was almost comical. Using their hands as visors they loomed, dreamlike, squinting at each other. Hard to know if their mouths were stretched into a smile or a grimace.”

I loved this book and I look forward to other Joan London books coming out here. The Golden Age is a good read, a book that immersed me in a different place, different lives, and yet reminded me of familiar feelings. There are so many different aspects of the story to discuss, it would be a terrific book club selection.

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The Flight of the Maidens by Jane Gardam

My experiment with reading only (or at least mainly) Europa Editions books til the end of the year might continue — after the last book I wasn’t so sure — because The Flight of the Maidens was the kind of terrific read I hoped for. Of course, I cheated because I knew if Jane Gardam wrote it, I’d love it. This is another book Gardam published quite some time ago but reissued. It’s set in 1946 and tells the story of the summer before three young women head to college — all having won scholarships, all set to leave their small Yorkshire town for a world they know little about, mainly because of the war.

Una Vane is the daughter of a widow who opened a hair salon in the house when she had to manage on her own. Una is off to Cambridge to study physics, but she wants to spend her summer trying to understand her relationship with Ray, who grew up in a poorer part of town and is now a railroad man dabbling in socialist politics. Hetty Fallows is off to a guesthouse in the Lakes District to try to read everything she thinks she hasn’t read before she goes off to college in London. Her father, a gentleman before WWI left him shocked, is a gravedigger and her mother is overbearing and flirts with both the vicar and Hetty’s first boyfriend. And Liselotte Klein, who grew up the foster child of Quakers, spends the summer before she starts at Cambridge piecing together her identity. She can’t recall much about Hamburg, and she knows nothing of how her Jewish family fared and whether any of the rest of them got out. She lands with a mysterious elderly couple in London and then with a distant aunt on the California coast, trying to understand her past so she can decide on her future.

The three friends — Una and Hetty since childhood, Liselotte since they all began to apply themselves to getting into college — go through the pangs of leaving school and starting adult life, along with the challenges of adapting to the postwar world.They have very different experiences but are all in flight, as Gardam imagines. As they struggle to reconcile what they know with what’s in the world and with the hopes they have for themselves and others have for them, the three girls teeter on the edge of womanhood with all the people they know rallying around them to one extent or another. The presence of these people, both dear to them and maddening, provides insights into all kinds of detail about England in the 1940s.

Gardam’s ability to bring people so fully to life, in such vivid detail, never fails to delight. Such vivid people and dialogue — more than many of her books, I could imagine this as a film. I hope it becomes one. Anyway, a terrific read about the end of childhood, the beginning of growing up, the challenge of recovering from war for those in it and near it, the carrying on so many people do when their lives aren’t full of great achievements but they hope their children’s will be. I’m sad that I seem to be all caught up on Gardam’s reissues now.

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70% Acrylic, 30% Wool by Viola Di Grado

I checked out the eBook version of 70% Acrylic, 30% Wool  late Saturday night, having finished a previous Europa Editions book on Hoopla. The blurb sounded good — an award winner and nominee,  translated from Italian. The main character meets a boy who teaches her Chinese ideograms, and “Camelia learns to see the world differently and, in it, a chance for renewal.” “Bittersweet and funny at times, heartbreaking at others . . . .”

My take? Dreadful. If I wanted to read about hopelessness and unhappiness, I’d read the news. Sure, there was some magical realism (it’s December for months, for example), and tragedy can, potentially, be transformative. But this book never transcended despair, and I found the unreliable time/date distracting (in a “look at me, I’m doing strange things with my narrative” manner) and the characters unlikeable and even uninteresting. I couldn’t understand the point of many of Camelia’s actions, it’s extremely unbelievable that a family, even an immigrant family, could elude the notice of social services in a place like Leeds if they were suffering to the extent that she and her mother are throughout this book, and Wen, the love interest, is two dimensional.

I don’t usually give negative reviews, but here it is: unless you like despair and pointlessness, don’t read this book.

 

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Faith Fox by Jane Gardam

Longtime bookconscious followers will know I am a big Jane Gardam fan. I was browsing on Hoopla and realized they have a large selection of Europa Editions, including Gardam’s Faith Fox, which I hadn’t even heard about. I did the Europa challenge a couple of times, reading a certain target number of books from that publisher, and I really don’t think I ever disliked a Europa Editions book. But once I was working in an academic library, I didn’t get in to my public library all that often, and so ended up reading a lot of other things. I’m very glad to have found this trove of Europa titles easily accessible on my iPad. I still don’t love eBook reading, but I saw a number of books I want to read, so I may be eReading for a bit.

Faith Fox, like many of the Europa Editions Jane Gardam books, was published in England many years ago. It’s the story of a baby whose mother died in childbirth, and what happens to the people in her family and their friends. We’re introduced to several of them — Faith’s mother’s circle, from the South of England, and her father’s family, in the North. Faith’s father, a doctor in the South, takes the baby to his brother Jack’s farm and retreat center, the Priory, where Jack takes in various people — former inmates, Tibetan refugees, etc. — and now his tiny niece. Jack is the hub to the rest of the characters’ spokes, an Anglican priest whose “gentleness, his innocence, and his loving looks” reveal what several characters believe is his holiness. Others think he’s daft. At any rate, Jack is the one through whom all the other characters are connected.

Gardam as always examines society from many angles in this brief story, from family relationships and the meaning and manifestation of faith to the cultural differences between northern and southern England, the impact of education, the different ways people manage grief, and how people who are different than the cultural norms get by. One of the things I love about Gardam’s writing is that she writes about life unvarnished, and doesn’t shy away from the tragedies and traumas, but also doesn’t dwell in them. People get on, one way or another, as they do in the world. Her stories almost always offer some hope for humanity, which I appreciate. And she is really good at inhabiting so many different kinds of characters, male and female, old and young, well off or not.

This was a delightful read, and I’m looking forward to some more Europa Editions!

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