Tag: literary fiction

#BookReview Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks @HutchHeinemann

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Snow CountryAbout the Book

1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick.

1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time.

Format: eARC (368 pages)                     Publisher: Hutchinson
Publication date: 2nd September 2021 Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

Although Snow Country is the second book in a planned trilogy – the first of which was Human Traces published in 2005 – it can be read as a standalone.

Opening with a dramatic prologue that some readers may find too graphic for their taste, the book explores some profound psychological and moral issues through events in the lives of its principal characters – Anton Heideck, Lena Fontana and, to a lesser extent, Rudolf Plischke.

The first part of the book featuring Anton Heideck provides a vivid picture of pre-First World War Vienna with its coffee houses, opera houses and concert halls. Unfortunately, most of the delights of the city are out of the reach of young Anton as he tries to scrape a living as a private tutor and journalist. Anton begins an intense relationship with the enigmatic Delphine, a young woman hired as a companion and French tutor to a Viennese family.

As Anton becomes more successful, assignments to Paris and Moscow follow as well as a trip to report on the US-led construction of the Panama Canal. The latter has resonance for citizens of France because of the earlier involvement of Ferdinand de Lesseps, for a time a national hero because of his role in the construction of the Suez Canal. Unfortunately, his attempts to build a sea-level canal across the isthmus of Panama ended in failure with investors in the project losing everything. However, the outbreak of the First World War has momentous consequences for Anton, leaving emotional scars and unanswered questions.

Lena’s story is one of a young girl growing up with few advantages in life, except perhaps that her alcoholic mother has chosen to raise her rather than give her up for adoption like so many of Lena’s half-sisters and brothers, the result of her mother’s brief couplings with various men. Even learning the identity of her father leaves Lena feeling abandoned and her instinctive self-expression and unconventional nature sets her apart from others. Gradually she transforms herself from illiterate school girl to independent young woman although not without moments of desperation and emotional disappointment along the way, including a relationship with idealistic young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke.

Although the book seems to be at least two different stories with little connection between them, chance – or perhaps, fate – sees Anton, Lena and Rudolf arrive at the sanatorium, Schloss Seeblick. Lena is employed there as a servant, and Anton and Rudolf are there for professional reasons. Lena is the connection between the two men, although they are unaware of this. For Lena and Rudolf their meeting is an opportunity to resolve some unfinished business between them.

Initially Anton’s interest in the sanatorium is purely professional, having been commissioned to write an article about it. He learns more about the sanatorium and the philosophy behind its treatments through his conversations with head therapist Martha Midwinter. These include discussions about the theories of Freud and others, a lot of which I’ll freely admit went over my head. Whilst studying the papers in the sanatorium’s archives for his article, Anton comes across a letter whose contents resonate with him: ‘The human mind has evolved in a way that makes it unable to deal with the pain of its own existence. No other creature is like this.’ Anton begins to wonder if Schloss Seeblick might offer him a way to resolve his own mental torment, caused by a combination of the unresolved issues in his personal life and his experiences as a soldier in the First World War. Through his subsequent sessions with Martha, we begin to learn more about Anton’s wartime experiences and understand their lasting impact on him, including what we would today recognize as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The observation that ‘life is full of missed connections, of bad timing’ is an apt description of the book and I enjoyed Snow Country, especially Lena’s story, although I was left with the feeling that I wasn’t quite clever enough to appreciate everything the author was seeking to explore in the book. However, I guess it’s no bad thing for a book to leave you with the sense there’s more to the world, and to other people, than you think you know.

My thanks to Hutchinson for my advance review copy via NetGalley. Sebastian Faulks will be appearing at Henley Literary Festival on 2nd October to talk about Snow Country. The event is also being live-streamed and tickets are still available at the time of writing.

In three words: Profound, complex, moving

Try something similar: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker or The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon

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Sebastian FaulksAbout the Author

Sebastian Faulks was born in 1953, and grew up in Newbury, the son of a judge and a repertory actress. He attended Wellington College and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, although he didn’t enjoy attending either institution. Cambridge in the 70s was still quite male-dominated, and he says that you had to cycle about 5 miles to meet a girl. He was the first literary editor of The Independent, and then went on to become deputy editor of The Sunday Independent. Sebastian Faulks was awarded the CBE in 2002. He and his family live in London. (Photo/bio credit: Goodreads author page)

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#BookReview Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price @WorldEdBooks

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Planet of Clay 2About the Book

Rima is a young girl in war-torn Damascus. Her feet seem to work independently, she says. Is this an affliction? Or is she just an inquisitive, adventurous young child? Her exhausted mother keeps her tied with a rope around her wrist to stop her wandering off.

As a young girl, Rima also loses the ability to speak, although she can recite sutras of Qur’an. And she can use her voice to scream – which, tragically, happens more as the story progresses.

Hidden in the library of the school where her mother works as a cleaner, she finds refuge in a fantasy world full of coloured crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur’an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits.

Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she’s crazy, but she is no fool – the madness is in the battered city around her. One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta – where, between bombings, she writes her story.

In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek offers a surreal depiction of the horrors taking place in Syria, in vivid and poetic language and with a sharp eye for detail and beauty.

Format: Paperback (320 pages)        Publisher: World Editions
Publication date: 26th August 2021 Genre: Literature in Translation, Literary Fiction

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My Review

I don’t think Planet of Clay is a book I would have picked up had it not been for Ruth Killick and World Editions kindly sending me an advance review copy.  How glad I am that they did because reading this book was to enter a strange, unsettling world and meet an unforgettable character.

Translated from Arabic by Leri Price, Planet of Clay‘s narrator, Rima, recounts her story in a non-linear fashion, switching back and forth in time between different memories of events she has witnessed.  The stories seem to pour out of her, with many left unfinished as she takes up another story, along with frequent promises that she will return at some point to complete the earlier stories.  As she admits, ‘I’m writing without restraint and without sequence’. This takes some getting used to but I found it best to go with the flow and see where Rima took me.

Through Rima’s eyes the reader experiences the horror of daily life in war-torn Damascus: checkpoints, armed militia and tanks on the street, aeroplanes flying overhead and the sound of bombs falling across the city. ‘We wait, every day, for the bombs to fall on us.’ At one point, she muses, ‘I don’t understand how a giant plane can come and kill small, weak people in such quantities.’ Quite.  Rima witnesses random acts of violence, one of which results in the death of her mother, just one of the people who disappears from Rima’s life. Worse is to come as parts of the city are subjected to attack from lethal weapons. In the words of Rima, ‘the planes and the sky rained smells in August‘.  Rima herself suffers the after-effects of this attack.

Rima’s view of the world is different from those around her, sensed as colours rather than words, and expressed through drawings. For her, ‘every adjective in language is like a painting‘. The writing has moments of intense beauty with some memorable turns of phrase, often influenced by Rima’s beloved The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. ‘Love is a group of small planets with long thin arms dancing then lacing together into a knot of dazzling light.’

Before long, Rima’s existence has contracted to a tiny cellar room which she cannot leave. She perceives her life as a series of planets, and retreats in her mind to the most secret of them, one which is ‘hard to invade’ and cannot disappear until she disappears too. And as for the book’s title?  As Rima observes, ‘We are toys made out of clay, small toys, quick to break and crumble’.

Towards the end of the book Rima observes, ‘You are starting to know my theory now, about circular stories with intersecting centres which are only completed by retelling and new details’.  The stories Rima tells are heartbreaking and paint a unique picture of a world gone mad. I’m sure I won’t be the only reader to see parallels with the terrible events taking place in Afghanistan.

In three words: Mesmerising, imaginative, moving

Try something similar: The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan

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Samar YazbekAbout the Author

Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novels include Cinnamon (2012) and Planet of Clay (2021). Her accounts of the Syrian conflict include A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (2012) and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015). Yazbek’s work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards – notably, the French Best Foreign Book Award, the PEN-Oxfam Novib, PEN Tucholsky, and PEN Pinter awards.

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About the Translator

Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. Price’s translation of Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature (US) and winner of the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Her translation of Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was shortlisted for the ALTA National Translation Award. Price’s other recent translations include Sarab by award-winning writer Raja Alem.