Tag: literature in translation

#BlogTour #BookReview The Jeweller by Caryl Lewis @Honno

whatcathyreadnext3 Comments

The_Jeweller_Blog_Tour_Poster

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Jeweller by Caryl Lewis, translated from the Welsh by Gwen Davies. My thanks to Julia Forster for inviting me to take part in the tour and to Honno Press for my advance review copy.

the jeweller coverAbout the Book

Mari supplements her modest trade as a market stall holder with the wares she acquires from clearing the houses of the dead. She lives alone in a tiny cottage by the shore, apart from a monkey that she keeps in a cage, surrounding herself with the lives of others, combing through letters she has gleaned, putting up photographs of strangers on her small mantelpiece.

But Mari is looking for something beyond saleable goods for her stall.  As she works on cutting a perfect emerald, she inches closer to a discovery that will transform her life and throw her relationships with old friends into relief. To move forward she must shed her life of things past and start again. How she does so is both surprising and shocking…

Praise for The Jeweller

A moving, quirky, and gorgeously written meditation on the haunting afterlife of the objects we leave behind. There is a lapidary beauty hidden in almost every sentence.” Tristan Hughes

Format: Paperback, ebook (208 pp)         Publisher: Honno Press
Publication date: 19th September 2019 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk | Hive (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Jeweller on Goodreads

My Review

Mari lives alone in a remote cottage by the sea with only her cat and a rather needy and temperamental pet monkey for company.   The latter has the same love of trinkets as Mari. The ‘clutter’ that fills the cottage is the vintage clothing and jewellery gleaned from house clearances or bought at auction that Mari sells on her market stall, along with the letters and photographs she obsessively collects containing the stories of other people’s lives.

From the beginning, I was struck by the author’s imaginative and descriptive writing about landscape and nature, skilfully preserved in Gwen Davies’ translation.

‘The sea was breathing in the distance, dark against the growing light, and seagulls were being flung across the air like litter.’

‘Catkins of pussy willow and hazel caught the light like earrings: grey-silver droplets and knuckles of pale gold that twisted on an updraught.’

I particularly liked the way that inanimate objects become animate in Mari’s eyes. So a beech tree is described as ‘flirting its little fans of beaten neon-green at her’ or freshly laundered vintage clothes destined for her stall are ‘alive on the line as though their new owners were dancing in them right now‘.  Mari even sees the jewels she collects and works with as having a life and personality of their own. At one point, she refers to some jewels as ‘giving her a hard time’.

Unfolding over the course of a year, the reader witnesses Mari’s physical and mental struggles, especially when the future of the market where she has her stall is placed in jeopardy. As summer turns to stormy autumn, things grow darker, events from earlier in Mari’s life are revealed and the reader begins to understand the complex nature of her past relationships.  There is closure of a sort but also a sense of history repeating itself.

The Jeweller is a slim novel but beautifully written.  It’s a book which packs a lot into a small space.

In three words: Lyrical, evocative, intense

Try something similar: The Keeper of Lost Things by Ruth Hogan

Follow my blog via Bloglovin

Caryl_Lewis_Photo_Credit_Keith_MorrisAbout the Author

Caryl Lewis has published eleven Welsh-language books for adults, three novels for young adults and thirteen children’s books. Her novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (Y Lolfa, 2004), won Wales Book of the Year in 2005. Caryl wrote the script for a film based on Martha, Jac a Sianco, which won the Atlantis Prize at the 2009 Moondance Festival. Her television credits include adapting Welsh-language scripts for the acclaimed crime series Y Gwyll / Hinterland. (Photo credit: Keith Morris)

GWEN Davies Credit Jessica RabyAbout the Translator

Gwen Davies grew up in a Welsh-speaking family in West Yorkshire. She has translated into English the Welsh-language novels of Caryl Lewis, published as Martha, Jack and Shanco (Parthian, 2007) and The Jeweller and is co-translator, with the author, of Robin Llywelyn’s novel, published as White Star by Parthian in 2003. She is the editor of Sing, Sorrow, Sorrow: Dark and Chilling Tales (Seren, 2010). Gwen has edited the literary journal, New Welsh Review, since 2011. She lives in Aberystwyth with her family. (Photo credit: Jessica Raby)

Blog Tour/Book Review: The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan

whatcathyreadnext

I’m delighted to be hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for The Storyteller by Pierre Jarawan, which was published on 4th April 2019 by World Editions, in a new translation by Rachel McNicholl and Sinéad Crowe.  You can read my review below.

Thanks to Julia at Ruth Killick Publicity for inviting me to participate in the tour and to World Editions for my advance review copy of The Storyteller.  The blog tour kicked off yesterday with an extract from the book hosted by Liz Loves Books.

Watch Pierre Jarawan talking about the book here.

The_Storyteller_CoverAbout the Book

Samir leaves the safety and comfort of his family’s adopted home in Germany for volatile Beirut in an attempt to find his missing father. His only clues are an old photo and the bedtime stories his father used to tell him.

The Storyteller follows Samir’s search for Brahim, the father whose heart was always yearning for his homeland, Lebanon. In this moving and gripping novel about family secrets, love, and friendship, Pierre Jarawan does for Lebanon what Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan. He pulls away the curtain of grim facts and figures to reveal the intimate story of an exiled family torn apart by civil war and guilt. In this rich and skilful account, Jarawan proves that he too is a masterful storyteller

Format: Paperback, ebook (468 pp.)    Publisher: World Editions
Published: 4th April 2019   Genre: Literary Fiction, Translated Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Waterstones | Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Storyteller on Goodreads

My Review

Opening with a dramatic and intriguing prologue, the book is structured in three parts, moving between Lebanon and Germany over a period of more than thirty years.   In the first part, the reader experiences firsthand the close relationship between Samir and his father, a man who charmed everyone he met by never forgetting a name, being the life and soul of any party and, most importantly, telling Samir the most wonderful bedtime stories.  Along the way, we learn of the family’s flight from war-torn Beirut to Germany in the 1980s along with many other refugees.

However, one night everything changes seemingly as a result of something as simple as a photograph.  It leads to Samir’s father’s disappearance, an event which will shape the course of Samir’s life.   The dramatic impact of this on young Samir, his mother and sister, Alina, is convincingly conveyed.  Eventually, Samir travels to Beirut in search of his father because it seems to be the only way he can move on in his life and settle down to a career and relationship. What he learns will involve long-buried secrets, the complex political history of Lebanon (there’s a useful short history at the end of the book) and explore questions of national identity.  And Samir comes to realise that perhaps his father’s imaginative and colourful stories hid the truth all along if he’d only known it.

The theme of storytelling pervades the book, whether that’s something as innocent as bedtime stories or the thrill of telling a story to an appreciative audience.  Or the stories that a photograph can reveal, the contested stories a nation tells about itself or the stories of the hidden that don’t get told.

I loved the descriptive writing in the book, skilfully preserved by translators, Rachel McNicholl and Sinéad Crowe.  Like this about young Samir’s new home: ‘The smell of fresh paint drifted like a cheerful tune through the rooms.’  The book contains fascinating information about Lebanon: its culture, food, complex politics, turbulent recent history and, of course, the famed cedars of Lebanon.  In fact, you could say that, at its heart, The Storyteller is a love letter to Lebanon as much as a story about a young man’s search for the truth about his father.  On either count, The Storyteller is a fascinating, intriguing and beautifully written book that I can highly recommend.

I received an advance review copy courtesy of publishers, World Editions.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

In three words: Compelling, multi-layered, thought-provoking

Try something similar…The Glass Diplomat by S.R. Wilsher (read my review here)

Pierre_Jarawan_Author_PicAbout the Author

Pierre Jarawan was born in 1985 to a Lebanese father and a German mother and moved to Germany with his family at the age of three. Inspired by his father’s imaginative bedtime stories, he started writing at the age of thirteen. He has won international prizes as a slam poet, and in 2016 was named Literature Star of the Year by the daily newspaper Abendzeitung. Jarawan received a literary scholarship from the City of Munich (the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis) for The Storyteller, which went on to become a bestseller and booksellers’ favourite in Germany and the Netherlands. (Photo credit: Marvin Ruppert)

Connect with Pierre

Website  ǀ  Twitter  ǀ  Goodreads

Jarawan_Blog_tour_poster_Final