Tag: literature in translation

#BookReview House of Beauty by Melba Escobar, translated by Elizabeth Bryer

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House of BeautyAbout the Book

House of Beauty is a high-end salon in Bogotá’s exclusive Zona Rosa area, and Karen is one of its best beauticians. One rainy afternoon a teenage girl turns up for a treatment, dressed in her school uniform and smelling of alcohol. The very next day, the girl is found dead.

Karen was the last person to see the girl alive, so the girl’s mother is desperate to find out what Karen knows. Most important of all: who was her daughter going to meet that night?

Format: Paperback (247 pages)     Publisher: 4th Estate
Publication date: 7th March 2019 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literature in Translation, Crime

Find House of Beauty on Goodreads

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Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

Told from multiple points of view, initially I found it hard to distinguish between the different narrators, especially Lucia and her friend Claire, although it helped that Claire’s sections are written in the first person, whilst the others are in the third person. The story also skips forwards and backwards in time meaning, although billed as a crime novel, it’s not long before it becomes less of a ‘whodunnit’ but more a ‘will they get away with it?’

The House of Beauty of the book’s title not only provides a connection between many of the  characters but is also a place of work for beauticians like Karen and a place of indulgence.  ‘House of Beauty takes me in, I’m submerged in the silence and the expensive perfumes, the rosewater, oils and shampoo.’ In the case of Claire, the intimate services performed there are a kind of substitute for the affection that is lacking in her private life. It’s also an almost exclusively female environment, causing one of the male characters to refer to it as ‘that place, off limits to men, where there was room for all kinds of conspiracies and secrets’.

If it’s secrets and conspiracies you’re after, there’s no shortage of them amongst the male characters and there’s certainly little beauty. Take your pick from a rapist, a drug addict, a corrupt politician, a dodgy taxi driver, and any number of unfaithful husbands. The only male characters who display any integrity are Cojack, the private investigator hired by Consuelo, the mother of the dead girl, and Jorge, Consuelo’s ex-husband.  They find themselves pitted against corruption in high places and a bureaucratic legal system that moves at a snail’s pace.

As the book progresses, Karen becomes the dominant character in the story, finding herself in situations that force her to make increasingly more desperate and risky choices and casting her in the role of victim. But is Karen’s story true or is her life a fiction constructed by herself or others?

At one point, Lucia observes, ‘Life is a fabrication, don’t you think? Something we make up from start to finish.’ Whilst ostensibly about the search for the truth about a young girl’s death, House of Beauty exposes the corruption at the heart of Colombian society but also explores the notion of artifice, whether that’s the double lives led by many of the characters, the cosmetically enhanced faces and bodies presented to the world, or the external beauty that hides ugliness within.

In three words: Intriguing, thought-provoking, dark

Try something similar: The Liar by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Melba EscobarAbout the Author

Melba Escobar is a fiction writer and a journalist. She lives in Bogota, Colombia with her children and husband. (Photo credit: Goodreads suthor page)

Connect with Melba
Twitter | Goodreads

About the Translator

Elizabeth Bryer is a writer and translator from Australia. Her translation of Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s Blood of the Dawn was published by Deep Vellum in 2016. In 2017 she was a recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.

#BlogTour #BookReview A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery, translated by Alison Anderson @BelgraviaB

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Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for A Single Rose by Muriel Barbery, translated from French by Alison Anderson. My thanks to Isabelle at Gallic Books for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my review copy.

A Single Rose Blog Tour CoverAbout the Book

Rose has turned 40, but has barely begun to live. When the Japanese father she never knew dies and she finds herself an orphan, she leaves France for Kyoto to hear the reading of his will.

In the days before Haru’s last wishes are revealed, Rose is led around the city of temples by his former assistant, Paul. Initially a reluctant tourist, Rose gradually comes to discover her father’s legacy through the itinerary he set for her, finding gifts greater than she had ever imagined.

Format: Paperback (144 pages)               Publisher: Gallic Books
Publication date: 23rd September 2021 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literature in Translation

Find A Single Rose on Goodreads

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My Review

From the start of the book the reader, like Rose, is immersed in the culture of Japan: its food, its customs and traditions, even its weather. Each chapter of the book is preceded by a Japanese folk tale or legend which subtly, often obliquely, informs the content of the chapter that follows. There are trees and flowers everywhere – carnations, peonies, magnolia, azaleas – often in hues of red. You would expect their presence to excite Rose’s interest, being a botanist by profession, but her reaction is more ambivalent.  She is seemingly unmoved by their beauty but drawn to their shapes and symbolism. This is reflected in the story of Issa, a famous Japanese poet, who, when asked why he only visited a plum orchard famed for its blossom when the trees were bare replied, ‘I have waited a long time in a state of deprivation; now the plum blossom is inside me’.

To some extent this also describes Rose’s mood when she arrives in Kyoto for the reading of her father’s will; the father she never met. She is full of repressed anger towards her father. ‘What can he give me now?’ she asked. ‘What can absence and death give me? Money? An apology? Lacquered tables?’ Much of her angst is experienced by Paul, her father’s assistant, charged with accompanying Rose on an intinerary compiled by her father shortly before his death.  Poor Paul, who has known loss of his own, puts up with this out of loyalty to Rose’s father.  For a long time, Rose actively resists being drawn to any aspect of her father’s life, resenting rather than appreciating the evidence that emerges of his interest in her life, even if from afar.  Gradually she starts to soften as she absorbs the atmosphere of the temples and gardens she and Paul visit.  The sake helps a little too and soon self-deprecating humour replaces her previous abrasive and petulant nature.

Muriel Barbery’s writing has an etheral, almost dreamlike quality, carefully preserved in Alison Anderson’s translation. I especially liked the evocative descriptions of the temples and gardens Rose visits, the landscape in and around Kyoto, and the weather. Waking up to heavy rain one morning, Rose observes ‘The mountains of the East steamed with mist rising into a diaphonous sky; the river was silenced by the downpour.’ On another morning, the view from her window is of mountain slopes ‘bathed in thick mist that rose in successive exhalations towards a transparent sky’.

By the end of her stay, Rose finds she has become a different person, able to put past disappointments behind her and look to a future that offers so much more than she might have imagined.

A Single Rose is the sort of book you need to linger over, much as you might a cup of fragrant Japanese tea, gradually taking in and appreciating its delicate, subtle features.

In three words: Profound, lyrical, sensuous

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Muriel-Barbery-©-Catherine-Hélie-Editions-GallimardAbout the Author

Muriel Barbery is the author of four previous novels, including the IMPAC-shortlisted multimillion-copy bestseller The Elegance of the Hedgehog. She has lived in Kyoto, Amsterdam and Paris, and now lives in the French countryside. (Photo credit: Publisher author page)

About the Translator

Alison Anderson is an author and the translator of around 100 books from French, including Muriel Barbery’s previous novels and works by Amélie Nothomb and J. M. G. Le Clézio.