Tag: literature in translation

#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.

#BookReview End of Summer by Anders de la Motte @ZaffreBooks

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End of SummerAbout the Book

You can always go home. But you can never go back…

Summer 1983: Four-year-old Billy chases a rabbit in the fields behind his house. But when his mother goes to call him in, Billy has disappeared. Never to be seen again.

Today: Veronica is a bereavement counsellor. She’s never fully come to turns with her mother’s suicide after her brother Billy’s disappearance. When a young man walks into her group, he looks familiar and talks about the trauma of his friend’s disappearance in 1983. Could Billy still be alive after all this time?

Needing to know the truth, Veronica goes home – to the place where her life started to fall apart. But is she really prepared for the answers that wait for her there?

Format: Paperback (480 pages)        Publisher: Zaffre
Publication date: 19th August 2021 Genre: Crime, Mystery

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My Review

End of Summer was first published in Sweden in 2016 where it was shortlisted for Novel of the Year in the Swedish Crime Writers’ Academy Awards. Now available in English, it’s the second book in the ‘Seasons Quartet’ with Dead of Winter and Deeds of Autumn due out in January and October 2022 respectively, joining Rites of Spring which was published in April 2021, although each book is a standalone story.

End of Summer unfolds in alternating chapters, moving between past and present – the summer of 1983 and the present day. For me this structure really worked as I was constantly wondering what was going to happen next in the other timeline, although later in the book, one of the timelines predominates. Throughout the book the author’s  ability to deliver a teasing last line adds to the suspense, as does the occasional inclusion of a series of letters from an undisclosed correspondent, the significance of which only becomes evident in the closing chapters.

As the mystery of Billy Nilsson’s disappearance remains unresolved, the reader sees played out the disturbing effect it has on the family, the small community of Reftinge in which they live, and the police officer charged with investigating it, Chief of Police Månsson. Unfamiliar with investigating a crime of this magnitude, Månsson feels out of his depth but deeply conscious of his obligation to provide an answer for the Nilsson family. Månsson can’t help imagining what it would be like if it was one of his own sons who had gone missing. At one point he reflects, “I’m doing my best… I’m trying to be a good husband, a good father. A good police officer.” I found him a very empathetic character. The pressure on Månsson only increases when what evidence there is seems to point to a particular individual.

Moving to the present day, Billy’s sister, Vera, has reinvented herself as Veronica. The reasons for this remain tantalizingly unclear for much of the book; all the reader knows is that she seems to have experienced more than one traumatic event in her life. Ironically, Veronica is now working as a bereavement counsellor running grief therapy sessions at which those attending share the impact of their loss. The author shows a deft touch here, one phrase in particular sticking in my mind: the description of the tears shed by a member of the group as being ‘tiny, translucent pearls of grief’. An unxpected arrival at one of Veronica’s sessions triggers disturbing memories and sets in motion a chain of events which increasingly spirals out of control, triggering feelings of panic and paranoia.

When Veronica returns home to the family farm at the urging of her brother Mattias, Reftinge seen through her eyes is rather rundown. However, that feeling is soon replaced by the spine-tingling atmosphere the author creates as Veronica pursues her own investigation into the disappearance of her brother, heedless to the risks she runs in doing so. But how much of what she experiences is imagined, how much is real?

The author lays down plenty of false trails that certainly had me foxed. I developed several theories but the answer to the question ‘Where is Billy?’ when it is finally revealed definitely wrong-footed me. The solution was both more complex and more heartrending than anything I could have come up with.

End of Summer is a compelling mystery but also an absorbing and insightful picture of a family coping with the disappearance of a child: the unanswered questions, the dashed hopes, and the sense of absence. I found it absolutely gripping from start to finish and it’s a book I definitely won’t forget in a hurry.  I must also commend the translator, Neil Smith. If I hadn’t known, I certainly wouldn’t have guessed the book was originally written in Swedish.

My thanks to Clare Kelly at Zaffre for my proof copy of End of Summer. I shall certainly be looking out for future books in the series.

In three words: Gripping, moving, masterful

Try something similar: The Missing Girl by Jenny Quintana

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Anders de la MotteAbout the Author

Anders de la Motte is the bestselling author of the ‘Seasons Quartet’; the first three of which – End of Summer, Deeds of Autumn and Dead of Winter – have all been number one bestsellers in Sweden and have been shortlisted for the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year. Anders, a former police officer, has already won a Swedish Academy of Crime Award for his debut, Game, in 2010 and his second standalone, The Silenced, in 2015.
To date, the first three books in the ‘Seasons Quartet’ have sold over half a million copies, with the fourth, Rites of Spring, publishing in Sweden in 2020. Set in Southern Sweden, all four books can be read as standalone novels.
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