one plague to the next

Some thoughts on

Violeta
by Isabel Allende
Plaza & Janes 2022

In recent years I haven't quite managed to keep up with Isabel Allende's publishing speed (here's the last one I read), but picked this one because I thought I remembered her saying in an interview that it was based on the life of her mother, who was then in her 90s. Turns out that it isn't quite, but the 100-year timeframe may have been inspired by it. The fictional Violeta was born in 1920 during the flu pandemic and died in 2020 during the covid pandemic, so this is a very neatly defined life span from plague to plague. Even though it's not a real memoir, it is written like one, so I'll also tag it as such, to go in my memoir inspiration file.

Other than not being the biography of her mother, this is very satisfying for aficionados of the Allende universe, as we get elements of her family history and her early novels remixed and extrapolated into the 21st century. Criminal involvement of the CIA looms over people's lives as you would expect. Reviewers tend to emphasise that her novels are set in an un-named South American country, but here as in many of her previous books Chile is so clearly recognisable that no other interpretation is possible.

A bit more unexpected to me were the multiple links to European countries including Germany and Norway. With both Germany and Chile moving into and out of brutal dictatorships within the 20th century, it is kind of logical that there has been traffic of refugees in both directions, and some families have even moved back and forth. This connection between Germany and Latin America is also featured in a film from 2012, El amigo aleman (my German friend, by Argentinian-German director Jeanine Meerapfel), but other than that I haven't seen all that much coverage of it.

Naturally, with a focus on female character and the 100 year time span, progress in women's rights is a thread, but not waved around too much.

Overall a big and bold sweep of a female centred and unconventional family saga that may come to be seen as one of her major achievements.

I do like the cover designs they are now using for her novels. At one point, when El cuaderno de Maya came out, I hated the cover so much I couldn't bring myself to buying the book.

PS have now created a tag for libros en español - also, as promised in 2020, I will create a new book review master post at the end of the year.

stew and cello

some thoughts on

Cocido y violonchelo

Mercedes Cebrián
Penguin Random House Literatura 2022
available from Blackwells, not sure why they add an English title, as the book is definitely in Spanish!

As some of you may have noticed I’m a sucker for music memoirs, especially if they involve an instrument that I try to play myself, so when I came across a brand-new memoir about the author learning the cello in her forties, that was enough reason for me to order a copy and read it immediately. I was only very slightly worried about the cookery aspect covered in the same tome.

So to summarise her story briefly, Mercedes Cebrián studied piano and singing as a youngster, had some experience of baroque summer schools (as a harpsichord player) then started cello lessons in her late 40s. She spends too much time watching internet videos of child prodigies and at one point spends 600 euros on a good bow. Oh, and she’s a foodie but I won’t count that against her.

The memoir falls into two halves, the first is set in that strangely distant world before Covid and has exactly the right mix of cello and rest of the world for my taste with some musical memories of her childhood and travels. The second half deals with the first Covid year, but strangely a travel to Italy takes up much of the space, and the cello somehow becomes less important. This is also where the foodie things come to the fore.

I found this is really surprising as to me, the times of repeated lockdowns meant I had a lot more time to spend with the cello and play unaccompanied Bach. Maybe that should have been included in the government advice around the world. Stay home and play Bach. (Privilege check: yes I do know that this doesn’t work in a block of flats, our cello would be heard five floors up and five floors down, and in this range there is bound to be somebody who doesn’t like the suites - or my interpretation of them.) So I found the second half slightly less engaging and may have skipped one or two paragraphs that appeared to be only about soup (she styles herself as the anti-Mafalda here).

The scary bit comes near the end [spoiler alert] where she suggests she might be terminating the cello adventure, citing Amundsen who didn’t spend the rest of his life in Antarctica either. Now any room with a cello in it tends to be a lot warmer and welcoming than Antarctica, usually, if only because it would be very bad for the cello if it was exposed to the elements. Also, this kind of thing hurts me because I feel the collective guilt about our family cello (memoir to be finalised soon) which spent more than 40 years not being played at all, and another 30 until it came to be played properly and regularly. That, and the fact that it is such a huge privilege to have a cello and be able to converse with it that I really can’t comprehend why anyone would stop (other than for medical reasons such as arm amputation). It just doesn’t compute. There are definitely more cello pieces that I want to learn than I could conceivably master by the age of 100.

So, well, that may just be my problem but I really enjoyed the first half and got some interesting celloing hints out of it. For instance, I had completely forgotten that a cello adaptation of the famous Boccherini minuet is included in book 3 of Suzuki's cello school. After reading the page where she mentioned the piece, I actually dug it out and played a part of it. Also, there were some performers (eg Anastasia Kobekina) and some works mentioned that I need to check up on.

See also my twitter thread listing books I read in 2022.

The book comes with a short bibliography of works mentioned in the text, but there aren’t any of the other cello memoirs in it that I’ve read, so here’s my list:

• Hilary and Piers DuPre: A genius in the family
• John Holt: Never too late
• Gregor Piatigorsky: Cellist
• Jetta Marie Vasak: My bohemian heritage (about the family of Zdeňka Černý, praised as "the greatest Bohemian violoncellist" in a famous Mucha poster).

In the midst of winter

Más allá del invierno
Isabel Allende


I think I first read Isabel Allende in 1984, when her first novel, La casa de los espiritus came out in translation and was very successful worldwide. From the next novel De amor y de sombras onwards, I read almost all her novels in the original version (a quick count gets me to 15). I skipped the young adult ones and may have missed one or two in recent years. (I really hated the cover of El cuaderno de Maya so much I couldn’t buy or read that one. Would have to wrap it in paper or something.)

Having started the shared reader/author journey 35 years ago with what was then the recent history of the coup in Chile, and having made all sorts of excursions to remote times such as the early days of the European conquest of the Americas, it feels a bit weird to be jolted into the present day New York and the eve of the Drumpf election with this novel published in 2017. However, it mostly works well.

It starts a bit slowly with a wintry encounter between the three very different characters, but then she throws in a dead body hidden in the trunk of a car and all goes swimmingly. Three interesting back stories relating to different parts of Latin America interwoven with the quest to do something meaningful about the body makes an interesting tapestry. Although the characters manage to sort out their mess, this doesn’t really tell us what to do about the rest of the horrid world.

PS looking for the cover of this one, I found out that the next novel is due out on May 21, called Largo pétalo de mar. I really do need to pull my socks up and keep up a bit better.

celtic connections

First thoughts on

La hermandad de los celtas
by Carlos Núñez
Espasa 2018


To those of us obsessing over Galician folk music, Carlos Núñez is a massive star – even if this ecological niche isn’t quite big enough to enable him (or anybody else) to lead a proper rock star life. We’ve had the rather amazing privilege of welcoming him to a special edition of our Galician session here last year, a truly unforgettable experience.

So of course I didn’t want to miss his debut book publication, especially not as it is about Celtic (including Galician) music and culture. Actually, preparations for his book were what brought him to Oxford back in May 2017, where he spoke to archaeologist Barry Cunliffe (who, as it happens, also has a new edition of his book on the Celts out this year). But I was also a bit anxious, wondering how he would be as a writer.

The good news is that he writes beautifully. The sentences sing, you can feel his musical talents in the way he writes them. So, as long as you’re caught in the moment, it’s great fun to read him, and it’s entertaining in the same way as it would be to chat to him or indeed to jam with him.

The trouble starts when you’ve read a few dozen pages and you try to get an organised kind of concept of what you’ve just learned. Unfortunately, you don’t get much help with that. There is no index, and the structure within each of the lengthy chapters isn’t really obvious if it exists. In a very conversational manner, Núñez recalls who he talked to, on what occasions, and reminisces about other influences that shaped his musical life or informed his foray into the wider Celtic cultural history. The typical connection between two items is “This reminds me of… “ While this may be absolutely true, it is not much help for the reader who wants to come away with a bit of structured knowledge, rather than just with the fuzzy feeling of having had a nice chat.

So, in an attempt at helping my poor old memory, I took some notes in the first half of the book (which is quite long enough to count as a book in its own right, so I am now having a break before I tackle the second half). Here are a few of the amazing but sadly disorganised bits and pieces that I noted:

* There is generally a lack of actual archaeological finds of musical instruments of the ancient Celts. The carnyx (war trumpet with animal-shaped head towering high above the player, as featured eg in Asterix), of which a nearly complete example was found at Deskford, and which you can now buy as a reconstruction, is a notable exception.

* Benjamin Franklin wrote about Scottish music. I can’t find it at GoodReads, must be an essay filed under Miscellaneous Writings? References in the book would have helped with this kind of thing.

* Marie Antoinette played the hurdy-gurdy. He just mentions that in passing, as something everybody is supposed to know, and as I didn’t, I looked it up. Apparently this was the tail-end of a wave of folk music being fashionable at the court of Versailles, which started under Louis XIV and ended within the reign of Louis XVI, so supposedly Marie-Antoinette also put away her gurdy at one point.

* To the same folk wave we also owe the musette de cour – a gentrified variant of the bagpipes. Nicolas Chédeville wrote the sonatas Il pastor fido for this instrument. Wrongly attributed to Vivaldi at one point, they are today part of the repertoire for flute and recorders.

* Music from Celtic traditions was considered primitive in the 18th century partly because it was rarely written down, and if at all, it was written just as a melody line, with harmonies left out. (See also: Bach’s cello suites. It took a Casals to convince the world that they are more than just finger exercises.)

* The fact that Welsh is today the most widely spoken Celtic language can in part be attributed to the popularity of Welsh male voice choirs. These, in turn, were created and supported in a bid to keep miners away from the booze.

* Galileo’s father wrote about the Irish harp. How random is that?

* Speaking of which, the oral tradition of harpers in Ireland (such as eg Turlough O’Carolan, 1670-1738) died out in the 19th century. The reason we know their music at all is that at the last of their regular reunions, which took place in Belfast in 1792, the organist of St. Anne’s Cathedral, Edward Bunting, wrote down some of the tunes they played. (Just a couple of weeks after reading that, I accidentally discovered an LP with this music in our house, recorded by Gráinne Yeats in 1980.)

* Post 1066 Norman rulers used the Arthurian legends to bond with the Celts against the Anglosaxons, which explains why Richard Lionheart had Breton harps playing at his wedding. (Plus lots more stuff about the Arthurian legends, and their various echoes in different parts of Europe.)

The take-home message is that everything in the history of the universe has some sort of Celtic connection. I love all these unexpected cross-links through history and across Europe (in the second half, Núñez also covers the Celtic diaspora around the world, so the connections will become global).

But what I really would have needed would be a set of maps with some arrows to reflect all these intercultural connections, some references and a very good index … Part of which would have been the task of the publishers, not the author, so this omission doesn’t diminish the author’s achievement. It just makes it less accessible to us mere mortals.

He repeatedly stresses his own lack of scientific expertise and says that he dreams of bringing the academic experts in the relevant fields together to one meeting and get them to sort it all out. Seeing that for this book he seems to have spoken personally to everybody who is anybody in any field related to Celtic archaeology, history, culture or music, I don’t quite see what’s stopping him from having that meeting next month.



the cover wants to be appreciated in fully unfolded form ...
The photo was taken, as he mentions on page 52, at the beach of Honón, with the Cies islands in the background. Stone monuments in this location are allegedly linked to the legend of Breoghan, and thus to everything else in the book.

book reviews reviewed

I'm trying to find some way of organising my literary book reviews published here, which are currently in the same tag (bookreview) as non-fiction and indeed as the reviews of science books that I write for Chemistry & Industry magazine. Plus, in the early days I also had some entries just pointing to other people's reviews of books I hadn't read. With 147 entries, that tag is getting a bit unwieldy.

So let's start with a master post sorting reviews by language (and maybe I'll introduce a new tag for each language, as I have already done for Galician), starting with the Romance languages which I am more interested in than in the Germanic ones:


Galician
(tagged biblioteca galega)

María Reimóndez: O club de calceta

Anxos Sumai: Así nacen as baleas, Galaxia 2007

Santiago Lopo: Hora Zulu, Galaxia 2012

Santiago Lopo: A arte de trobar, Xerais 2017


Spanish
(libros en español)

Isabel Allende: Más allá del invierno

Gioconda Belli: El país de las mujeres (2010)

Almudena Grandes: Castillos de cartón

Mario Vargas Llosa: El sueño del Celta

Elvira Valgañón: Luna cornata Sobrelamesa Ediciones 2007

Gioconda Belli: La mujer habitada

Gioconda Belli: El pergamino de la seduccion

Alicia Yanez Cossio: El Cristo feo


French
(livres en français)

Dai Sijie: Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise (2000)

Katherine Pancol: Bed bug (2019)

Leila Slimani: Dans le jardin de l'ogre

Anne Golon: Angélique, Marquise des Anges

Jean-Yves Ferri, Didier Conrad: Asterix - Le papyrus de César (2015)

Anna Gavalda: Ensemble, c'est tout

Alain Mabanckou: Verre Cassé


English

Ursula Le Guin: Lavinia

Laila Lalami: The Moor’s account

Esther Freud: Lucky break

Sefi Atta: Swallow Interlink 2010

Jennifer L. Rohn: The Honest Look Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2010

Weam Namou: The feminine art Hermiz Publishing 2004

Jennifer L. Rohn: Experimental heart Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press 2009

Esther Freud: Love Falls 2007

Salman Rushdie: The enchantress of Florence Jonathan Cape 2008

Belle de Jour: The intimate adventures of a London call girl Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2005

Megan Clark: Seduce me Kensington Books 2008


German

Daniel Kehlmann: Die Vermessung der Welt


Translations from other languages

Hong Ying: K - the art of love



Oh well that is an eclectic old list. And I should definitely review more French novels ...


In the meantime, here's my little Galician library:




PS I'm still adding a couple of links to more recent reviews but will at some point (end 2020?) leave it alone, lest it grows to become unmanageable. After that I might try and do a reviews master post at the end of every calendar year. Watch this space.

feminist utopia

Book review:

El país de las mujeres

Gioconda Belli

(2010)

In a small Mesoamerican country called Faguas, a volcanic eruption has enriched the air with an antidote to testosterone, turning its macho men into kind and docile human beings who don’t put up too much resistance when the feminist Partido de la Izquierda Erótica (PIE) sweeps to an election victory and its charismatic leader, famous for having exposed prominent sex traffickers in her TV show, becomes president with an all-female government promising to “clean up” the country.

In a time when much of the more imaginative writing goes in the dystopian direction and the state of the real world may also be headed that way, it is unusual and refreshing to find an unashamedly positive utopian novel. Especially for me with a political background that has quite a few connections to the author’s, the general idealism feels like home and the protagonists the PIE committee are very sympathetic characters.

I’m not entirely sure if the novel would work for anybody who doesn’t experience this huge political feel-good factor. The postmodern structure which mixes different kinds of testimonies and documents is at first a bit confusing until you’ve worked out who’s who. Until about the middle of the book it appeared gratuitously random to me and I would have appreciated a frame, maybe set in the distant future, such as the work of a future historian who explores these developments. Belli has used distant times to great effect in The scroll of seduction as well as in The inhabited woman, and it might have improved this effort as well.

As it stands, this is an interesting book and a heart-warming story for those who still have a heat-conducting heart, but maybe not quite as spectacularly brilliant as the two earlier novels mentioned above. Depressingly, there doesn’t seem to be an English translation at all, although it has been translated into German (Die Republik der Frauen), Dutch (Het land van de vrouwen) and Portuguese (O País Das Mulheres) among other languages.

castillos de cartón

This is a lovely movie about three students trying to find their way in art, love/sex, and life in general, and I reckon it shows about equal parts of these three areas. You wouldn’t be able to tell from the cover of the UK DVD, which focuses on one of these and obviously tries to sell the film as porn, which it clearly isn’t. This is underlined by the very unsubtle English title, "3some". I think the original title, Castillos de cartón, is to be understood along the lines of “castles in the air”. The script is based on a novel by Almudena Grandes with the same title (see book review below).

The three characters are set apart from mainstream society not just by their creative urges but also by their unusual 2+1 love life, which they don’t dare to spell out to their parents. This isolation increases the pressure on each of them to find fulfilment within that triangle. To me, this was the most important aspect, and it was acted very convincingly. The art could have been used even more – I love the triangular arrangement where they draw portraits of each other, but their art isn’t really used to show how they see each other.

Actress Adriana Ugarte also appears in Lo contrario al amor (which was shown at the London Spanish Film Festival this year (but I missed it) and in the earlier film El juego del ahorcado. Will have to check those out ...

Can't bear to reproduce the UK cover, so here's the spanish one, which I will at some point print off to replace the one I have now:

amazon UK - they sell the horrid UK edition a lot cheaper, though.

--------------

PS (23.11.2012): review of the book:

Discovering the book after having seen the movie isn’t an ideal situation, but as we live on an island that seems to be a million miles away from continental Europe, I wouldn’t have heard of the book otherwise. It hasn’t even been translated into English.

This is a slim novel under 200 pages, but it still has some intriguing layers of complexity. On top of the plot of the movie, the love triangle set in the 1980s, it has a noughties level as well. It starts with one of the protagonists calling the second to deliver the news of the suicide of the third. On that premise, which understandably makes the protagonists think of the past, the story is related in flashbacks.

There are also some formal subtleties which I quite enjoyed. For instance, the text has four parts, titled el arte, el sexo, el amor, and la muerte (the fourth, death, was dropped in the film, but the rest agrees with my three-part description above). Each of the parts starts with a statement concerning the number 3, reflecting, of course the status of their relationship:

3 is an odd number;
3 is a peculiar number; (not sure if that’s what she meant with “aparte”)
3 is an even number;
3 isn’t a number after all.

And there are other elements like these hidden in the text, echoes, reflections, repetitions, contradictions, which I rather like, and which I’m sure will keep students in Spain busy for a while.

I think Grandes succeeds in making the artistic mind accessible. I’m a great fan of everything that at least tries to explore how creativity works and what makes artists tick, and this was an interesting addition to the relevant works I knew. Sadly, Grandes doesn’t describe in detail what the art of the most successful of the three artists looks like (or did I accidentally skip a page?). In the movie, his breakthrough moment is when he covers a huge canvas entirely with red paint, but I found no reference to that in the book.

What I did find, however, is the song from which the title is derived. It is Para ti, by Fernando Márquez, and it dates from 1995, so its use in the story is only mildly anachronistic.

The relevant lines, which are quoted in the book, are:

Para ti, nos buscamos el paraíso,
nos cocinamos melodías con su charme,
nos olvidamos de los críticos seniles,
nos encerramos en castillos de cartón.

Anyhow. A lovely little novel. Available in Spanish and in German, but not yet in English, so if anyone wants to push for a translation …

beware of orange trees

I got an orange tree for my birthday last year, and some time after that, seemingly unrelated, I started reading La mujer habitada by Gioconda Belli. I've had the book for 10 years, but only got round to reading this, her debut novel, now, after her other major works. It soon turned out that the heroine is becoming "inhabited" by the spirit of a native American from the time of the Spanish conquest, and that the spirit had previously inhabited the orange tree she put in her patio. The spirit gradually turns her into a guerilla fighter. So I am now being very careful not to get too close to that tree of mine. Maybe it already tricked me into reading the book.

But seriously, and leaving any irrational fears of citrus plants aside, I liked the novel a lot, and it was particularly intriguing to read it soon after her more recent novel, El pergamino de la seduccion (the scroll of seduction). Although the books are very different and set in different countries (Nicaragua and Spain, respectively), one could argue that they both feature as the main characters a young woman and a large house. In both books the young woman establishes a magical link to a woman who lived around 400 years earlier, via the orange tree in one case, and via the old house and its inhabitants in the other.

It's also interesting to read the book as a look back across time on the regime that the Sandinista movement swept away, knowing as we know now, that a few of the dashing young guerilla leaders eventually became corrupted by power.

What I really don't understand is why her work is so underappreciated in the English-speaking world. Maybe it doesn't translate well?

going loco

Book review

El pergamino de la seduccion (The scroll of seduction) by Gioconda Belli


“Juana la loca,” or Queen Joanna of Castile (1479-1555) never reigned because her father, her husband, and her son consecutively declared her insane and unfit to govern, claiming her political role for themselves. According to Gioconda Belli’s rehabilitation dressed up as a quite marvellous novel, the poor woman wasn’t insane at all, just squeezed between three males who had much bigger political ambitions and instincts, and whom she had the misfortune to love. (The men in question were Ferdinand II of Aragon, her father, Philip the Handsome, her husband, and her son Charles I of Spain and V. of Germany, in whose empire the sun never set.)

Gioconda Belli (born 1948) brings Joanna back to life using Lucia, a young woman in 1960s Madrid (so she’s vaguely of the author’s generation, who also went to boarding school in Madrid in the 60s) who plays her role in a game of history re-enactment that allows her to go through at least some of the experiences (love, vulnerability, imprisonment, bereavement) that Joanna went through in the 16th century. The role play artifice bridging a gap of 450 years works surprisingly well, bringing both the unfortunate queen and her modern day interpreter to life. The male history prof who sets the situation up and manipulates Lucia as the three men in her life manipulated Joanna remains more enigmatic. The spooky old house where much of the story is set is almost a character of the story and reminded me of the modern classic Nada by Carmen Laforet.

Does the author convince us that Joanna wasn’t mad after all? In her afterword she argues that while historians tend to label her as schizophrenic, none of the psychiatrists she consulted agreed with this diagnosis. Most tellingly, Joanna only went “mad” when she was treated badly, e.g. locked up, forcefully separated from her children, etc., but appeared perfectly sane under normal conditions. Which suggests that she wasn’t psychotic at all.

What appears to have been her real problem, however, was a lack of political instinct, which turned out to be catastrophic for somebody thrown into the political arena simply by virtue of her royal descent and her robust health – everybody else with higher ranking claims to the throne died young. Yes she was kicked around by the men in her life, but one can’t help thinking that the queen gene skipped a generation. Her mother, Isabella of Castile, described as cold-hearted in the novel, but famous for the Reconquista (the expulsion of the Arabs from the Iberian peninsula) and for sponsoring Columbus’ crossing of the Atlantic, would have asserted herself in a similar situation, while Joanna just drowned in it and went “mad”.

Her gift appears to have been in a different domain – she is described as a passionate lover (the safe hands of an author who is also known for her erotic poetry are a definite bonus in that domain) and managed to produce six healthy children who all went on to become monarchs. The mad world of political power-struggle just wasn’t for her.




Picture from Wikimedia

the artist inside

Michelangelo famously stated that his statues were already present in the marble a priori, and the hand of the sculptor did nothing but to liberate them. Although the author doesn’t mention it directly, this may well have been the inspiration behind “El cristo feo” by Alicia Yanez Cossio (Quito, 1929). All the main figures in this novel, namely a statue and three living persons, get re-sculpted in different ways.

This is the story of the poor maid Ordalisa who works for a zombie-esque elderly couple. She has inherited an excruciatingly ugly crucifix from her mother, which one day starts talking to her. It (or Christ, or whoever is talking, it might just be within her head!) has a refreshingly unorthodox take on christian values, reminiscent of the 1970s cult hit “Mr God this is Anna”. Thus, even if the story is superficially about a crucifix, it’s never preachy.

Instructed by the Voice (who is and isn’t inside the crucifix, as s/he is and isn’t everywhere), Ordalisa starts chiselling out a beautiful (and movable) christ from inside the ugly crucifix. In doing this, she also liberates the artist within herself, and a living person within one of her employers (although the other gets resculpted in a less commendable way).

Told laconically with a minimal cast and setting, this enchanting story would work just as well as a chamber piece for a small theatre. Michelangelo would have loved it, as will anybody who has a bit of an artist hidden somewhere underneath their marble surface.

PS the only one of her books that found some attention in the English speaking world seems to be the pot-bellied virgin, which is reviewed here:

http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2006/bookreviews.asp