After just finishing Domenico Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito (my review here) featuring a domineering father, it felt appropriate to read another Italian author Natalia Ginzburg and her fictional account of a domineering mother. The Interfering Parent However, Ginzburg’s parent in the novella Sagittarius might be considered timid compared to Starnone’s Federico. While she is over invested in the lives of her two daughters, they seem able to pursue their own desires in spite of her interference. Fed up with life in a small town she moves to the suburb of a city to be closer to he ..read more

Now in its 8th year, The Republic of Consciousness Prize is an annual literary prize aimed to support small and independent presses in the UK and Ireland. The organisation supports and recognises the work of those presses considered vital to the United Kingdom’s literary culture. They state their purpose as: “To advance for the public benefit literary fiction of the highest merit from small presses in the UK and Ireland through a range of reading, speaking and event initiatives, and by providing grants and assistance to practitioners and producers of literary fiction.” Ground Breaking Exper ..read more

I stumbled across Carson McCullers in our local French library one day, it was one of the titles on the very few shelves dedicated to books written in English. Back then, I realised my reading had exposed me to very little American fiction. I was keen to try a slim classic, even though it was a title I was unfamiliar with. The book was Reflections of a Golden Eye (1941), I remember that it was a strange, uncomfortable tale, full of dread, I knew nothing of the world it inhabited and felt incurious about that environment or its people. I am wary of authors/books esteemed as classics, to then of ..read more

The more I read of the Italian author Natalia Ginzburg, the more I am hooked. Valentino leads the reader along, thinking you are reading a straight forward story, until you arrive at the point of realising that your reactions are judgements and the book holds up a mirror to our own conditioning. And that is how it feels reading it in 2024. I can’t even imagine the storm it likely raised when published in 1957. Little Sense or Sensibility Valentino is a short novella narrated by Caterina, who is training to become a teacher. She lives with her father, a retired schoolteacher, her mother, who u ..read more

Tender, nostalgic vignettes of a childhood growing up in Gaza, often told from the perspective of the twenty-something narrator looking back from the present, now living in exile in London. She is constantly longing for old places while finding new ones, the past never far from being elicited by the present. Each new chapter has an associated song, vignettes accompanied by a playlist. The image of the sambac, the tree that filled our back yard with its sweet, creamy scent, appears in my narrator’s attempts to create life where this shrub doesn’t naturally thrive. The little stories are so c ..read more

I’m planning on reading a few books by the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, as mentioned on reviewing her excellent memoir Family Lexicon which I chose to start with, before diving into her fiction. I start her fiction at the beginning with this brilliant, page turning feminist classic, originally penned in 1947, The Dry Heart. Captivating right from the opening lines, “Tell me the truth,” I said. “What truth?” he echoed… I shot him between the eyes. Natalia Ginzburg’s debut novella starts with a shot and then goes into the domestic detail that preceded that moment. Those first lines begin ..read more

The Delivery was next up to read from my 2023 Charco Press bundle and was published on 24 October. This year’s books have been so great, I couldn’t wait to get to this one. I haven’t read her previous translated book Fish Soup, but I had heard good things about it too. Charco Press and Latin American Fiction On a Roll One of the earlier Charco novellas I read this year, The Remains (see my review) by Mexican author Margo Glantz (translated by Ellen Jones) just made the longlist of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2023. In the same week Two Sherpas (see my review) by Sebastian Martine ..read more

Boulder is another portrait of a woman, the second of a triptych. The narrator of Permafrost never quite cut the strings of family, choosing the path(s) of least resistance, while lamenting not having made more independent choices in her formative years. Assured Prose Who Art in Metaphor If the narrator of Permafrost is somewhat unsure, that of Boulder is more certain. The prose is assured, the narrative has pace, the protagonist moves towards what suits her, to freedom – until things change. The avid descriptions and bold metaphors have me rereading and highligh ..read more

A Poet’s Prose On the back page in the first sentence that describes the author, it says Eva Baltasar has published ten volumes of poetry. Permafrost is her debut novel, the first in a triptych which aims to explore the universes of three different women in the first person. It clear from the beginning this is the prose of an assured poet. I love the title, Permafrost. That deep, but necessary layer in the earth, cold and hard, it creates a foundation layer and stability, as long as conditions remain the same. Kathleen Jamie writes about it in her excellent essay collection Surfacing. The nar ..read more

Cold Enough for Snow is a 96 page literary fiction novella set in Japan, that can be read in an afternoon. Mother Daughter Relationships It is an intricate, observant story told by a daughter who has arranged to take her mother on holiday to Japan. She recounts their days and interactions and tries to anticipate what her mother might like, knowing that the intersection of their common interests is negligible. Mother and daughter have been raised in different countries and cultures, additionally the mother was not raised in the same country as her parents, so both have grown up migrants, knowin ..read more