The Looking-Glass by Machado de Assis (tr. Daniel Hahn)

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Thanks to the Pushkin Press Essential Stories series I’ve had the opportunity to explore the short stories of Herman Melville (a new author for me) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (an author I’d read before but only in full-length novel form). This latest collection has introduced me to another new author, the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, who lived from 1839-1908. This book contains ten of his stories, translated from Portuguese into English by Daniel Hahn.

When trying a new author for the first time, you never really know what to expect, but since Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (usually just referred to by his surnames) is described as one of Brazil’s greatest authors I thought he would surely be worth reading, even if the stories turned out not to be to my taste. Fortunately, I did find most of them quite enjoyable, providing lots of insights into the various sides of human nature. Although the stories were written more than a hundred years ago and on the other side of the world from me, they were still relatable because, of course, human beings aren’t really all that different, no matter where or when they lived.

The longest story in the book, which could probably be considered a novella, is The Alienist, in which Simão Bacamarte, a physician, opens an asylum in the town of Itaguaí. Bacamarte has a genuine interest in the new science of psychology and begins committing patients to the asylum so that he can study their symptoms. However, the numbers being admitted rapidly start to increase as it becomes clear that sane people are being sent there as well. Once most of the population of the town has been locked up and the others begin to rebel, Bacamarte is forced to reconsider his criteria for deciding who is sane and who is not, with surprising results!

Another story, The Stick, follows the story of Damião, a young man who escapes from a seminary and is afraid to return home because he’s convinced his father will send him back. Instead, he seeks the help of Rita, his godfather’s lover, who lets him stay in her house until the situation is resolved. Rita is a teacher of lacework and embroidery and has several young girls working for her. Damião discovers that one of them, a black slave called Lucrécia, is being badly treated and he must decide whether to intervene. I found this story interesting because Machado himself was the mixed-race grandson of freed slaves – and slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888.

Apart from The Canon, which describes a noun and an adjective searching for each other inside a man’s brain (too bizarre for me), I found most of the other stories intriguing in different ways. The Fortune-Teller, The Tale of the Cabriolet and Midnight Mass were some I particularly enjoyed. However, although I don’t usually include ‘trigger warnings’ in my reviews, I should mention that in The Secret Cause there are some graphic descriptions of animal cruelty which aren’t very pleasant to read!

At the end of the book, I was interested to read Daniel Hahn’s note on the translation where he explains why he deliberately tried to retain the 19th century feel of the original writing, even though this wasn’t necessarily the easiest option for a translator. I think this was the right decision – it worked for me and I found this collection a good introduction to the work of Machado de Assis.

Thanks to Pushkin Press for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

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I was drawn to this book by the pretty cover, but also because it sounded similar to Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy, which I loved. Set in 16th century Russia, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, The Witch and the Tsar is a blend of history, fantasy and folklore featuring as its heroine the legendary Baba Yaga. Unlike the traditional idea of Baba Yaga as a ferocious old witch who eats children, however, Moscow-born author Olesya Salnikova Gilmore’s portrayal is something very different.

We first meet Yaga, as she is known, living alone in a forest with her wolf Dyen, owl Noch, and Little Hen, a living hut who stands on chicken legs and has a mind of her own. Half-mortal and half-goddess, Yaga has been badly treated in the past so has chosen a life of solitude, interacting with other people only when they come and seek out her knowledge of healing and potions. She is reluctantly drawn back into society when an old friend, the Tsaritsa Anastasia – wife of Tsar Ivan IV – comes to her to ask for help. Convinced that Anastasia is being poisoned by someone at court, Yaga decides to accompany her friend on the journey back to Moscow to keep her safe.

Returning to the world from which she has hidden away for so long, Yaga is dismayed by the evil she senses all around her. Unsettled by an encounter with a former adversary, Koshey Bessmertny (usually known in Slavic myth as Koschei the Deathless), she is then introduced to Ivan Vasilyevich, the man who will later become Ivan the Terrible, and is struck by his power and volatility. When tragedy strikes the Russian court, Ivan becomes more unstable and launches a campaign of terror with his band of oprichniki burning, raiding and pillaging Russia’s towns and cities. It seems that Yaga is the only one who can stop him, but to do so she will have to learn things about herself and her family that she would prefer not to uncover.

I enjoyed some aspects of The Witch and the Tsar, but others not so much. I wasn’t sure what to think of Yaga herself. On the one hand, it’s good to see a much-maligned character given a more sympathetic interpretation; on the other, Gilmore’s Yaga has so little in common with the mythical Baba Yaga she’s really not the same character at all. Also, we are told that although she has the appearance of a young woman, she has actually lived for hundreds of years – yet she never sounds, thinks or behaves the way I would expect someone with centuries of wisdom and experience to sound, think and behave. She just feels like the young woman she appears to be.

It was interesting to see how Gilmore works characters from other Russian and Slavic myths into the story. As well as Koschei the Deathless, we meet Marya Morevna, Morozko the frost demon, the god Volos, the house spirit Kikimora and others. The fantasy/mythology element becomes very dominant in the second half of the book, more than I would have preferred, but Gilmore does a good job of tying it together with the historical storyline, showing how the actions of the gods and demons are linked to the actions of Ivan and his oprichniki. I was particularly intrigued by the character of Ivanushka, the Tsar’s son and heir; Yaga promises Anastasia she will protect him, but we know from history that his story will take a tragic turn.

I think The Witch and the Tsar is worth reading if you’re interested in Russian history and mythology, but naturally I couldn’t help comparing it to Katherine Arden’s trilogy (beginning with The Bear and the Nightingale) which I found much more enjoyable.

Thanks to HarperVoyager for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Classics Club Spin #32: The Result

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The result of the latest Classics Club Spin was revealed today.

The idea of the Spin was to list twenty books from my Classics Club list, number them 1 to 20, and the number announced by the Classics Club represents the book I have to read before 29th January 2023. The number that has been selected is…

6

And this means the book I need to read is…

Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell

Pretty, impecunious Mary Preston, newly arrived as a guest of her Aunt Agnes at the magnificent wooded estate of Rushwater, falls head over heels for handsome playboy David Leslie. Meanwhile, Agnes and her mother, the eccentric matriarch Lady Emily, have hopes of a different, more suitable match for Mary. At the lavish Rushwater dance party, her future happiness hangs in the balance.

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This is not one I was particularly hoping for, but I’m happy enough with that result. I liked but didn’t love the first book in this series, High Rising, and was assured that some of the later books are better, so I’m looking forward to continuing with them.

Have you read this? What did you think of it? And if you took part in the Spin which book did you get?

The Darlings of the Asylum by Noel O’Reilly

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I have read several novels that tackle the subject of Victorian women locked away in asylums, sometimes due to depression, anxiety or ‘hysteria’, but often simply because they were an inconvenience to their husbands or families. The Asylum by John Harwood, The Crow Garden by Alison Littlewood and The Girl Who Couldn’t Read by John Harding are a few examples and I was keen to see how Noel O’Reilly would approach the same topic in his new novel, The Darlings of the Asylum.

The story begins in Brighton in 1886 with a marriage being arranged between our narrator Violet Pring and the wealthy Felix Skipp-Borlase. Violet is fond of Felix but she knows she doesn’t love him and doesn’t want to marry him – what she really wants is to be free to pursue a career as an artist and she’s not ready to give up on her dream. The more her mother tries to push her into the marriage, the more Violet tries to resist until things finally reach a climax and a tragedy occurs. The next day, with no memory of what happened, Violet wakes up to find herself incarcerated in Hillwood Grange Lunatic Asylum.

Getting to know the other inhabitants of Hillwood Grange, Violet finds that many of them do have genuine mental health issues – although nothing to warrant the kind of treatment they are receiving in the asylum – but she has no idea why she has been sent here herself. She knows she must have done something terrible, but nobody will tell her what it was and she can barely remember her last night of freedom at all. Allowed only limited contact with family and friends and banned from drawing and painting, Violet is miserable and frightened – particularly when she discovers that the sinister Dr Rastrick may have his own reasons for wanting her in the asylum. Violet must find a way to prove that she is sane and escape from Hillwood Grange, but how can she do that when everyone around her seems to be part of a conspiracy to keep her imprisoned forever?

The Darlings of the Asylum is a fascinating novel, although quite similar to the books I’ve mentioned and others with a Victorian asylum/mental hospital element. Still, whether or not you’ve read much on this topic before, the portrayal of Violet’s plight is disturbing and at times horrifying, as she desperately tries to make herself heard and free herself from the clever and manipulative Dr Rastrick. Violet also makes an effort to befriend some of the other women in Hillwood Grange who are even less fortunate than herself and have been dismissed as insane or used as subjects for experiments rather than receiving the sort of care we would expect them to be given today.

Noel O’Reilly has written the book from Violet’s perspective and although sometimes I find that male authors don’t write in a convincing female ‘voice’ and vice versa, I thought he did a good job here. I could believe in Violet as a Victorian woman, albeit a slightly unconventional one. I was also happy with the way her story ended. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected, but better than some of the alternatives would have been! Now I’ll have to read Noel O’Reilly’s first novel, Wrecker, about shipwrecks on the Cornish coast.

Thanks to HQ for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book #63 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

Classics Club Spin #32: My List

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It’s time for another Classics Club Spin – the last one of 2022. I don’t feel that I’ve made much progress with the Classics Club this year, so I’ve been looking forward to this! If you’re not sure what a CC Spin is, here’s a reminder:

The rules for Spin #32:

* List any twenty books you have left to read from your Classics Club list.
* Number them from 1 to 20.
* On Sunday 11th December the Classics Club will announce a number.
* This is the book you need to read by 29th January 2023.

Here’s my list:

1. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
2. The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
3. Claudius the God by Robert Graves
4. The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy
5. The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins
6. Wild Strawberries by Angela Thirkell
7. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household
8. Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff
9. Moonfleet by John Meade Falkner
10. A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy
11. Random Harvest by James Hilton
12. The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins
13. Farewell the Tranquil Mind by RF Delderfield
14. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
15. Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault
16. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
17. Jane and Prudence by Barbara Pym
18. Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff
19. The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy
20. Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

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As I only have 16 books remaining on my Classics Club list, I’ve had to duplicate some of them here. I don’t really mind which one I get but I would be particularly happy with Strangers on a Train, The New Magdalen or one of the Thomas Hardy books.

Which number do you think I should be hoping for on Sunday?

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk (tr. Ekin Oklap)

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This is the first book I’ve read by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. It sounded fascinating – a murder mystery set on a fictional Mediterranean island during an outbreak of plague at the turn of the 20th century. However, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting!

It would be easy to assume that this was a book written in response to the Covid pandemic (I certainly did), but it seems that Pamuk actually started work on Nights of Plague in 2016. Obviously now that we’ve all had experience of living through a pandemic, that element of the novel has taken on new relevance, but it’s made clear that the illness described in the book is a form of bubonic plague rather than a respiratory virus like Covid, so the causes, symptoms, methods of transmission and outcomes are very different. On the other hand, there are also lots of parallels – in 1901, just like in 2020, with no vaccine available the only way to really tackle the progress of the disease is through quarantine and isolation. People protest against the restrictions, members of government break their own rules, and while the crisis brings some communities together it creates division in others.

The fictional island at the heart of all of this is Mingheria, an outpost of the Ottoman Empire with a population made up of both Turkish Muslims and Greek Christians. The governor, Sami Pasha, is doing his best to implement quarantine measures on the island but they are having little effect and he is being held back by having to wait for official orders from the Sultan in Istanbul. As the novel opens, a ship is on its way to Mingheria from Istanbul carrying the Sultan’s niece Princess Pakize, her husband Doctor Nuri, and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Bonkowski’s job is to investigate the outbreak of plague, but before he is able to draw any conclusions he is murdered.

With Bonkowski Pasha dead, it’s now up to Doctor Nuri to give advice on quarantine arrangements, while also looking into the circumstances of the chemist’s murder. The Sultan, who has become a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sends instructions that he must use ‘the methods of Sherlock Holmes’. There’s the basis of an exciting story here – yet the mystery element is virtually abandoned until much later in the novel and even when we return to it, it turns out not to be all that exciting after all. Much more time is spent describing the plague and the attempts to get the outbreak under control. With Covid in mind, I found this quite interesting to read about, but the book is written in such a factual and impersonal style it might as well have been non-fiction. There’s a reason for the dry style – we are told at the beginning that the whole book is supposed to be a history of Mingheria compiled by a modern day historian based on letters sent by Princess Pakize to her sister – but it means the book isn’t much fun to read, there’s not a lot of dialogue and there are pages and pages of exposition.

I felt that what Orhan Pamuk was really trying to do was tell the story of the final years of the Ottoman Empire through the lens of Mingheria’s plague response and the political change that follows on the island as a result. He has a lot to say about national identity, the reclaiming of the Mingherian language (almost forgotten as those who once spoke it grow old and die), the challenges of breaking away from rule by a larger power and the tensions between different religious groups who share the same small island.

So, lots of interesting ideas and themes in this book, but I can’t say that I particularly enjoyed reading it. It was far too long and slow and needed some editing, in my opinion. Ekin Oklap’s translation seemed fine – I think my problems were due to the overall style and pace of the book. I did become quite immersed in it after a while, but I was pleased to reach the end and I think a non-fiction book about the fall of the Ottoman Empire might have been a better use of my time! I don’t know whether this novel is typical of Orhan Pamuk’s work but I’m not really tempted to read any more just yet.

Thanks to Faber and Faber Ltd for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book #62 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

Six Degrees of Separation: From The Snow Child to Murder Under the Christmas Tree

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. I read this when it was first published and found it a beautiful, magical story – a perfect winter read.

A bewitching tale of heartbreak and hope set in 1920s Alaska, Eowyn Ivey’s THE SNOW CHILD was a top ten bestseller in hardback and paperback, and went on to be a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Alaska, the 1920s. Jack and Mabel have staked everything on a fresh start in a remote homestead, but the wilderness is a stark place, and Mabel is haunted by the baby she lost many years before. When a little girl appears mysteriously on their land, each is filled with wonder, but also foreboding: is she what she seems, and can they find room in their hearts for her?

Written with the clarity and vividness of the Russian fairy tale from which it takes its inspiration, The Snow Child is an instant classic.

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Despite having read the first book, which often makes things easier, I struggled to get started this month. I tried linking The Snow Child to other books based on Russian fairy tales, to other books set in winter and to books with snow in the title, but in each case I only got two or three links along the chain before getting stuck. Eventually, I decided to start with a link to another book with ‘child’ in the title: A Word Child by Iris Murdoch (1). I really enjoyed this story of Hilary Burde, a London office worker who thinks he has arranged everything in his life just as he wants it, until a face from the past arrives and throws everything into disarray.

The Hilary in A Word Child is a man; a female character who shares the same name is Hilary Craven in Destination Unknown by Agatha Christie (2). This is one of Christie’s standalone thrillers and is set in Morocco, first in Casablanca and Fez and then in the High Atlas Mountains. Hilary finds herself agreeing to impersonate a dying woman so that she can go in search of the woman’s husband, a scientist who has disappeared without trace. I found this book entertaining but too far fetched and bizarre to be a favourite Christie.

The Country of Others by Leïla Slimani (3) is also set in Morocco. The book was written in French and is available in an English translation by Sam Taylor. It tells the story of Mathilde, a young woman from France who marries a Moroccan soldier at the end of WWII and goes to live with him in Meknes. The book describes how she struggles to settle into her new home and tries to find a place for herself in this ‘country of others’.

I seem to have read a lot of books translated into English from French – probably more than from any other language. One of these is The Princess of Cleves, or La Princesse de Clèves to give it its French title. This classic novel was first published anonymously (and translated anonymously too) in 1678, but was later believed to be the work of Madame de Lafayette. It’s set at the royal court of Henri II and is said to be one of the earliest psychological novels.

Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree (5) was also originally published anonymously. Set in the small village of Mellstock in Wessex, it follows the romance between Dick Dewy and Fancy Day and is a beautiful portrayal of rural life as one season turns into the next. This is an unusually cheerful, uplifting book for Hardy; I often recommend it to people who find him too bleak and depressing!

From under one tree to under another! I think I’ve used Murder Under the Christmas Tree (6) in a previous Six Degrees chain, but it’s too good a link not to use again here. Edited by Cecily Gayford, this is a collection of Christmas-themed short stories from classic and modern crime authors, ranging from Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr to Val McDermid and Ian Rankin.

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And that’s my chain for this month! My links have included: ‘child’ titles, the name Hilary, Morocco, French translations, books published anonymously and ‘under the tree’.

In January we’ll be starting with Beach Read by Emily Henry. Will you join us?