Tag: Translation

The Kill by Émile Zola

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Translated by Brian Nelson

This is the second book in Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle, if reading in order of publication. A few years ago I read the first book, The Fortune of the Rougons, which lays the foundations for the rest of the series, but each novel is also designed to stand alone. The connection between them is that each book features characters who belong to rival branches of the same family, the Rougons and the Macquarts, all descended from Adelaïde Fouque, whom we met in the first novel. The Kill, or La Curée to give it its French title, was published in 1872 and is set during the Second French Empire (1852-1870).

The Kill follows Aristide Rougon, son of Pierre Rougon from the first book, as he leaves his home in Provence and settles in Paris, where he changes his name to Aristide Saccard. It’s a good time to arrive in Paris as the city is currently undergoing huge renovations with new boulevards, parks and landmarks being created under the supervision of Baron Haussmann. Ambitious and ruthless, Aristide starts buying up properties he has discovered are targeted for demolition then claiming compensation from the city at vastly inflated levels. He’s beginning to make a fortune through this corrupt scheme when his wife becomes terminally ill. Before she has even died, Aristide is already arranging his next marriage – to Renée, a girl from a rich family who will come with a large dowry.

The marriage is not a very happy one, with both husband and wife aware that it’s not much more than a business deal. Bored, Renée begins an affair with Maxime, Aristide’s son by his first wife. Maxime is several years younger and expected to marry the wealthy but consumptive Louise de Mareuil, but he is excited by the idea of a forbidden, incestuous relationship with his stepmother. In an interesting reversal of normal gender stereotypes, Zola portrays Maxime as delicate, feminine and beautiful while describing Renée as having masculine traits and being the stronger, more assertive of the two. Their affair forms one major thread of the novel; the other is concerned with Aristide’s business schemes and his attempts to get Renée to sign over the deeds to her family home.

The Kill, then, is a book that focuses on the lives of the rich and privileged. It’s a very descriptive book, as Zola brings to life the huge, opulent mansions, exquisite clothing, lavish banquets and luxurious carriages of the very wealthy. The title is a hunting term referring to the scraps of prey that are thrown to the hounds at the end of the hunt and Zola uses this as a metaphor for the greed of the businessmen who are fighting for money, power and influence and taking whatever they can from the rebuilding of the city. There wasn’t a single character I liked or had much sympathy for (although Aristide’s sister Sidonie was a great villain!) and I found all the descriptions of extravagance and waste overwhelming and distasteful, but I know that was the point of the novel so it certainly achieves its purpose. Apparently Zola himself was a poor journalist at the time of writing this book and had no personal experience of the sort of world he was describing, so everything had to be written purely from research, which makes it even more impressive.

I’m aware that there are several English translations of this book available, including an old one you can download free from Project Gutenberg, but I read a modern (2004) translation by Brian Nelson and do recommend it. I also found the introduction to my Oxford World’s Classics edition interesting as it discusses not just the story but also Baron Haussmann’s transformation of Paris. One of the projects that took place under Haussmann was the creation of the glass and iron structure that housed the Les Halles food market, which is the setting of the third book in the series, The Belly of Paris, and the next one I’m planning to read!

Book 8/20 of 20 Books of Summer

I’m also counting this towards Paris in July hosted by Emma of Words and Peace.

This is also book 5/50 from my third Classics Club list.

Gigi and The Cat by Colette – #ReadingtheMeow2026

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Translated by Roger Senhouse (Gigi) and Antonia White (The Cat).

I wasn’t sure what to read for this year’s Reading the Meow (a yearly cat-themed reading event hosted by Mallika), but then I came across this pair of stories by the French author Colette – Gigi, first published in 1933, and The Cat, which first appeared in 1944 as La Chatte. I’ve never read anything by Colette and have been intending to for a long time, so I thought this would be a good opportunity. Only the second story fits the Reading the Meow theme, but as this Vintage Classics edition includes both, I’m reviewing Gigi here as well.

I’ll start with The Cat, which is novella length and follows a young newly married couple, Alain and Camille. Alain, an only child, has grown up at the centre of his mother’s world and although he finds his new wife attractive, he doesn’t feel ready to leave behind the comforts of his family home to embark on a new life with her. This is frustrating for Camille, particularly after they move temporarily into a friend’s apartment and she discovers that Alain keeps sneaking back home to visit his mother and his beloved Russian Blue cat, Saha. Alain misses Saha so much that eventually she comes to live with them and from this point it becomes obvious that there’s only room for one female in Alain’s heart – and it’s not Camille! As the days go by, Camille grows more and more jealous of her husband’s cat until she finally decides that she needs to take action…

I found this a dark, unsettling story and although it’s also quite a simple one on the surface, there’s a lot of psychological depth. Camille and Alain are complete opposites in terms of personalities – Alain is quiet, sensitive and introverted, while Camille is lively and outgoing – and they begin to irritate each other as soon as they’re married. They have very different outlooks on life, with Camille being ambitious and forward-thinking and Alain struggling to move on and leave his childhood behind. Saha has been his companion for many years and is his last connection to the safety and security of his past, so Camille finds herself competing not just against the cat, but also everything the cat represents. I suspect she and Alain would have discovered their incompatibility anyway, but Saha’s presence makes it happen much more quickly!

Gigi is about half the length of The Cat and is a much lighter story. The title character, Gilberte (known as Gigi), is fifteen years old, that awkward age where you’re not quite an adult and not quite a child. Her mother is preoccupied with her career as a singer in a Parisian music hall and has left most of Gigi’s upbringing to her grandmother and Aunt Alicia, who are grooming her for life as a courtesan, like themselves. With Gigi’s mother, who works for a living, as a warning of what happens if a woman fails to find a wealthy man to support her, Gigi is being educated in all the skills her grandmother and aunt consider necessary for her future – dancing, table manners, rolling cigars and knowing the value of expensive jewels. The only man currently in Gigi’s life on whom she could try out these skills is family friend Gaston Lachaille. Grandmother and Alicia begin making plans for Gigi to become Gaston’s mistress, but it seems Gigi herself has other ideas!

Gigi is fun to read (if you ignore the morals of two older women pushing a fifteen-year-old girl into a relationship with a thirty-three-year-old man) and is a story about choosing your own way in life and doing what you want to do rather than what other people think you should do. It’s certainly a more uplifting story than The Cat, although I personally found The Cat more interesting and a perfect choice for Reading the Meow.

Have you read either of these stories? What else should I read by Colette?

~

Book 1/20 of 20 Books of Summer

The Blind Woman of Sorrento by Francesco Mastriani

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Translated by Idara Crespi

Francesco Mastriani is a completely new author for me – I’m sorry to say I hadn’t even heard of him until I was offered a review copy of his 1852 novel, The Blind Woman of Sorrento, but it seems he was a very prolific Italian writer, producing over two hundred works of fiction during the 19th century. Espresso Publishing House, an imprint focusing on neglected foreign-language novels, have made this one available in its first modern English translation.

The ‘blind woman’ of the title is Beatrice, daughter of the Marchese di Rionero. She wasn’t born blind, but at the age of three she witnessed the brutal murder of her mother and lost her sight due to the shock and trauma she suffered. Now, seventeen years later, an English doctor, Oliviero Blackman, has arrived in Sorrento and believes he can help her to see again. Unknown to Beatrice, however, Dr Blackman is not all he appears to be. Who is he and does he have another motive for promising to restore Beatrice’s sight?

We also get to know Gaetano Pisani, the son of the man who killed Beatrice’s mother all those years earlier. Gaetano’s life has also been affected by the events of that terrible night and he can’t escape the shame and guilt of knowing that his father was hanged for murder. When he crosses paths with his father’s accomplice and gets his hands on a box of jewels stolen from the murdered woman, it seems that he may still have a chance to find redemption.

I don’t want to say much more about the plot as I would prefer future readers to discover all the twists and turns of this fascinating novel for themselves, as I did. The publisher compares it to Wilkie Collins, which is a good comparison as this book does share many of the elements you would often find in Collins’ work and other 19th century sensation novels such as murders, stolen jewels, family secrets, revenge plots and hidden identities, as well as lots of melodrama! I was particularly reminded of Poor Miss Finch, which also deals with the subject of blindness in a similar way (although that book was published twenty years after this one and the plot itself is quite different). I also think if you’ve enjoyed books by authors like Alexandre Dumas or Rafael Sabatini, there’s a good chance you would enjoy this one too.

Although I would have preferred Beatrice to have been a stronger character (she has a tendency to faint and swoon), I did find it interesting to see how Mastriani writes about her blindness. For a book published in the 1850s, he handles the topic quite sensitively, never implying that she’s any less intelligent because of her condition – on the contrary, she is more observant and perceptive than most people, with her other senses being heightened to compensate. Gaetano is also a complex character: although his actions and motives are sometimes questionable, I could never really think of him as a villain, but at the same time he’s not entirely heroic either.

I found Idara Crespi’s translation very clear and easy to read and I appreciated the translator’s note at the beginning, explaining why certain words and spellings had been chosen. There’s also an introduction, which you can read before or after the novel itself (I got more out of it reading it afterwards), a glossary and some notes on historical Naples. Naples was Mastriani’s own place of birth and both that city and nearby Sorrento are vividly brought to life through his descriptions. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and was entertained by it from beginning to end.

The Final Problem by Arturo Pérez-Reverte – #ReadIndies

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Translated by Frances Riddle

It’s June 1960 and actor Ormond Basil has found himself trapped on the small island of Utakos, near Corfu. He has been invited to join a film director on his yacht to discuss a new project, but stormy weather means they are unable to leave the island until conditions improve. Luckily, there’s a hotel on Utakos where they and a small group of other guests and staff can take shelter until the storm has passed. However, there are no police on the island, so when one of the guests, British tourist Edith Manders, is found dead under suspicious circumstances, it’s up to the others to investigate until help can arrive.

Because Ormond Basil famously played the part of Sherlock Holmes on screen many times, he’s nominated to lead the investigation. No matter how much he explains that he’s only an actor and not really the great detective, everyone else insists that he must know more about solving mysteries than they do. And despite his protests, he does seem to know what he’s doing. With one of the other guests, Spanish crime author Paco Foxá, as his Watson, Basil begins to look for clues and question the suspects – but can he find the killer before another death takes place?

You may have guessed that Ormond Basil is closely based on the real life actor Basil Rathbone, who is for many people the quintessential Sherlock Holmes. I’ve talked before about not liking the current trend for using real people as detectives, but this is slightly different as the character is semi-fictional which gives Pérez-Reverte more scope to have him say and do things that the real Basil may not have done. He’s so obviously supposed to be Basil Rathbone, though, that it seems a bit pointless to pretend that he’s not. Either just calling him Rathbone or creating a completely fictional character would have worked better for me.

The novel is well plotted and the locked room mystery has a solution which is clever without being overly complex. With only a small number of suspects due to the setting, I thought I had guessed who the murderer was, but I was wrong and there was a nice twist towards the end that I hadn’t seen coming. For all Basil’s insistence that he’s not the real Sherlock Holmes, he does turn out to be an excellent detective, with powers of observation and deduction almost as good as the character he played for all those years!

However, I felt that there was far too much name-dropping of other famous actors and directors Basil had worked with, and too many long discussions between Basil and Foxá on the subject of Sherlock Holmes, in which both of them quote constantly from the books and adaptations. This all became a bit tedious and detracted from the mystery. I had a similar problem with the other Pérez-Reverte novel I’ve read, The Dumas Club, in which we’re bombarded with references to Alexandre Dumas’ books, so maybe this is just the way he writes.

I’m not sure if The Final Problem is going to be left as a standalone or if it’s intended as the start of a series; I don’t know if I would want to read any further adventures for Ormond Basil, but I did enjoy this one overall because of the interesting murder mystery. This edition of the novel is available from Atlantic Books, translated into English from the original Spanish by Frances Riddle. As Atlantic Books is an independent publisher, I’m counting this towards Read Indies, hosted this month by Karen of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings.

Tales from the Underworld by Hans Fallada – #GermanLitMonth

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Translated by Michael Hofmann

November is always a busy month with lots of events taking place in the book blogging world, so for German Literature Month (hosted by Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Tony of Tony’s Reading List) I decided to read a short story collection that I could dive into now and then throughout the month in between reading other things. Hans Fallada is probably my favourite German author so I thought Tales from the Underworld would be a good choice.

This collection was published by Penguin Modern Classics in 2014 and contains a large number of Fallada’s short stories which were originally published between 1925 and 1946. The stories have been translated from the original German by Michael Hofmann, who has also translated other Fallada books including Alone in Berlin and A Small Circus. Many of the stories are semi-autobiographical, which I would have guessed from the small amount I know about Fallada’s life, but this is covered in more detail in the foreword by Jenny Williams.

As the title of the book suggests, the focus is on the darker side of life – some of the stories are about thieves, prisoners or drug addicts, while others deal with subjects such as poverty and unemployment. You’re probably thinking that it all sounds very bleak and depressing, but Fallada’s lively, conversational style and sense of humour means it’s much less miserable and much more entertaining than it could have been in the hands of a different author. I think my favourite story was Fifty Marks and A Merry Christmas, a lovely, touching story about a young couple, Mumm and Itzenplitz, who are struggling to make ends meet but determined to have a happy Christmas despite their financial problems. This one reminded me very much of the novel Little Man, What Now? which was published in the same year.

The stories range from the very short, such as the sequence titled Calendar Stories, written in the style of fables with an obvious moral, to the more substantial, such as Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism, in which an addict desperately tries to acquire enough morphine to get through the day, looking for pharmacies that will accept fake prescriptions. The addict’s name is Hans, because this is one of the autobiographical stories – Fallada and his wife were both addicted to morphine, which also inspired his 1947 novel, Nightmare in Berlin.

The impact of the two world wars is felt in several of the stories, including The Returning Soldier, where a man comes home from the war with a wounded arm and finds that his father is less sympathetic than he had hoped. Some of the stories deal with urban life – for example War Monument or Urinal? is a satire on the politics and bureaucracy that holds back progress in a small town – while others, such as The Good Pasture on the Right have rural settings and explore the problems facing farmers and the importance of owning land. Fallada also looks at different aspects of marriage and parenthood, with stories like Happiness and Woe, where an unemployed father is tempted into spending the family’s rent money, and The Missing Greenfinches, in which a father tries to teach his young son to value the lives of even the smallest creatures.

I haven’t mentioned even half of the stories here, but I hope I’ve given an idea of how fascinating and varied this collection is. I think it would be a good introduction to Fallada’s work, but if, like me, you’ve already read some of his books, it’s interesting to see how many of these topics come up again in his longer fiction and how many are drawn from his own life. It was a good choice for German Literature Month, just as I hoped it would be!

The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas

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Translated by Torbjørn Støverud and Michael Barnes

Tarjei Vesaas is a completely new author for me, but when I saw two new editions of his books available from Pushkin Press in English translations, I was intrigued by both of them. I decided to start with The Birds, which sounded fascinating. On the front cover, the author Karl Ove Knausgaard describes it as ‘the best Norwegian novel ever’.

The Birds is a short but powerful book. It’s the story of Mattis, a Norwegian man in his late thirties who sees the world differently. Today he would be described as having a mental disability, but Mattis lives in a time when people are not always so sensitive. He’s aware that his neighbours talk about him behind his back and that the village children call him Simple Simon. He has never been able to hold down a steady job and lives with his older sister, Hege, who supports them both through her knitting.

Mattis has low self-esteem and is afraid of what will happen to him if his sister ever leaves, but he is still able to find pleasure in the small things in life, such as the appearance of a woodcock which begins to fly over their house at night. Although nobody else seems to care, to Mattis this is an important, momentous event and the bird and its fate eventually become symbolic of himself. Another, equally significant event is the arrival of Jørgen, a lumberjack with whom Hege falls in love. Convinced that she’ll go away with Jørgen and abandon him, Mattis struggles to cope with this unwelcome change in his life.

This book was published in 1957 and I was impressed by how sensitively and convincingly Vesaas writes about Mattis and his disabilities. He knows he’s not like other people, which makes him feel inadequate and isolated, so any little victory means a lot to him. I found it very moving to see the joy he feels when two young women are kind to him and his sense of pride when he finally starts his own business as ferryman (despite there never being any passengers). I also had a lot of sympathy for Hege. Although we only really see her through Mattis’ eyes, it’s clear that the situation is equally difficult for her. She loves her brother and is protective of him, but at the same time she feels tired, trapped and frustrated. Life seems to be passing her by, so when she finally gets a chance of happiness, she doesn’t want to lose it.

The Birds is a sad, poignant novel but also has some moments of hope and inspiration and is beautifully written, in a simple, gentle way. I loved it and am now looking forward to reading The Ice Palace which sounds just as good.

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

Murder at the Black Cat Cafe by Seishi Yokomizo

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Translated by Bryan Karetnyk

Over the last few years, Pushkin Press have been publishing Seishi Yokomizo’s Kosuke Kindaichi mysteries in new English translations. This is the latest, but I found it different from the previous ones in several ways.

First, where the other books are full-length novels, Murder at the Black Cat Cafe is a novella (this edition also includes another short story, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, to make the book more substantial). Yokomizo’s detective, Kosuke Kindaichi, plays a prominent role in the first story, but a very small one in the second – in fact, I wouldn’t really call that one a Kindaichi mystery at all as he only appears right at the end. Both stories belong to the type Yokomizo refers to in the prologue as ‘faceless corpse’ mysteries – in other words, where the murder victim has had their face destroyed so they can’t be identified.

The other main difference is in the setting. Usually the Kindaichi mysteries are set in rural Japan – a small village, a country house, a remote island – but Murder at the Black Cat Cafe has a city setting: Tokyo’s red-light district, an area known as the Pink Labyrinth. First published in 1947, the story takes place just after the war and begins with a policeman on patrol discovering the faceless body of a woman in the garden of the Black Cat Cafe, an establishment owned until very recently by the Itojimas, who have just sold it and moved away. Beside the corpse is the body of a black cat, which has also been killed. It’s assumed that the cat is the famous mascot of the Cafe – until the Cafe’s black cat emerges alive and well. Where did the other cat come from and who is the dead woman?

I enjoyed the post-war urban setting, but with the second story, Why Did the Well Wheel Creak?, we are back on more familiar ground with a family living in a remote village. The patriarch, Daizaburo, has two sons – one legitimate and one illegitimate – who are almost identical apart from their eyes. When both young men go to war and only one returns alive, having lost both eyes, questions begin to be asked. Is this man who he says he is or could he be pretending to be his brother?

Both of these stories, then, feature mistaken or stolen identities and people who may or may not be impostors and both have enough twists and turns to keep the reader guessing until the truth is revealed. The first one was probably the stronger mystery, but I did enjoy the second one as well and liked the way the story unfolded through letters sent from a sister to her brother. I’m already looking forward to the next Kindaichi book, She Walks at Night, coming next year.

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

Book 2 for RIP XX