Patria - Fernando Aramburu

In my desperate search for something to read over the last couple of months, I decided to read this widely acclaimed novel. Winner of all sorts of awards and, for me, very much in the mould of A Little Life - something so bad that it made me question the sanity of thousands of supposed intellectuals around the world. 

While I do understand that ETA caused a lot of problems to people in the Basque countries and all over Spain, the vision of the book feels excessively Manichean. Miren feels little more than a caricature from a 1950s B-movie. And while on critic wrote that this is War and Peace for our times, I think it's more like a very low calibre feuilleton (then again, I have never actually read War and Peace!). 

I unfortunately read this in translation, and the translator did a monumentally pathetic job: some  Spanish expression were translated literally, others more freely, the verbal tenses (already confusing in the original, I've been informed) were all over the place, and the whole prose was so incredibly stilted. 

The Door - Magda Szabó

 

I was really grasping at straws as most of my e-libraries didn't seem to have anything particularly appealing on offer. Then my daughter's Hungarian BFF came over for a playdate and that made me realize that, other than The Paul Street Boys, I had never never a single Hungarian book, so I chanced upon this novel. 

The start was a bit of a slog, with the focus on female companionship and bickering not being something I found engaging, but then I got into the novel ("getting into a novel" - what an awful turn of phrase...) and I was left in awe of what I think can be considered a small masterpiece. 

Szabó's book is one of small secrets that are justifiably oh-so-important to her characters. It is one of love between people who at first glance have very little in common. And crucially is one in which the reader (or at least, that was the case for me) finds him/herself justifying most of the narrator's decisions and actions, while eventually accepting also Emerenc's viewpoint and, at the end of the day, wishing s/he was more like the cantankerous cleaning lady who appears to singlehandedly hold a small community together. 

Mon Assassin - Daniel Pennac

 

The book that I didn't know I needed. Seriously. The last novel by Pennac had left me so unmoved and disappointed, but this short book (not quite a novella, not fully an autobiography) brought me peace and closure. 

It is extremely tactful, and I ultimately see it as an attempt by Pennac to exorcise some of his demons, talk about loss, give his real-life friends and unorthodox family members their chance to take centre stage, and in general come to terms with the end of his career and, in the not so distant future, eventually the end of his own life. 

Unfortunately, I'm rather certain that in a couple of years he'll be persuaded to write something else, or someone will unearth an early draft of an unfinished novel and decide to publish it, or something equally unappealing. And sadly Pennac will have his own Baugmartner or, possibly worse, Silverview or,  possibly worse, Go Set a Watchman.