An end of week recap

“… propaganda always begins with words, but soon it proceeds to deeds. When there are no facts to support lies, facts must be made.”
– Eric Ambler (born 28^th June 1909)

Let me see now… What do I have for you this week? Well, the Swiss philosopher, writer and composer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on this day in 1712 – as was the Sicilian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer, Luigi Pirandello, but in 1867. It is also, would you believe, International Caps Lock Day. Yes, really! Don’t ask me why but it has a second celebratory day on 22^nd October, which seems a tad excessive. Surely someone should put a block on such blatant upper-casery and capitalize on just one. Sorry, AM I SHOUTING?

As ever, this is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming publications, see what folk have on their nightstands and keep readers abreast of various book-related happenings.

CHATTERBOOKS >>

If you are planning a reading event, challenge, competition, or anything else likely to be of interest to the book blogging community and its followers, please let me know. I will happily share your news here with the fabulous array of bibliowonks who read this weekly wind up.

* Return Unopened, Or Reply? *

I am delighted to report that the latest title by Romanian multi-genre writer, Patricia Furstenberg (now residing in South Africa) – a highly regarded member of our book loving community – was published yesterday. When Secrets Bloom, an historical novel set in 15th-century Transylvania, “asks a simple question: what is remembered when history forgets you?” Lord Vlad Dracula is apparently “no more than a memory” but, says Pat, he “haunts the story not as a specter of horror, but as a mentor whose shadow shaped the life of the novel’s protagonist, Kate, a Saxon healer caught between duty and accusation”. To find out why “Vlad’s presence lingers”, head over to What Would You Do if Vlad Dracula Wrote to You? and consider purchasing a copy of this gripping tale of rumour, secrets and a missing rare manuscript.

* Almost Overlooked *

Back in March 2024, Hannah Bennett of Back Shelf Books found herself “wildly out of [her] comfort zone” reading what she describes as a “fiery rebuke of fame and a thorough examination of what it’s like to be under the thumb of a cult of personality.” Tatum Vega, the bisexual protagonist of Ursula Villarreal-Moura’s debut novel, Like Happiness, lives in Chile with her girlfriend but finds it difficult to forget the decade spent in New York City with M. Domínguez, a famous, much older male author recently accused of assault. When an American journalist makes contact requesting an interview with her, she is forced to confront her memories of this destructive relationship. The book, which “often reads like a memoir” has “much to say about power, influence, gender, sexuality, and cultural identity”, and the narrative structure “also works extremely well”. Indeed, “the final twist” of this novel “is shocking”, says Hannah, “and couldn’t have been better.” She cannot recommend it highly enough. Find out why in her post: Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura – REVIEW.

* Lit Crit Blogflash *  

I am going to share with you one of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are a great many talented writers producing high-quality book features and reviews, which made it difficult to pick only this one – published in the last week or so:

Giorgio Bassani, Within the Walls – Over at Tredynas Days, Cornish critic Simon Lavery shares his thoughts on Within the Walls, a short fiction collection by the Bologna-born Italian novelist, poet, essayist, editor and international intellectual Giorgio Bassani (1916-2000) who specialised in writing about the Jewish community in the Northern Italian city of Ferrara. Included with five other works in The Novel of Ferrara, it was first published in 1956 and later translated into English by Jamie McKendrick. A “central feature [of these stories] is the poignant, repeated revelation that many of [its Jewish inhabitants] embraced fascism enthusiastically”, as did Bassani’s “own father” but “the spectre of the death camps in Germany becomes an increasingly sinister presence.” Simon focuses individually on all the pieces, among them tales of “atrocities committed by the fascists and their consequences.” He found these classic stories in which the “citizens […] go through all kinds of moral and emotional contortions to try to eradicate their memories of [this] terrible time” both “powerful [and] well-crafted”. You may also enjoy Simon’s review of Bassani’s 1958 gay novel The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, featured in his most recent post: Giorgio Bassani, The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles.

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally make a point of tweeting/x-ing (not to mention tooting and bsky-ing) a few favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, here are a selection of interesting snippets: 

****************************

Aeon: Merveilleux-scientifique – “With brain swaps and death rays, a little-known French sci-fi genre explored science’s dark possibilities a century ago”, says Fleur Hopkins-Loféron, an art historian specialising in scientific imaginaries. 

Miller’s Book Review: The Human Comedy of ‘The Betrothed’ – Joel J Miller heard “Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed is to Italian literature what Shakespeare is to English.” He reviewed the “beloved” classic to find out for himself.

1000 Libraries Magazine: Books as Travel Companions: On Literary Escapism – Vincent Phan explores the ways in which “books offer comfort, insight, and emotional refuge while traveling and how the Portuguese idea of ‘saudade’ deepens the literary journey.” 

ABC News: Tasma Walton explores a tragic family story in her new novel, I Am Nannertgarrook – In Tasma Walton’s second novel, “she tells her ancestor’s story, exposing a dark chapter of Australian history.”

The Dial: J.M. Coetzee vs. English – Speaking in Tongues is, says Carey Baraka, “a conversation [about language] between the Nobel Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee and the Argentine translator and writer Mariana Dimópulos”.

History Today: ‘The Writer’s Lot’ by Robert Darnton review – “The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France by Robert Darnton discovers a literary flowering in the shadow of the guillotine”, finds Simon Macdonald. 

Financial Times: The Place of Tides by James Rebanks — an elegiac tale of the ‘duck women’ of the far north – In The Place of Tides, James Rebanks seeks “sanctuary and renewal on a remote Norwegian archipelago”.

BBC Future: ‘It opened up something in me’: Why people are turning to bibliotherapy – “Bibliotherapy has been soaring in popularity as a means of improving people’s wellbeing”, says Katarina Zimmer. “But getting it right depends on the book, and the person.”

Asymptote: Life Adorned with a Little Death: A Review of Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü – Thanks to Maureen Freely’s translation of Journey to the Edge of Life from the Turkish, a novel in which a writer seeks redemption by tracing the lives and deaths of three of her literary heroes on a journey through Europe, the late Tezer Özlü’s works are finally gaining “recognition in the Anglosphere”, says Hilary Ilkay.

Asian Review of Books: “The Spider” by Aurko Maitra – “Set in West Bengal, […] The Spider grapples with the human predisposition to violence,” writes Ria Dhull of Aurko Maitra’s disturbing coming-of-age debut.

The Conversation: Nineteen Eighty-Four might have been inspired by George Orwell’s fear of drowning – “Nineteen Eighty-Four is filled with references to sinking ships, drowning people and the dread of oceanic engulfment”, points out Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, Nathan Waddell.

A Book Designer’s Notebook: 13 Quotes About Book Covers – “From The Look of the Book by Peter Mendelsund and David J. Alworth.”

The Yale Review: Taking Offense – Garth Greenwell close reads Miranda July’s novel All Fours and reflects on “reading through bad feeling”.

Air Mail: 007 Diaries – Ian Fleming was a 44-year-old newspaper editor on vacation in Jamaica when he dreamed up James Bond. In Talk of the Devil, a newly published collection of his writings, we are offered a window into his life off the page – and his thoughts on the ‘great’ spy novel.

The Duck-Billed Reader: Shriek, Roar, and Rattle: Trains as Engines of Doom in Victorian Fiction – What will cause the world to end? “This post [argues] the Victorians thought it would be fire: specifically, the world-eating fire of the emerging railway system. If you don’t think that the advent of railways sounds cataclysmic, read on and see if Charles Dickens can change your mind”, suggests Claire Laporte.

World Literature Today: A Few Out-of-the-Way Bookshops in South Africa – “Tiny bookstores are thriving across South Africa. J. L. Powers offers a guided tour of some of her favorites.”

JSTOR Daily: Tolstoy’s Christian Anarchism – Ben Woollard explains why a “fateful visit to a market in Moscow entirely upended Tolstoy’s view on life and society—and changed the trajectory of his work and purpose.”

The New Yorker: Anne Enright’s Literary Journeys to Australia and New Zealand – “The Booker Prize-winning author recommends three works by writers who, thanks to geography, may have never received their due.”

AGNI: Ledia Xhoga’s Misinterpretation: A Guide to the Intimacy of Language and Translation – “Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel, Misinterpretation, follows an unnamed Albanian woman adrift in present-day New York City, a translator and interpreter plagued by an unshakable feeling of alienation”, writes Suzana Vuljevic.

Jane Austen’s World: Jane and Dorothy: Lives of Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth – Marian Veevers’ Jane and Dorothy: A True Tale of Sense and Sensibility explores the lives of Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth, “two women, living at approximately the same time, who never met”, finds Brenda S Cox.

The Haitian Times: Haitians pack Livres en Folie as PM vows security, again – “More than 1,100 titles — including 94 by debut authors — were featured at the 31st edition of Livre en folie, which paid tribute to Frankétienne and reaffirmed literature’s power in uncertain times”, reports Juhakenson Blaise.

For Love of Words: Seaside-Set Books To Read This Summer– Lidija Hilje with a “list of books inspired by the sea that make for a perfect summer read.”

Mirror: ‘I’m a chemist – Agatha Christie wrote one murder plot better than any other’ – “A new book, V is for Venom, by chemist-turned-author Kathryn Harkup reveals why Agatha Christie ‘s poison plots were so accurate – and why we still can’t get enough of a good cosy murder mystery story.”

Los Angeles Times: Why this author wrote about creative women as they aged: ‘They made much of less’ – “Susan Gubar explains why she chose to write about women who entered a new creative phase as they aged in her new book, Grand Finales.

Guernica: Andrey Kurkov: The Border Between Real and Surreal Lies Somewhere Else – “The Ukrainian novelist [speaks to Alyssa Oursler about] writing during war, using humor and magic to survive, and what’s next for his home country”.

The Atlantic: The Real Reason Men Should Read Fiction – “Literature is often pushed on allegedly reluctant men as a machine for empathy. [Jeremy Gordon says he reads] it for a different reason.”

Zona Motel: Interview: Taylor Lewandowski and Lynne Tillman by Juliet Escoria about The Mystery of Perception (Archway Editions) – Juliet Escoria talks to Taylor Lewandowski about “the ordinary versus the extraordinary. The fleetingness of time and memory. Publishing on independent presses. The ridiculousness of identity” and The Mystery of Perception, her book length interview with Lynne Tillman, the widely admired icon of underground American literature.

Macmillan Library Marketing: Staff Review: SALTCROP – “Missing sisters, failing crops, and a perilous trip across the sea form the foundation of [Saltcrop, a] post-apocalyptic odyssey from [the Japanese American speculative fiction writer] Yume Kitasei,” says Phoebe Houser.

Church Times: Book review: Listen In: How radio changed the home by Beaty Rubens – “Fiona Hook discovers how radio changed the habits of households” in Beaty Rubens’ narrative history, Listen In.

A Narrative Of Their Own: How does Virginia Woolf’s essay still respond to the female writer? – In Virginia Woolf’s extended essay, A Room of One’s Own (published in 1929) she “suggests that women had been traditionally marginalised, seen as inferior writers and artists due to the nature of literature and history being a male construct.” Kate Jones asks, does this theory “still respond to the female writer?”

3:AM Magazine: Into the Sun – “Into the Sun is a short, eerie, pitiless novel by [C. F. Ramuza]”, which “simmers fitfully, and occasionally flares into life”, says Max Callimanopulos. Set in a Swiss town by a lake, something has gone awry with the axis of the Earth, and we are heading straight for the sun, leaving the surrounding countryside resembling a “baking Boschian hellscape”.

Reactor: An Anti-Hero Predicts the Future in Graham Greene’s Classic Brighton Rock – “Heaven was a word—Hell was something he could trust.” Zack Budryk on “the nihilism of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock and how it speaks to the rise of an oppressive branch of Catholicism today.”

Granta: An Aesthetic Inquiry – Devika Rege’s Quarterlife “is that rare thing: a political, social novel that, instead of reclining in self-satisfaction, plunges into the consciousness of a remarkably wide spectrum of contemporary Indian society.” The author discusses her new novel with the editor “at a tea house in Bandra West, Mumbai.”

Literary Theory and Criticism: Analysis of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm – Nasrullah Mambrol writes: “An epic novel that was published the same year Patrick White won the Nobel Prize, The Eye of the Storm is set in Australia, White’s native country, and covers the period of the first 70 years of the 20th century.”

Caught by the River: Overnight – “Recently published by Canongate, Dan Richards’ [Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark] is an immersive hybrid of investigative journalism, personal memoir and nocturnal psychogeography, writes Andy Childs.”

Wordsworth: Between Two Worlds: The Weird Tales of Arthur Machen – Dr Stephen Carver on Arthur Machen, “a Welsh author and journalist best known for his occult, mystical, and supernatural fiction, and greatly admired in his own day by Oscar Wilde and H.P. Lovecraft.”

Open Book: Read an Excerpt from The Midnight Project, a Riveting New Science-Fiction Novel by Christy Climenhage – An excerpt from The Midnight Project, a novel “set in a speculative near-future where the world is on the verge of collapse”, by Canadian science fiction author Christy Climenhage.

Aspects of History: Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives, by Alice Loxton – Now released in paperback, Richard Stone declares Eighteen, a “wonderfully entertaining book, written with assured flair [by] historian Alice Loxton, [which] takes the age of eighteen as a unifying theme for telling the story of Britain.”

Beyond: A Million Tiny Kindnesses – “The Body, Brain, and Books” – Jane Ratcliffe has eleven questions for writer and teacher Jordan Rosenfeld, author most recently of the thriller, Fallout.

Ancillary Review of Books: Profane Illuminations: An Initiation – “Everyone knows that the short story is the ideal form for weird fiction. But why? What is it about the form and the genre that makes them so symbiotic?” In this first essay for a “regular column” exploring short stories “to illuminate different approaches to the weird,” Zachary Gillan focuses his attention on “that most neglected of book forms, the collection”.

South China Morning Post: A new generation of translators bringing Hong Kong literature to the world – “More English readers are asking for translated literature – and in Hong Kong and beyond, the art of translation is taking off”, reports Karen Cheung.

The New York Times: Oprah Shamed Him. He’s Back Anyway. – “Twenty years after A Million Little Pieces became a national scandal, James Frey is ready for a new audience”, finds Sam Dolnick.

The Tyee: Twenty-Seven Great Books to Read This Summer – The team of staff at this Canadian independent, online news magazine from B.C share their summer reading list, which “brims with humour, silliness and hope.”

The Guardian: Marginalia mania: how ‘annotating’ books went from big no-no to BookTok’s next trend – “Readers are sharing how they write their predictions into novels, colour-code their emotional responses and even gift annotated books to friends. Is it actually fun, or just a bit like homework?” wonders Caitlin Welsh. 

BBC News: ‘Not just smut’ – Why it’s happily ever after for romance books – “Inside London’s first romance-only bookshop, Sarah Maxwell stands in the ‘smut hut’ – a section dedicated to her store’s more erotic titles”, reveals Maia Davies.

****************************

FINALLY >>

If there is something you would particularly like to see in Winding Up the Week or if you have any suggestions, questions or comments for Book Jotter in general, please drop me a line or comment below. I would be delighted to hear from you.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I wish you a week bountiful in books and rich in reading.

NB In this feature, ‘winding up’ refers to the act of concluding something and should not be confused with the British expression: ‘wind-up’ – an age-old pastime of ‘winding-up’ friends and family by teasing or playing pranks on them. If you would like to know more about this expression, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: Aurko Maitra, Christy Climenhage, Eric Ambler, Giorgio Bassani, International Caps Lock Day, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ledia Xhoga, Luigi Pirandello, Maurice Renard, Patricia Furstenberg, Science Fiction, Ursula Villarreal-Moura