The difficult second novel - but not for readers!

 

Four Seasons in Japan by Nick Bradley (Transworld)

Back in 2020 one of my friends was raving about a book called The Cat and The City and was insistent I had to stop everything and read it *now*. I was decidedly skeptical as Alison and I do not often share the same taste in books. I am glad that I listened to her as the book was excellent and I've been keeping my eyes out for the author's next book.

Four Seasons in Japan has just come out and it was, I think, even better. This is a clever book that uses the 'book in a book' device to weave two beautiful stories - one about Flo (a character we met in The Cat) who is looking for her next translation project and then the book she finds and falls in love with.

All of the characters jumped off the page for me and I loved the slight air of mystery and 'out of time' feeling I got from the book. Being a fan of translated fiction I also really liked the parts of the book that looked at this process.

Alison and I went to Nick's book launch this week and as he talked about the book I fell in love with it even more, so many little nuances that are obvious now I think about is, and also knowing how personal parts of the book are but without being autobiographical.

Nick also admitted that this was his second difficult novel - well in fact as the original 2nd novel was scrapped (bar three ideas) perhaps it should be known as the brilliant third novel - but as a reader I definitely didn't feel this at all and really hope that the book does brilliantly.

Many thanks to Transworld for allowing me to read this book early via NetGalley

Too soon? (Micro reviews 8 & 9)

 Looking back on Covid around the world - sort of.

It was inevitable that the Covid pandemic was going to spawn a lot of books, already you can see it filtering through into fiction and there have been a lot of memoirs from medical professionals published. In the past couple of months I've also noticed a few memoirs coming through from people in other countries talking about their experiences of lockdown. So far the ones I've come across have been all from English speakers and set in western cities but it has been interesting getting an insight into lockdowns around the world.

The first book I came across was These Days are Numbered by Rebecca Rosenblum (Dundurn Press/NetGalley) which is a collection of Facebook posts that Rosenblum wrote between March 2020 and March 2022. She lived in an apartment on the edge of a reasonably affluent Toronto suburb but was keenly aware how lucky she and her husband were compared to lots of their neighbours.

Being a collection of Facebook posts this book did, at times. feel overlong and repetitive but thinking back to this time in Norwich it was overlong and repetitive so this may be more accurate than annoying! 

The second book was Matthew Kneale's Roman Plague Diaries (Atlantic Books), set in Rome and focussing on the first Roman lockdown of March 2020 until early summer 2020. Again Kneale lives in an apartment in a reasonable affluent area of the city but the Italian/Roman lockdowns were more severe than others I've read and the lack of access to open spaces even for the Kneale family becomes an issue.

This book is a diary and also a meditation of being a non Italian living in the city, Italian history and politics as a whole plus also a look at how nothing in the world is actually new...

Both books were thoughtful in that they did query how people not as fortunate as themselves were coping with the rules, and they did convey the fear, oppressiveness and the way time really did seem to behave oddly. 

On the whole I preferred Kneale's taut and focussed book rather than the sprawling stream of consciousness from Rosenblum but it was great to get a more global view of the pandemic - I would like to hear more from the developing world, or even in translation to see how non English speaking world found this unsettling time.