Rwanda: From Red Earth, by Denise Uwimana

I was looking for a different book in our library when I spotted this on the shelf. I hadn't heard of this book before, so it was a fortuitous discovery.

The book is not a novel but a memoir. Denise Uwimana was born in Burundi to Rwandan parents, and grew up in the Congo. Her Tutsi parents had fled Rwanda at the time of independence in 1962, when the new government was in Hutu hands, and there was considerable unrest. However Denise returned to Rwanda at the invitation of her aunt. There she found both a job and a husband. Life was good at first, but it did not last long. Even as three sons were born to them, violence was increasing, culminating in the genocide of Tutsi at the hands of their Hutu neighbours - many of whom had been friends - in 1994. Over the space of a hundred days, more than a million Tutsi were murdered.

The book would be remarkable as an account of that genocide. More remarkable is that Denise and her sons survived, by many small occurrences that can only seem miraculous.

Even more remarkable is the account of Denise's work after the genocide. Denise is the founder of Iriba Shalom International, an organization that provides material and spiritual help to genocide survivors and their children. Their are many Tutsi widoes, since the genocide targeted men and male children. But their are also Hutu women whose husbands were in prison for their part in the genocide. The work of Denise's foundation, and indeed the government, includes recovery and reconciliation between survivors on both sides. For instance, Tutsi widows were given a cow. When that cow had a calf, the woman would give the calf to a Hutu woman. The Hutu widow would give the next calf to a Tutsi woman, and so on.

Denise was driven by her Christian faith, and the book is published by a Christian publishing house. But there are no easy platitudes here. Forgiveness did not always come easily, but it did come. It is a powerful story, and one that I was unfamiliar with as I knew of the genocide of the early 1990's, but not the path that the country had followed since.

Even more remarkably, Denise wrote the book in English, her sixth language.

She now lives in Germany with her second husband, Dr. Wolfgang Reinhardt, but continues to work for healing in Rwanda.

From Red Earth was published by Plough Publishing House, Walden, New York in 2019

Ukraine: The Gardener from Ochakov, by Andrey Kurkov

The Gardener from Ochakov is a story of time travel - but it is very specific time travel, in which the protagonist makes trips into the past to one particular time and place - the town of Ochakov, in 1957.

Igor's mother, Elena Andreevna, has hired a gardener, who lives in their shed. Stepan, the gardener, bears a mysterious and blurred tattoo which Igor helps him to decipher with the help of a computer hacker friend. As a result, Igor and Stepan visit a house in Ochakov, where they find goods hidden inside a wall, including an old Soviet policeman's uniform and a wad of now unusable roubles.

But when Igor decides to wear the uniform to a party, he finds himself inexplicably back in the past. There he meets a wine smuggler and falls in love with a married woman.

I found this book immensely enjoyable. Despite the time travel, it doesn't really fit into the genre of science fiction. The how and why of the time travel is not important. What the book does very successfully is to depict life in the Ukraine in two eras - the 1950's, when it was part of Soviet Russia, and modern times, when it is an independent country. There is a dark edge to it, especially to the part set in the past, but ultimately everything turns out well for Igor and Stepan (and, we are to be hoped, for Igor's computer hacker friend who flees to the past after blackmailing the wrong people).

The Gardener from Ochakov was translated from Russian by Amanda Love Darragh and published by Harvill Secker in Londonin 2013.

Libya: The Return, by Hisham Matar

If I was to describe the ideal author for this world reading project, it would be someone born and raised in their native country, still largely resident there, and writing a book set in that country. So I was initially a little put off when I borrowed this book from the livrary, only to read on the blurb that he was born in New York (his father was a minor Libyan diplomat there at the time), and while he returned to Tripoli at a young age, his family left Libya when he was eight. Most of the rest of his childhood was spent in Cairo until he left for boarding school in the UK, and he has spent most of his adult life in London.

It's an arrogant demand, though. I quickly found on starting the book, that Matar regards himself as Libyan through and through. And the view of Libya that the book provides makes it clear that my ideal author is an unlikely construct. Under the 42 year reign of the dictator Muammar Qaddafi, a large proportion of the country's writers and intellectuals were thrown in prison for their opposition to his regime. Many of the author's own family met this fate. His father was abducted in Cairo and imprisoned in Libya. His eventual fate remains unknown. Two of Matar's uncles and two of his cousins were also imprisoned at the same time and released only after many years. The book describes how that wrote poetry in prison. Paper was bought from guards, some of whom could be bribed, and the poems were passed from prisoner to prisoner, but always had to be destroyed, often before reaching their intended recipient. So very few of the poems written in prison survive. If this was the fate of the poems, short enough to be memorised in some cases, how much more difficult would it be to write a novel under these conditions?

Hisham Matar has written two novels - his debut, In the Country of Men, was short listed for the Man Booker Prize - but The Return is non-fiction, a gripping account of his search to find out the fate of his father. This search remains, in the end, unresolved. But along the way, besides a good deal of information on Libyan politics, a light also shines on culture, art, and the importance of family.

The Return was published in the UK in 2016 by Viking, am imprint of Penguin Books Limited, and was also published in the USA.

Colombia: Fruit of the Drunken Tree, Ingrid Rojas Contreras

I had read a book by a Colombian author early on in my world literature journey, but it was set throughout in Argentina. So it seemed appropriate to try again with something actually set in Colombia, and I found this in our local library.

It is set at the height of the time when the country is riven by violence and the name of the drug lord Pablo Escobar is on everyone's lips. Seven year old Chula and her older sister Cassandra live in an upper class gated community in the capital, Bogota, but outside their neighbourhood life is not so safe.

Petrona is a teenager from the city slums, where her family has fled after being forced off their farm in the conflict. Chula's mother hires her as a live-in-maid, and Chula tries to befriend her. At first Petrona speaks little, and Chula makes a game of counting the syllables in each sentence that Petrona speaks. Gradually Petrona warms to Chula, but there are other forces in her life, and the escalation of political violence leads them towards disaster.

Quite a few of the books I have read in this project have a background of violence. While the events described in this book were devastating, it was saved from being all gloom and doom by the perspective of the seven year old, which seemed to lighten the tone enough to make it more bearable to read. It is narrated from Chula's perspective as an older teenager herself, so has the benefit of both a child's perspective, and the viewpoint of the older Chula who is able to make sense of what happened.

While the story is a novel, it draws heavily on the personal experience of the author. Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia and now lives in California. Fruit of the Drunken Tree was published by Doubleday, New York in 2018.

Poland: Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk

Flights is an extraordinary book, winner of the Man Booker International Prize in 2018. Is it a novel,or a collection of essays? It seems to be both at the same time, and more - a collection of meditations on migration, travel and the human body.

Apparently the Polish title comes from the name of an old sect who believed that by being constantly in motion they would outwit the devil. This belief surfaces in one of the stories, in which a Russian woman suddenly leaves her home for several days, spending her time travelling back and forth on trains, and encountering an apparent madwoman, who carries this belief about constant motion.

In other fragments, Chopin's sister carries his heart back to Poland, a seventeenth century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg, and a retired professor gives lectures on Greek antiquities to cruise passengers.

Some of the stories seemed only obliquely related to the main theme, but somehow I found them always engrossing. And I was delighted to come across a few references to New Zealand!

Flights was translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft. The edition I read was published by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, in 2018 in New York.

Burundi: Small Country, by Gaël Faye

Although this book is described as a novel, it seems to have a lot in common with the life of the author. The protagonist, Gabriel (a name suspiciously similar to Gaël), was born in Burundi to a French father and a Rwandan mother. Gabriel is ten at the outset of the book in 1992, and leads a comfortable life in an ex-pat neighbourhood. That is soon to change as civil unrest breaks out both in Burundi and in neighbouring Rwanda, where an unthinkable genocide creates havoc in the lives of Gaby's Rwandan grandmother, aunt and cousins.

Burundi is supposedly a democracy but one in which it is dangerous to be elected president if the army are opposed. To a ten-year-old, the difference between Hutu and Tutsi, the two tribes between which violence breaks out, is hard to understand. The book opens with Gabriel's father explaining: they have the same country, the same language, and the same God. So why are they at war? "Because they don't have the same nose".

Seen through the perspective of a ten year old, the book recounts shocking atrocities. Nevertheless the prose is lyrical throughout, with a startling beauty to it. Eventually like the author, Gabriel and his small sister Ana are evacuated to France, although without their parents. Many years later Gabriel returns, and is reunited with his mother.

The author however moved to France with his family, including his mother, in 1995, and according to the blurb on the book, still lives in Paris. However in this article, he describes moving to Kigali in Rwanda with his part Rwandan wife. Small Country is his first novel. It won the Prix Goncourt des Lyceens in 2016. Small Country is translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone and published by Hogarth (part of the Penguin Random House group) in 2018.

Chad: The Plagues of Friendship, by Sem Miantoloum Beasnael

Chad was not an easy country from which to find a book to read. Eventually I came across this novel, and it took me a while to get through it. I read part way, and abandoned it for a while, then came back to it, at which point I had lost track of the plot enough that I started again.

The second time was easier, perhaps because I was better prepared for the fact that the English was not that great, and that there were plenty of rants about the corruption of Africans in positions of authority. The problem with the English is that the book was written in English, by someone for whom English is not his native language, even though he had higher education in America. I suspect it would have flowed better if it had been written in his native tribal tongue (of which it appears that there are a multitude in Chad) and then translated by a competent translator. An example of an error which totally changed the meaning "emphasise" when it appeared that what was meant was "empathise".

The story is supposedly told by one Nainlaou initially, but then transitions into being a written account delivered to him as told by his friend Njeleulem. However I found it hard at times to follow whose perspective was currently being told. Nainlaou, Njeleulem and Ngarbel, among others, attend school together, grow up, obtain scholarships to study in various foreign countries and return to Africa to obtain positions in various government and development organisations. Apart from that there is not a lot of plot in the sense of a true narrative arc, more of a collection of events along the way. In the book's favour, it does reveal quite a bit about Chadian culture, both in tribal villages and in the cities. There is eventually, a denouement of sorts, although it comes suddenly and rather unexpectedly - I couldn't see enough foundations laid to make the ending a coherent outcome, and it was somewhat depressing (no spoilers, though all is revealed in the blurb on the back cover).

All in all, it's not a book that I would particularly choose to read if there had been other choices available, but it could perhaps have been redeemed by some really good editing. I suspect it was self-published - I haven't heard of the publisher, 1stBooks (United States).

Sem Miantoloum Beasnael was born in Doha, Chad in 1948. He trained as a high school teacher and taught in Chad before undertaking post graduate studies in Ghana. In 1989 he went to Dallas Theological Seminary (USA) and while in the United States also graduated from the Writer's Digest School. He taught African literature and culture in Dallas, and also taught French, philosophy, history and geography, before returning to Chad to help found the Evangelical University of Chad.

St Lucia: Omeros, by Derek Walcott

For the small Caribbean island of St Lucia, I turned to poetry. Omeros, however, is not a typical poetry book, being a narrative in verse of 325 pages. For that reason, I was happy to count it as fiction. Although it is structured almost throughout in three line rhyming stanzas, the rhyme is not obvious. Normally when I read poetry, I linger over the language and read and re-read parts to appreciate them better. Wth prose, particularly novels, I prefer to read straight through, for the story.

In this case, I attempted to read the book as I would a prose novel, but I found that often the language slowed me down, as I paused to ponder a metaphor, or to make sense of a passage where the phrasing to fit the poetic structure obscured the meaning slightly.

The book has been described as a recasting of the Odyssey in a Caribbean setting. It is not however, a direct retelling - rather, a new story, or several interlinked stories, in which the author uses mythical tales for their themes and resonances. So we have two Caribbean fisherman, Achille and Hector, vying for the affections of the beautiful Helen, but there is no war fought over Helen - at one point, Omeros (Homer) appears to ask "do men still fight wars" and the answer is yes, but not for love, not for beauty.

The fisherman Achille makes a journey back in time, back to Africa, where he sees the tragedy of the slave trade, but it is not clear whether this is a real or a dreamed journey.

The book shifts about quite a bit and needs close reading to keep track of its shifts - Major Plunkett, an old soldier living on the island with his wife, muses on his past, and old wars in Europe make an appearance, along with London and the peaceful Irish spot of Glen da Lough (whose significance I did not quite follow).

In the end it returns to St Lucia and the hordes of tourists that crowd its villages and beaches, gaping at the local colour and capturing everyday life in photos as "picturesque".

I enjoyed the book but I do feel that the modern reader is unused to the genre of epic poetry, which leaves one somewhat unsure of how best to read it.

Derek Walcott was born in Saint Lucia in 1930 and was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988.He lived in St Lucia and Boston, and died in 2017. He was also an accomplished painter - the cover images of this book were painted by the author. Omeros was published in 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Nauru: Legends, Traditions and Tales of Nauru, compiled by Timothy Detudamo

Nauru is a tiny island nation in Micronesia, with a population of around 11,000 to 12,000. That does not allow for a large choice of literature. Fortunately our local library has an excellent Pasifika section, in which I found this compilation of legends and stories, along with some cultural information.

Head chief Timothy Detudamo put this collection together from oral sources in 1938. Nauru has changed a good deal since then. It became very wealthy for a brief time, when western nations descended on it to mine phosphate from centuries of guano deposits. Unfortunately the wealth was largely squandered. These days it is largely known for its use by Australia as a place to house would-be refugees arriving by boat from South East Asia.

Thus the foresight in transcribing these tales becomes even more important. I thought I knew quite a bit about the culture and languages of various Pacific Islands but it turns out that what I knew was really quite small. The islands with which I am more familiar - the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga - are Polynesian islands, but Micronesia is quite different. The names in the book, and the terms that had been left in their native language, looked quite unfamiliar, and there were aspects of the culture that are different to Polynesian culture. For instance, the Nauruans practised fish farming - they caught small fish of a certain species, and used them to stock ponds where they grew them to an edible size.

The stories here are fairly simple on the whole, and somewhat repetitive. Strife between different tribes features strongly. There is a glossary at the back of the book but often the only explanation given is "a type of food" or "a type of plant", which could be figured out from the context of the story, so it rather left me wanting to know more.

Nevertheless, I found this slim volume an intriguing introduction to a culture of which I knew very little. Legends, Traditions and Tales of Nauru was published by IPS Publications, University of the South Pacific, in 2008.

Seychelles: Echoes from the Oasis, by A R Tirant

My reading has slowed down, and blog posting has slowed down even more, as I have had a busy year so far. I have a few books in the queue for posting and will try to catch up in the next few days.

The Seychelles is a remote group of islands in the Indian Ocean. It was unpopulated until the French settled it, taking with them African slaves to work the plantations there. In 1814 the French and British were battling for trade routes to India, and a treaty was signed, making the Seychelles a British colony.

Echoes from the Oasis is set a hundred years later, in the years just before and at the start of World War I. The country's French Catholic roots are still a strong influence. Anna Savy is a young Catholic girl, the eldest daughter of a plantation overseer. When she is called to assist in the difficult birth of a younger sibling, she swears off the expected marriage. Her way out is to become a nurse, although that is a career usually reserved for lower class women. However,she falls in love with Louis, the son of the plantation owner.

The book is filled with events: a smallpox epidemic that hits the island, Louis's father's amibitions to expand into shipping cause a deadly enmity with another islander, and war also brings tragedy. Still, I thought the book could be shorter with tight editing, as there was a good deal of repetition of Anna's feelings and emotions, and of explanations of the cultural milieu at the time. Catholic angst causes Anna a good deal of trouble. The genre is historical romance and the book felt rather like woman's magazine fiction at times. (I'm not sure if women's magazines publish much fiction these days, favouring stories about "celebrities", but when I was younger, they were full of it.)

Nevertheless, the story was an enjoyable read and I learnt quite a bit about the history of a country that I was not familiar with until now. Apparently this book is planned as the first of a series and it was left quite open-ended, so there was plenty of room for follow-up. There is no "happily ever after" just yet, but perhaps that will come in book two, or book three.

A.R. Tirant was born in the Seychelles in 1958 and worked as a nurse in Victoria Hospital, Mahé (where Anna also worked in the story). She emigrated to England in 1995. I couldn't find a publisher on my copy of the book, although I did find a printer - amazon.co.uk - so it appears that this may be a self-published book. It is also available in Kindle format and was first published in 2014.

Bogota 39: New Voices from Latin America

I can't really count this book for my reading round the world project, as it is not from any one specific country, but it is an interesting overview of younger Latin American writers. Writers selected are not just from South America, but also from Mexico and the Caribbean. And not every South American country is represented - although I tend to forget it, the Guyanas (Guyana, French Guiana and Suriname) are none of them Latin American countries being British, French and Dutch colonies respectively. Also, there is no writer here from Paraguay which suggests that Paraguayan writers are thin on the ground - in fact, the coverage is a bit uneven with the largest group being from Mexico (7 authors) followed by Argentina and Colombia (6 each) and Chile (4). Peru has 3, Ecuador, Brazil and Uruguay 2 each and Bolivia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Cuba 1 each. It is the second such collection being published in 2018 out of the Hay Festival of Literature as a follow up to an earlier collection in 2007.

As for genre there is a wide range. Some are quite realistic, others are futuristic and imaginative. Most are short stories, but a surprising number are excerpts from novels, in most cases not yet published in full in English, which I found on the whole rather unsatisfying, wanting to go on and read the whole thing. And some of the short stories too felt rather fragmentary. Others however, like Diego Zuniga's "Castaways" (Chile), Juan Manuel Robles' "Valentina in the Clouds" (Peru) and Valentin Trujillo's "Forest Where there was Nothing" (Uruguay) were beautifully executed small pieces. I also loved the excerpt from Laia Jufresa's "Umami", but as I had already read the full novel, it was hard to judge whether this really worked as an excerpt.

Only a few of the authors seem to have longer works available in English, and I hope that publication in this collection will lead to longer works being available in the future, as there are certainly many talented young authors represented here.

The Importance of Stories

Living in such a dangerous and wounded world we need the best community building and peace making wisdom we can get hold of. My experience is that every religion and every culture has gifts to offer for the healing of our divided humanity. It's an ongoing task that requires disciplined listening, compassion and empathy. The death dealing divisions that so distort the human family have visited New Zealand. Stop, look, ponder.

Police Commissioner Bush said: "Let's not imagine the danger is over." He was referring to the day of the horror but the words have a larger significance. The danger is present as long as we live in ignorance of the wisdom, dreams and values of those who belong groups other than our own, as long as we are content to have our lives shaped by bigotry and hatred.

- Dr Keith Rowe, a former president of the New Zealand Methodist Church and of the NZ Council of Christians and Muslims.

For more of his comment see here.

Reading stories from other countries seemed trivial to me sometimes, but less so now. I recall a writer from South Sudan, a Christian nation, writing a story from the perspective of a North Sudanese Islamic fighter. A Kuwaiti woman wrote with sympathy from the perspective of a teenage suicide bomber. And many other writers have given me new perspectives on different cultures. We need to listen to these stories. We do not need to listen to hate-filled ranting. "What is your story, how did you get here" is a very different question to "what is your platform".

Events last Friday came horrifyingly close, geographically. But white privilege is real, and I was never in danger. Sadly that was not true for many fellow residents of my city, who made their homes here, often leaving countries where violence is a fact of everyday life, because they thought it was a safe country.

Mozambique: Woman of the Ashes, by Mia Couto

For some reason, in comments on Ann Morgan's blog, there have been suggestions that Mia Couto is not the best author to read for Mozambique. I'm not sure why. Maybe because he is white, and there is a feeling that authors of indigenous descent would better represent the country?

However I have previously read and enjoyed his books, and besides, after starting on this project, I soon realised that actually buying around 200 books to read was too big a financial commitment (especially in New Zealand where shipping costs from the UK or USA add considerably to the price of most books), so I need the help of the library. Mia Couto it is then, that's what is on our library shelves.

Woman of the Ashes is his latest and while I found it an interesting enough read, I wasn't quite as gripped by it as by some of his earlier books. It is a historical novel, apparently the first part of a trilogy set in 1894 when Ngungunyane, the last emperor of the state of Gaza, has raised an army to resist colonial rule. The book alternates between the voices of Sergeant Germano de Melo, a Portuguese, and the young girl, Imani, who has been appointed to act as his interpreter.

I found the book a little choppy at times. There are flashes of magical realism which come and go in a blink, making it more difficult to get absorbed in the story. I found Imani's part of the story a good deal more compelling than Germano's. While he acts for the Portuguese authorities, he has actually been exiled to Mozambique as punishment for taking part in a rebellion. He tells his story in letters to his superior, and I think this is what distances him somewhat from the reader.

By comparison, the book that I read for Madagascar - Beyond the Rice Fields - I found a much more compelling and fascinating book. However, I enjoyed this one enough that I will probably read parts 2 and 3 when they become available.

Woman of the Ashes was translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw and published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2018

Kosovo: My Cat Yugoslavia, by Pajtim Statovci

I could have managed without reading a book by a Kosovan author, as it is only a partially recognised state. (It is recognized by 113 UN member nations, but not fully recognized by Serbia, from which it claims independence).

However, this book kept popping up on my radar, and it looked interesting, so when I spotted it on the library shelves I decided to give it a go. The narrator, Bekim, is a Kosovan refugee in Finland, where his family fled when he was a child. He is now living on his own apart from his pet boa constrictor, which he allows to roam his apartment, even though he is terrified of snakes.

Then one night in a gay bar, he meets a talking cat, who moves in with him. What evolves from that meeting is a journey in which Bekim eventually returns to Kosovo to confront his past.

I initially thought that the cat of the title was Bekim's companion, the talking cat. But nowhere in the book is he mentioned by name, and there are other cats - the small black cat who becomes the companion of Bekim's mother, Emine, after she leaves her husband, and the cat that Bekim briefly adopts in Kosovo, although cats are despised animals there. It seemed in the end that the cat of the title is a metaphor for the whole of Yugoslavia, although it would be hard for me to put the comparison into words, as to how the narrator is explicitly comparing his troubled country to a cat.

This is the story of Bekim's mother, Emine, as much as it is Bekim's story, from her marriage at the age of 16 to a young man who is handsome and wealthy, but whom she scarcely knows. Despite being unsure at first, I found it thoroughly absorbing.

Pajtim Statovci himself left Kosovo for Finland at the age of two, which made me have reservations about the suitability of this book to represent the country. Nevertheless, it is a book as much, or more, about Kosovo as about refugees in Finland.

My Cat Yugoslavia won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize in the category Best Debut, in 2014. It has been translated into 11 languages and was published in English by Pushkin Press. It was translated from Finnish by David Hackston.

Oman: Celestial Bodies, by Jokha Alharthi

Like Kuwait, Oman has changed rapidly in recent decades as it emerged as an oil-rich nation. Economic change was accompanied by societal change, and this book traces the stories of one family during these changing decades.

It is focused on Azzan and Salima's three daughters - Mayya, Asma and Khalwa. Mayya has a secret love, who shows no interest in her, so she resigns herself to accept marriage to another man. Asma marries from a sense of duty, while Khalwa waits years for the cousin to whom she believes herself betrothed, who has emigrated to Canada where he lives, unbeknown to her, with another woman. Their lives and loves are richly depicted. But this is not just the story of the three women, but of the men of the family too, and of their other relationships. We learn of Azzan's harsh childhood, and of Mayya's husband Abdallah's life, and love for her, which is not returned.

Azzan has a secret relationship with a Bedouin woman Najir bint Shaykha (Qamar - the moon). The title of the book seems to reflect the idea of women as celestial bodies, or perhaps celestial bodies as women. A quote from an old book says "Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is closest to the matters of this lower world." And throughout the book this idea of celestial bodies gives resonance to the events that take place.

I enjoyed following the lives of the family members over several generations, and discovering lives that are richer and more complex than westerners with a superficial knowledge of Arab countries might imagine. In particular, although the three sisters were clearly expected to marry and to be subject in many ways to their husbands, the book reveals them to have greater autonomy than the reader might at first think.

Jokha Alharthi has written children's books, short fiction, and three novels in Arabic. She teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat and has completed a PhD in Classical Arabic Poetry in Edinburgh (There are many quotes from classical Arabic poetry throughout the book).

Celestial Bodies won the 2010 Best Omani Novel award. It was translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth, and published in Britain by Sandstone Press in 2018, with support from the Anglo-Omani Society and Creative Scotland.

El Salvador: One Day of Life, by Manlio Argueta

One Day of Life is a shocking book, and although it is set around the time of its publication in 1980, it seemed very relevant as the news talks of caravans of refugees from Guatemala heading for the United States border, and of American pressure for a change to the political regime in Venezuela.

In 1980 El Salvador was ruled by a brutal right wing government, backed by the United States. There had been fifty years of military rule. Fear of Communism seems to have been behind the US intervention, but this book suggests that for the majority of the peasants, it was not a political leaning towards Communism that motivated their resistance to the military regime, but a simple desire to have enough to eat and to feed their children.

The main narrator of the book is Lupe (Guadalupe), the matriarch and grandmother of a peasant family. The book follows her day from 5.30 a.m when she gets up and starts her chores, through to 5 p.m when the events related come to a resolution of sorts. From time to time, the point of view shifts to other characters, including her daughter Maria Pia, granddaughter Adolfina, and "the authorities" who are in fact, young peasant boys recruited to do the dirty work of the regime. And the action is not strictly limited to one day, as Lupe reflects on the events that have led to this day, and the hardships that the peasants experience.

Although there is a resolution, there is no happy ending. But Lupe endures her hardships with a sort of resignation. As the book says "better not to keep on thinking because it can embitter one's life".

One Day of Life was banned in El Salvador because of its negative view of the government, and the author had to go into exile in Costa Rica where he lived from 1972 to 1993 before returning to El Salvador. It was translated from Spanish by Bill Brow and published by Vintage International.

Greece: Achilles' Fiancée, by Alki Zei

I was surprised how few books from modern Greek authors were in our library, but I had a couple marked on my "to be read" list. And then this turned up on the new books display, so I decided to give it a try.

At the start of the book the narrator, Eleni, is on a train in Paris with her friends Eugene, Panos and Stephanos. This train, however, is a film set and the friends are working as extras. Eleni recalls her first long train ride, Athens to Piraeus, and then other train rides, as over the course of several weeks, the filming continues.

The Achilles of the title is a guerilla, leader of the resistance against the German occupiers of Greece during World War II, and later against the British and against the Greek government during the civil war that followed. Eleni was known to all the resistance members as "Achilles' fiancée". The book follows her story through times of imprisonment in Greece, exile in Tashkent where Greek political refugees fled, then to Moscow and eventually Paris where the book is set, sometime after the right wing military coup in Greece in 1967.

But Eleni, though a communist, grows from a young girl following what she is told, to a woman who thinks and acts for herself, and does not blindly follow the party line, even when pressured to do so by Achilles.

For a short time, I found the structure of the book a little confusing. However it quickly became clear that during breaks in the filming, Eleni is in the present as she chats to Eugene, and while the filming is taking place, she is remembering the past. The words "cut" and "sound camera action" clearly delineate the time changes. I quickly became absorbed in the story and was fascinated both by the personality of Eleni and by the events in the modern history of Greece about which I had only a vague awareness previously.

Achilles' Fiancée was first published in Greece in 1987. This edition was translated by Anatoli Fitopoulou and published by Bookboom in 2015.

Alki Zei was born in Athens in 1925. Her books are mainly based on her personal experiences, and she herself spent time as a political refugee in the Soviet Union and Paris. While the book is semi-autobiographical, however, it felt universal in the humanity and stories of the characters, both the main characters and the many others who form part of their story.

Kuwait: The Hidden Light of Objects, by Mai Al-Nakib

When I can find only one book from a particular country, the quality can be a bit hit and miss. That wasn't a problem with Mai Al-Nakib's luminous short story collection, The Hidden Light of Objects. Ten "vignettes" alternate with the ten stories in this collection, which give a vivid picture of life in Kuwait as it develops from a traditional fishing village into a cosmopolitan oil-exporting nation, and then, with the Iraqi invasion, becomes a place of horror and war, and increasing fundamentalism.

There are objects a-plenty to carry the weight of the title. In "Chinese Apples" a young girl collects story objects - objects about which she spins imaginative tales which she relates to her younger sister. The story is a lamentation for the loss of her mother, the loss of innocence. In "Amerika's Box" another young girl, named in gratitude for America's role in resisting the Iraqi invasion, has a box in which she collects objects that represent America to her. But her name gradually becomes a liability as attitudes towards America change, particularly after 9/11. And there are many more significant objects in other stories - a compass, a diary, a stamp bearing the image of an elephant, a straw hat with a red ribbon.

While these stories are set against a background of Islam, it is a far less intrusive presence than in books I have read from other Middle Eastern countries. The characters in these books have an abiding interest in the wider world, in literature, culture, music and so on from all around the globe. If the young girls take up wearing the burqa, it is with reluctance and under pressure from an increasingly fundamentalist school and social environment. One senses that the author, too, has a liberal outlook on life.

Mai Al-Nakib was born in Kuwait in 1970. She holds a PhD in English literature from Brown University in the US and teaches postcolonial studies and comparative literature at Kuwait University. The Hidden Light of Objects was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing and won the 2014 First Book Award from the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

There is a Country: New Fiction from the New Nation of South Sudan

It's been a while since I posted here and in that time I have read far less than usual. I have been involved in house hunting and currently with one home purchased and one not yet sold, I have two gardens to maintain. Plus, I have been reading some books that are not related to my "Round the World" project. And then there was Christmas..

Still I do have a few books to catch up on reviewing, and this slim volume from South Sudan is one of them. South Sudan only became an independent country in 2011,, and the book was published in 2013 so it was fairly quick off the mark. However it is now out of print and hard to locate, and I haven't come across any alternatives. The conditions there are likely to make it difficult for anyone to publish a full length novel for some time.

There is an interesting introduction written by the editor, Nyol Lueth Tong, who was born in South Sudan but later became a refugee in northern Sudan and Egypt. At the time the book was published, he was at Duke University in the United States.

In the introduction he says "The North has been painted as Islamic and Arabic, while the South has been characterized as Christian and African, and regionally part of East Africa... In reality, however... in the South, more than sixty languages are spoken, and although both Islam and Christianity are practiced, local belief systems dominate the spiritual realm. Moreover, the last several decades of war have forced millions of Southerners to flee their homes... South Sudanese culture, in other words, is a strikingly hard to define thing."

It may be hard to define, but this collection makes a strong contribution towards introducing it to the world. It is to be expected that many of the stories focus on conflict, although unexpectedly, one, "Holy Warrior" by David L Lukudu takes the viewpoint of a soldier for the North Sudanese army. Others show the life of women and teenagers displaced by the fighting. Romantic relationships also feature in several of the stories.

A couple of pieces were different from the rest. "Lexicographicide" by Taban Lo Liyong is an unusual experimental piece which discusses the writing of a dictionary of the Zed language, the language of a fictional island of 125,000 people. The other piece, which ends the volume, is in verse. "Tall Palms", by Arif Gamal, is an excerpt from a longer work "Morning in Serra Mattu: A Nubian Ode". It is a narrative and lyrical work featuring a large boa constrictor, and forms a satisfying contrast to the fighting in the rest of the book.

"There is a Country" was published in 2013 by McSweeney's in San Francisco.