Podcast

Episode 13: Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War

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The Balkan TrilogyIn July of 1939, at the age of 31, the British writer Olivia Manning met Reggie Smith, who was on leave in England from his position as British Council lecturer in Bucharest, Romania. They were married the next month, and, just a few days after the ceremony, found out that Reggie was recalled to Bucharest. They apparently left in a matter of hours and arrived in Bucharest on September 3, the day Britain declared war on Germany. Soon the couple found themselves moving from Romania to Greece (arriving there not long before Greece entered the war), to Egypt and finally to Palestine as the war consumed Eastern Europe.

She memorialized these experiences with her husband in two trilogies of novels, The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, which follow Harriet and Guy Pringle. Though the series of novels, known collectively as The Fortunes of War, are not strictly autobiographical, the Pringles follow a similar course as Manning and her husband did a few decades before.

The Levant TrilogyThe first book of the Balkan Trilogy, The Great Fortune, was published in 1960, and was followed by The Spoilt City in 1962 and Friends and Heroes in 1965. In the 1970s, she published The Levant Trilogy, which began with The Danger Tree in 1977, The Battle Lost and Won in 1978, and The Sum of Things in 1980.

Olivia Manning died on July 23, 1980.

NYRB Classics published their edition of The Balkan Trilogy in January of 2010 and their edition of The Levant Trilogy in June of 2014. And those are the books we’ll be talking about in Episode 13 of The Mookse and the Gripes podcast.

In Episode 14 we will be talking about John Williams’ Augustus, which was just released this past week. With that, we will have talked about each of John Williams’ three masterworks.

Please send us your thoughts and we’ll share them on the show.

Bonus Episode: NYRB Classics’ Late 2014 Releases

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In this episode we look at what NYRB Classics will be releasing in the first part of 2014 (and a bit beyond).

  • Intro
  • Brief discussion of each book (the individual times are below): 03:20
  • Our most anticipated titles: 49:48

Here are the 20 books you can look forward to in the near future, along with their tentative release dates at the time of recording:

  • (03:20): The Burning of the World, by Béla Zombory-Moldován — August 5, 2014
  • (05:41): Augustus, by John Williams — August 19, 2014
  • (09:08): The Captain’s Daughter, by Alexander Pushkin — September 2, 2014
  • (10:44): Totempole and Conversations with Beethoven, by Sanford Friedman — September 2, 2014
  • (16:40): The Use of Man, by Aleksandar Tišma — September 9, 2014
  • (16:58): Journey by Moonlight, by Antal Szerb — September 16, 2014
  • (20:58): You’ll Enjoy It When you Get There: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor — September 16, 2014
  • (21:19): On the Abolition of All Political Parties, by Simone Weil — September 30, 2014
  • (23:27): In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, by William H. Gass — October 7, 2014
  • (25:30): Tristana, by Benito Pérez Galdós — October 14, 2014
  • (27:53): The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories of Tove Jansson — October 21, 2014
  • (31:43): The Land Breakers, by John Ehle — November 4, 2014
  • (34:25): Midnight in the Century, by Victor Serge — December 9, 2014
  • (36:52): Zama, by Antonio di Benedetto — January 13, 2015
  • (38:08): Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories of Silvina Ocampo — January 27, 2015
  • (41:32): Ending Up and Take a Girl Like You, by Kingsley Amis — February 3, 2015
  • (45:34): Primitive Man as Philosopher, by Paul Radin — February 10, 2015
  • (48:00): The Door, by Magda Szabó — February 17, 2015

Release dates can change. In fact, some of these have already changed. I keep a relatively up-to-date list of release dates of forthcoming books on the NYRB Classics GoodReads pages, which you can see here.

Other books or artists brought up in the podcast:

  • The Mad and the Bad, by Jean-Patrick Manchette
  • The Balkan Trilogy, by Olivia Manning
  • The Levant Trilogy, by Olivia Manning
  • Butcher’s Crossing, by John Williams
  • Stoner, by John Williams
  • László Krasznahorkai
  • Imre Kertész
  • Gyula Krúdy
  • Dezsö Kosztolányi
  • On Being Blue, by William H. Gass
  • Luis Buñuel
  • Fair Play, by Tove Jansson
  • The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
  • The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
  • Memoirs of a Revolutionary, by Victor Serge
  • Where There’s Love There’s Hate, by Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares
  • The Other, by Thomas Tryon
  • The Green Man, by Kingsley Amis
  • Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artermis Cooper
  • The Broken Road, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Episode 12: Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable

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IrretrievableNYRB Classics published their edition of Irretrievable in February of 2011, and it is the book we’ll be talking about in Episode 12 of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast.

I’ll get show notes on this post in due time. Meanwhile, here is the NYRB Classics blurb:

Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany’s greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife’s deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years—only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve.

How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane’s great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters’ own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. Irretrievable is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.

In Episode 13 we will be talking about Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy. Please send us your thoughts and we’ll share them on the show.

Episode 11: J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country

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A-Month-in-the-CountryNYRB Classics published their edition of A Month in the Country in October of 2000, and it is the book we’ll be talking about in Episode 11 of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast.

I’m going to get nostalgic for a moment. It’s only been about five years, but I remember feeling cold back in February 2009. I don’t like February that much because it’s cold and dark. Winter is not “loitering around the corner,” as it is in this book; it’s come home to roost. I remember simply reading the title of a book, A Month in the Country. The cover suggested warmth and reprieve, and I wanted that, even if it be just an idyll. As it turned out, the book was perfect, so perfect I look back on the day in February when I read it as a moment of renewal in and of itself. This melancholy books, that touches on happiness, is one of my favorite books.

In Episode 12 we will be talking about Theodor Fontane’s Irretrievable. Please send us your thoughts and we’ll share them on the show.

Bonus Episode: NYRB Classics’ Early 2014 Releases

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In this episode we look at what NYRB Classics will be releasing in the first part of 2014 (and a bit beyond).

While we do discuss all fourteen of the titles, the fun part of the episode is when Brian and I step back and list our top five most anticipated releases from this group. There’s some great stuff coming, of course, so this was a bit difficult. Please let us know what you’re most looking forward to.

  • Intro
  • Brief discussion of each book (the individual times are below): 00:03:27
  • Brian courageously offers the “least anticipated”: 00:31:45
  • Our top five anticipated titles: 00:37:50

Here are the fourteen books we talk about:

  • (00:03:27): The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos, by Patrick Leigh Fermor — March 4, 2014
  • (00:04:27): On Being Blue, by William H. Gass — March 18, 2014
  • (00:06:09): The Use of Man, by Aleksandar Tišma — April 29, 2014
  • (00:08:08): Shakespeare’s Montaigne — April 8, 2014 (Brian and I both muddled this one. It’s the translation of Montaigne that Shakespeare would have read.)
  • (00:11:07): During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, by Joan Chase — April 15, 2014
  • (00:13:10): Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy, by Olivia Manning — May 13, 2014
  • (00:14:40): Agostino, by Alberto Moravia — July 8, 2014
  • (00:17:06): Last Words from Montmartre, by Qiu Miaojin — June 3, 2014
  • (00:18:46): Zama, by Antonio di Benedetto — October 21, 2014
  • (00:20:16): The Mad and the Bad, by Jean-Patrick Manchette — June 17, 2014
  • (00:22:08): Fear, by Gabriel Chevallier — May 20, 2014
  • (00:25:20): The Professor and the Siren, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa — July 15, 2014
  • (00:27:48): You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There: The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Taylor — August 12, 2014
  • (00:30:05): The Captain’s Daughter, by Alexander Pushkin — August 19, 2014

Episode 10: Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider

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The-Black-SpiderNYRB Classics published their edition of The Black Spider in October of 2013, and it is the book we’ll be talking about in Episode 10 of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast.

Vainglorious people, doomed children, a black spider — the green man is coming, and through the ages enough people have made pacts with him that we are all in his debt. So clean your homes, folks, and your souls. We are about to learn our lesson from Jeremias Gotthelf’s 1843 novella The Black Spider.

In Episode 11 we will be talking about J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country. Please send us your thoughts and we’ll share them on the show.

Episode 9: John Williams’s Stoner

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StonerNYRB Classics published their edition of Stoner in June of 2006, and it is the book we’ll be talking about in Episode 9 of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast.

In 1965, John Williams published Stoner, a novel about a professor of English named William Stoner, a relatively nondescript person whom no one will remember much after his death. The novel did not do well, selling only 2,000 copies when it was first published. However, periodically since its publication someone has come forward declaring it a masterpiece. But those sentiments also seemed to go away without anyone paying any particular attention. That’s all changed recently. This past year, according to Publishers Weekly, Stoner has sold over 50,000 copies and become a world-wide best seller.

In Episode 10 we will be doing a Halloween special with Jeremias Gotthelf’s The Black Spider.

Episode 8: Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration and The Green Man

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The-AlterationThis month, we are joined by Nick During of NYRB Classics to discuss Kingsley Amis’s novels The Alteration and The Green Man.

We do apologize to you and to Nick, though, because for some reason only half of our discussion was recorded. Brian and I did get back together a few weeks later (finding time was difficult) and did what we could to cover some of what we discussed.

The-Green-Man

In the Fall of 2012, NYRB Classics began a project to release new editions of ten Kingsley Amis novels, starting with his comic debut, Lucky Jim, and his Booker Prize winning The Old Devils. Recently they released two more, venturing this time to Amis’s work with a science fiction/alternate history novel in The Alteration and a classic ghost story in The Green Man.

NYRB Classics published these editions of The Alteration and The Green Man in May of 2013, and they are the books we’ll be talking about in Episode 8 of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast.

In Episode 9 we will be returning to the first author we discussed on this podcast and discuss John William’s magnificent Stoner. If you have any thoughts on John Williams or Stoner, we’d love to hear from you via email, via comments, or via Twitter. Perhaps we can set up a Skype call to pull some sound bites of your thoughts.

Show Notes (53:06)

  • Intro
  • A look at what NYRB Classics has in store (03:13)
  • Bio of Kingsley Amis (06:41)
  • Brief glimpse at Lucky Jim and The Old Devils (11:45)
  • Synopses of The Green Man and The Alteration (14:16)
  • Discussion of The Alteration (18:05)
  • Discussion of The Green Man (35:29)

Some Links

Episode Credits

  • Co-Host Trevor Berrett
  • Co-Host Brian Berrett
  • Guest Nick During of NYRB Classics
  • Introduction Music — “Where We Fall We’ll Lie” by Jeff Zentner, from his album The Dying Days of Summer (used with permission)
  • Outro Music — “Where I’m From” by Jeff Zentner, from his album The Dying Days of Summer (used with permission)

Bonus Episode: Best Translated Book Award

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For this bonus episode of The Mookse and the Gripes Podcast, Trevor is joined by Tara of booksexyreview.com to discuss the Best Translated Book Award, in particular this year’s shortlist.

Show Notes:

  • Literature in Translation: Our Stories
  • A Brief History of the Best Translated Book Award (00:06:35)
  • Past Winners, Finalists, and Random Tangents (00:09:10)
  • The 2013 Shortlist (00:34:38)
  • Books That Didn’t Make It But Should Have (00:36:14)
  • The Planets (00:47:28)
  • Prehistoric Times (00:51:52)
  • The Colonel (00:56:50)
  • Satantango (01:01:40)
  • Autoportrait (01:07:42)
  • A Breath of Life (01:10:33)
  • The Hunger Angel (01:13:07)
  • Maidenhair (01:16:57)
  • Transit (01:19:07)
  • My Father’s Book (01:21:03)

We talk about — often quickly — a lot of books by a lot of authors, since we decided to go back in time to give a bit of history of the award. We did not intend to bring up so many books, but I guess this is what happens when two people get together to discuss books they love. We understand that many listeners may feel unmoored as we speed around, talking about books by authors from all over the world.

In an effort to help interested listeners find a foothold and follow-up on any of the books that sounded interesting, below is a list of each book or author we talk about other than those shortlisted for this year’s Best Translated Book award, in the general order in which they are brought up. We hope this helps!

[This list is still in the works. It will include more information as well as links to further information. As it stands, here is a simple list, which I will be updating as I collect information.]

  • Censoring an Iranian Love Story, by Shahriar Mandanipour, tr. from the Persian by Sara Khalill
  • Imre Kertész
  • Ghosts, by César Aira, tr. from the Spanish by Chris Andrews
  • Roberto Bolaño
  • Happy Moscow, by Andrey Platonov, tr. from the Russian by Robert Chandler
  • Basti, by Intizar Husain, tr. by Frances W. Pritchett
  • The True Deceiver, by Tove Jannson, tr. by Thomas Teal
  • Guantanamo, by Dorothea Dieckmann, tr. by Tim Morh
  • The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, tr. by Natash Wimmer
  • Ravel, by Jean Echenoz, tr. by Linda Coverdale
  • Montano’s Malady, by Enrique Vila-Matas, tr. by Jonathan Dunne
  • The Assistant, by Robert Walser, tr. by Susan Bernofsky
  • Sunflower, by Gyula Krudy, tr. by John Batki
  • Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, tr. by Anne Born
  • Missing Soluch, by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, tr. by Kamran Rasteger
  • Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, tr. by Lydia Davis
  • Tranquility, by Attila Bartis, tr. by Imre Goldstein
  • 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, tr. by Natasha Wimmer
  • Nazi Literature in the Americas, by Roberto Bolaño, tr. by Chris Andrews
  • By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño, tr. by Chris Andrews
  • “Mexican Manifesto” (not mentioned by name), by Roberto Bolaño, tr. by Laura Healey
  • Jack Kerouac
  • Victor Serge
  • Stefan Zweig
  • The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven, tr. by Dalya Bilu
  • Memories of the Future, by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, tr. by Joanne Turnbull
  • The Tanners, by Robert Walser, tr. by Susan Bernofksy
  • The Twin, by Gerbrand Bakker, tr. by David Colmer
  • Wonder, by Hugo Claus, tr. by Michael Heim
  • The Literary Conference, by César Aira, tr. by Katherine Silver
  • An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by César Aira, tr. by Chris Andrews
  • Varamo, by César Aira, tr. by Chris Andrews
  • The Seamstress in the Wind, by César Aira, tr. by Rosalie Knecht
  • How I Became a Nun, by César Aira, tr. by Chris Andrews
  • The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira, by César Aira, tr. by Katherine Silver
  • Agaat, by Mariene Van Niekerk, tr. by Michiel Heyns
  • Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck, tr. by Susan Bernofsky
  • A Life on Paper: Stories, by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud, tr. by Edward Gauvin
  • The Jokers, by Albert Cossery, tr. by Anna Moschovakis
  • Hocus Bogus, by Romain Gary (as Emile Ajar), tr. by David Bellos
  • Stone Upon Stone, by Wieslaw Mysliwski, tr. by Bill Johnston
  • Lightning, by Jean Echenoz, tr. by Linda Coverdale
  • Scars, by Juan José Saer, tr. by Steve Dolph
  • I Am a Japanese Writer, by Danny LaFerriere, tr. by David Homel
  • In Red, by Magdalena Tulli, tr. by Bill Johnston
  • Kafka’s Leopards, by Moacyr Scliar, tr. by Thomas O. Beebee
  • The Polish Boxer, by Eduardo Halfon, tr. by Daniel Hahn
  • Drowned, by Therese Bohman, tr. by Marlaine Delargy
  • Amsterdam Stories, by Nescio, tr. by Damion Searls
  • The Hare, by César Aira, tr. by Nick Caistor
  • Shantytown, by César Aira, tr. by Chris Andrews
  • Dublinesque, by Enrique Vila-Matas, tr. by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey
  • My Struggle: Book One, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. by Don Bartlett
  • The Traveler of the Century, by Andrés Neuman, tr. by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
  • The Map and the Territory, by Michel Houellebecq, tr. by Gavin Bowd
  • My Two Worlds, by Sergio Chejfec, tr. by Margaret Carson
  • The Dark, by Sergio Chejfec (not yet translated)
  • Demolishing Nisard, by Eric Chevillard, tr. by Jordan Stump
  • War & War, by László Krasznahorkai, tr. by George Szirtes
  • The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai, tr. by George Szirtes
  • Animalinside, by László Krasznahorkai, tr. by Ottilie Mulzet
  • Suicide, by Edouard Levé, tr. by Jan Steyn
  • Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector, tr. by Alison Entrekin
  • The Hour of the Star, by Clarice Lispector, tr. by Benjamin Moser
  • The Dream of the Celt, by Mario Vargas Llosa, tr. by Edith Grossman
  • The Silent House, by Orhan Pamuk, tr. by Robert Finn
  • December, by Alexander Kluge, tr. by Martin Chalmers