Reading the World: bibliograpy

Mexico
Signs preceding the end of the world Yuri Herrera

Japan
The Nakano Thrift Shop Hiromi Kawakami

Ireland
The Spinning Heart Donal Ryan

Yemen
Hurma Ali Al-Muqri

Sweden
A Man Called Ove Fredrik Backman

USA
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee

Iran
Persepolis Marjane Satrapi

Colombia
Of Love and Other Demons Gabriel García Márquez

Nigeria
Stay With Me Ayòbámi Adébáyò

Italy
The Beautiful Summer Cesare Pavese

Spain
Such Small Hands Andrés Barba

Signs preceding the end of the world

Country: Mexico
Author: Yuri Herrera
Translator: Lisa Dillman
Book: Signs preceding the end of the world

When I picked up Yuri Herrera's Signs preceding the end of the world, I probably should have paid more attention to the title. This is a 2009 book about a young Mexican woman, Makina, who illegally crosses from her home country into the US. Topical even when I read it at the end of October, given Donald Trump's promise to build a wall along the US-Mexico border and deport all illegal immigrants. Now, the title seems grimly, ironically prescient.

I actually chose this novel by chance. Well, not quite chance. I was browsing the fiction section for a short book. No more than about a centimetre thick, however many pages that works out as. I wanted one of those novellas where all the words matter and there's something brilliant about its brevity. This certainly fits that bill; its story, too, is fascinating, giving an insight into the human cost involved in such a journey – required reading, I might suggest, for the incoming president.

Signs preceding the end of the world is a realistic tale but with a mythological quality. It opens with a sinkhole swallowing up a man, car and dog. 'I'm dead,' are Makina's first words, who is only just spared a similar fate. As she embarks on a quest to find her brother in America, there's a feeling that this could in fact all be an allegory about passing from life to death. It's certainly about leaving behind a past life for a new one. Interesting, too, that these migrants have to pass across water, so symbolic of rebirth. The physical crossing of the river is fraught, and Makina doesn't make it without falling in: 'the world turned cold and green and filled with invisible water monsters.' But she reaches the USA, where she experiences snow for the first time, strange fried food, and is called scum'by 'a huge redheaded anglo who stank of tobacco'.

One of the most striking things about this novel was Herrera's non-standard vocabulary, which features a rich amalgam of anglo-Mexican and newly coined words. Lisa Dillman explores the challenge of translating this unusual lexicon, particularly how to capture the essence of the neologism 'jarchar', a word that comes from Mozarabic poetry, used all over the place here and meaning 'to leave'. She chooses the word 'verse', to suggest its poetic roots and the idea of motion – traverse, reverse, converse. And of course, it points to the wider universe, encompassing the sense that this one story of one woman in a specific time and place in fact tells us important things about identity, culture and today's world.

So that's the first country and first book from my Reading the World project. Mexico, tick! Next up, Japan.

United Palace, New York, 2016

Head to 175th Street and your eye may well be caught by the United Palace – yes, the building on the corner with the signs. What is it, I hear you ask? Good question, and one I asked too. The ornate, eclectic facade and curious shape gives little clue to identity; I read later that its architecture has been described as 'Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-Eclectic-Rococo-Deco'. Seems fair.

Luckily it was Open House Day in New York, so the friend who lived locally and I could head in to take a look around. It was intriguing. A foyer lavish enough to rival an actual royal palace, a staircase grand enough for a Sunset Boulevard-style entrance. And a row of sayings plastered across one wall: 'Life takes from the taker and gives to the giver'; 'There is nothing so bad as a good excuse. The better the excuse, the worse it is.'; 'When you discover who you are, it doesn't matter what you've been.' I felt like I had stepped into a self-help book.

Turns out these, er, gems are the handiwork of Reverend Ike, a TV evangelist who bought the United Palace in 1969. Here's another of his nuggets of wisdom: 'The best thing you can do for the poor is not to be one of them.' It's capitalism-meets-religion, a sentiment that somehow seems to epitomise that very American 'fend for yourself' attitude, the idea that by wanting money enough, you will make the dollars flow in to your bank account. But his congregation flourished and his broadcasts reached 2.5 million people.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a TV evangelist would make his religious home in a former movie palace. The United Palace was originally an extravagant 3,000-seater theatre, which, for the best part of four decades from 1930, attracted audiences for films and vaudeville. Now, Reverend Ike's son owns the United Palace, and it's used as a church, live music venue and cultural centre. Bob Dylan has played there, so have the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle. Fantabulous, as Reverend Ike once said.

 

Reading the World

The challenge? Read one book from every country in the world. Accepted. Inspired by writer Ann Morgan's blog, A Year of Reading the World, I've decided to embark on a literary tour of the globe. I'm not aiming to finish it in a year, but I am going to try to read a book from each of the 196 countries that she covers – here's an entry on how she came up with the list. I might add places (ie some of the territories not on the initial line-up); I'll see how I go. I have, however, decided that books I've already read don't count towards the final tally, although I might include them in my bibliography. Any suggestions of the best fiction to read from other countries, available in English translation, gratefully received.

Music for Life

100 works to carry you through. That's the subtitle of music critic Fiona Maddocks's latest book, Music for Life, which emulates those wonderful poetry volumes 'Staying alive' and 'Being alive'.  (Probably others, too, but those are the books I own and know.) Those themed collections offer poetic advice and musings on various life themes; this book does the same with music. It starts at 'Childhood, Youth' and ends with 'And Yet… Unfinished Works' (and a 'Last Word'), taking in areas like 'Land, Sea and Sky' and 'Journeys, Exile' along the way. Of course, reading about a piece of music isn't the same as hearing it, but the prose is such a joy to read that it becomes spiritual nourishment in its own right. The choices are fascinating, sidestepping the obvious for something a little more personal, although not stubbornly so. I've been inspired to go and listen, and that surely is the point.

Notes from a long flight

For us fearful-in-turbulence flyers, gorging on the in-flight entertainment film and TV is not a bad way to take our minds off the thought that there's nothing between the plane and … no… stop thinking about it. On my recent jaunt to Canada, I caught up with the Steve Jobs biopic. I've become increasingly cynical about big-budget silver-screen dramas portraying real lives, which tend to sentimentality (the instagram-filtered Theory of Everything) or simplification (the partial whitewash of The Imitation Game). Good, imaginatively-filmed documentary is just so much better. Anyway, however much the tranquilising glass of red wine gave me er, rose-tinted glasses, I found Aaron Sorkin's smartly scripted take on the Apple entrepeneur's story to be compelling from start to finish.

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Once back on terra firma (hallelujah!),  it was good to hear that the film even convinced one of the two tech geeks in my family, my Dad – although Apple fiend that he is, he could also point out the liberties that had been taken in the name of art. Computers were always a part of my childhood, as was watching Formula One with Dad. Now, if you want to really see how to do biography on film, watch Senna. It features so much previously unseen, close-up real-life footage of the ill-fated Brazilian driver that you start to wonder if it was faked. (It wasn't.)

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The aesthetics of technology was a theme explored in Steve Jobs, and the importance of artistry found its way in at other moments too. At one point, the famously difficult and demanding Jobs tells Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, of the time he met the conductor Seiji Ozawa, at Tanglewood. Jobs asks Ozawa what a conductor does that a metronome can't. (Beat the living s*** out of you, replies Wozniak.) The conductor's answer was more philosophical, and I hope, for sake of orchestral musicians everywhere, more realistic: 'The musicians play their instruments. I play the orchestra.'

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Seiji Ozawa clearly moves in famous circles. A book just out chronicles his conversations about music with the great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, himself a lifelong music fan. I've not had a chance to read the whole book – perhaps on the next long-haul flight – but it begins in minute detail, picking apart a remarkable concert at Carnegie Hall in 1962. Leonard Bernstein turned to the audience to explain that he didn't at all agree with the interpretation of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 that he was about to conduct. Bernstein added: 'I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept, and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould.'

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Glenn Gould was an obsessive, visionary maverick, who first made a splash with his 1955 recording of JS Bach's Goldberg Variations. A fascinating documentary Genius Within: the Inner Life of Glenn Gould lets us in on his tricky private world and tries to trace the roots of his unique talent. And the Canadian pianist's career was shaped by his strong interest in technology: he withdrew from live concerts in favour of the studio, championed post-production work done on recordings, and believed that one day we would all be able to edit our own recordings (as we now can, easily, on our PCs and Macs). Interesting, then, that JS Bach was reputedly Steve Jobs's favourite classical composer, that the two Gould Goldberg Variations recordings of '55 and 1981 his go-to versions. 'The first is an exuberant, young, brilliant piece, played so fast it’s a revelation,' Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson. 'The later one is so much more spare and stark. You sense a very deep soul who’s been through a lot in life. It’s deeper and wiser.”

A Banff panorama from Sulphur Mountain

Banff

I've just been lucky enough to go to Banff, Canada for work. What a stunning place! I'll be writing a feature about the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Banff International String Quartet Competition 2016 for BBC Music Magazine's November issue. The music and musicians were as inspiring as the views. Some wonderful musical discoveries were made over the past few days, and I'll keeping a lookout for many of the quartets I heard.