A Simple Twist of Fate

"A Simple Twist of Fate" Novel by Jan Ondřej Havlak, 1921, Krilovioc & Hrbski Vidavatel, Blansko, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, Hardcover, 508 pages, no graphics.
Mr. Havlak is an extremely talented writer, his book is imaginative and well written, interesting and beautiful ... for me, a very pleasant read. Strange novel that depicts, describes, documents and details a twelve hour period that starts one Wednesday evening at eight, part of the ongoing love story between Karla Kvitova, 21, a beautiful medical student and Horymir Klima, 27, a talented musician (saxophone player) from a wealthy local family. The unnamed location may be České Budějovice, on the Vltava. From the opening scene when "they sat together in the park" through their walk by the old canal, past the arcade all the way to a strange hotel where, later, Horymir wakes up and the room is bare, feeling the emptiness inside and hearing the clicking of the clock and then hunting Karla with the help of a blind man at the gate (holding a cup with a few coins), finally ending up at "the waterfront docks, where the sailors all come in", it is a great example of stream-of-consciousness writing, then, a new and revolutionary method of creation. The book ends just a couple of minutes shy of eight in the morning, on Thursday, when Cymbeline walks by with a parrot that talks and our hero concludes that all he experienced (or imagined) ought to be blamed on a simple twist of fate, one to which he could not relate. Yes.
I read and reviewed this volume as part me cataloguing and creating an inventory of the books found as part of the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first entry of this blog).

The Colours of Lennox

"The Colours of Lennox" novel by Ben McGrenatleyson, 1899, Cauldron Publishing, Printing and Issuing, Ayr, Scotland, Hardcover, 412 pages, one drawing. Great read, interesting story, well written will leave you wanting more from where this comes from.The hero of the story is Craig Coulton described as tall, with dark-red hair, of a strong and handsome figure with a permanent brooding look, a man of few words and firm beliefs. He has a small shop on Hunt Street in downtown Swindon,  where he makes, sales, cleans and mends gloves. Craig lives alone in the small apartment above the store, his only friends are the lads he has pints at night at the Thistle and Whistle, around the corner on Victoria Road. One day, a formidable lady of noble bearing and great poise walks into the shop asking for Rowan's Goatskin Gloves, "light burgundy or dark ocher, please!". The novel takes now a fantastic turn, Craig has a psychotic episode seeming to fly high above the North Wessex Downs searching for the meaning of life and stealing pens off other people's desks. When he comes to, he is alone in the shop holding a piece of white chalk, on the floor, in front of him, chalked in neat handwriting the words "Santiago Colors". Within two weeks Craig sells everything he owns and books passage to Chile. Once in Santiago de Chile, he leases a workshop in the Macul neighborhood and starts experimenting with pigments in chalk. In less than a year he opens a shop with the most exquisite colored chalk sticks anybody could have ever dreamed of and calls it "The Colours of Lennox". His commercial success brings fame and fortune and invitations to the noblest houses in town where he meets, courts and marries Maria Fernanda Lucia Esmeralda Conubles Flores Fernandez y Cocq. The novel ends with Craig sitting on the veranda of his hacienda listening to the Gramophone playing "The Bonnie Banks o'Loch Lomond" watching his three sons and two daughters drawing.

I read and reviewed this volume as part me cataloguing and creating an inventory of the books found as part of the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first entry of this blog).

It is Cold and I am Old

"It is Cold and I am Old" poetry by Yavana Kello, 1928, Krompton & Poe Printing, Murdo, South Dakota, Hardcover, 102 pages, foreword by Joe Bellnow.
According to the very friendly foreword to the book, this is the second volume of poetry Kello published. It turns out that Kello is twenty-three, of Scandinavian heritage, an heir to a scented soap and tooth-powder fortune and lives in a comfortable house in West-Fargo, Cass County, North Dakota. Kello is very unlikely to suffer of cold, hunger, thirst or old age ... so his poetry, although technically refined, neat and polished comes from a fake place. It appears that the author frequently stays out late into the night with friends drinking and having a great time and upon returning home, after a shower and a great breakfast of steak and eggs, takes his beautiful, young fiancee out for a drive in the hills and to have lunch at the country club. Mr. Kello's literary workday does not start until about four when he produces a couple of broken-heart and broken-dreams creations and then goes to the billiard room to relax.
All poems are written in very disciplined quatrains with an ABAB rhyme schema that makes them roll easily off the tongue and are very pleasant to the ear. After a while though, even the most enthusiastic reader finds they sound hollow and "hears vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme". I never found (not that I looked too hard) the first volume of Kello's poems and would not recommend his books to anybody anyway.

I read and reviewed this volume as part me cataloguing and creating an inventory of the books found as part of the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first entry of this blog).

Queen Laiya and the Circular Minute

"Queen Laiya and the Circular Minute" by Shivo Paliterri, in Italian, 1901, Casa Editirce Onero Belozzo, Catanzaro, Calabria, Hardcover, 644 pages, no graphics. This historical novel seems to be one of a series written by Paliterri, a baker by trade, autodidact historian and author by vocation.  The book deals with the last days of the last ruler of Batruria, Queen Laiya, from the moment the nine ships carrying Duke Moditereo's army land on the western shore, followed by the two battles (Batruria won the first, the second was undecided but horrifically cruel and bloody, both combatants losing upwards of half of their soldiers) until the capturing of the Queen betrayed by her own guard. The cause of the invasion was Agate, the curse and blessing of the kingdom that has the only known world deposit of indigo Agate of exceptional quality said to have mysterious and miraculous powers. Queen Laiya is a well-drawn character with actions of clear motivation, she is made on purpose attractive to the reader but so is, strangely, the Duke, her supposed antagonist. The main narrative is spiked with too many subplots (mostly romantic entanglements of some secondary characters) but remains a pleasant and entertaining read. The descriptions of Batrurian landscape, military equipment of that era and Agate mining and processing are fascinating. The reward for the treacherous captain of the Queens Guard was a wagon on which he could load as much Agate as it would hold with the condition to make it out of the kingdom by nightfall. Of course, in a totally predictable act of poetic justice, the captain falls to his death when the wagon proves to too heavy for the plank bridge he used as a shortcut to the border. His girlfriend, who travels with him,  clings to a rope and is rescued by a goat Sheppard who hears her screams (they later marry and have nine children of which one is the great-great-grandfather of the author).

I read and reviewed this volume as part me cataloguing and creating an inventory of the books found as part of the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first entry of this blog).

Free Tree and Other Stories

"Free Tree and Other Stories" by Aayram Kesh, in Pashto, 1901, Omaid Shah Publishing, Chora, Oruzgan Province, Afghanistan. Softcover, 86 pages, no graphics. The book is printed in obvious modest conditions: no frills, no thrills, very poor stock (pulp-like) but the twenty-eight short stories are excellent. Mr Kesh has a raw but profound talent, he is a sensitive writer with ideas and concepts that go way beyond any expectation. The stories are really short, the longest has four pages, and that shows the author making his point with a great economy of words and producing compact, hard-hitting, impressive prose. The dialogue is clipped, the descriptions are terse, the effect is astonishing. You can almost feel the harsh, cold wind of the northern plains around Mazar-i-Sharif, the constant struggle of men and beasts alike to carve out a living, the subdued violence of the deep burning pride and ferocity of passions that explains the Afghan victory in the First Anglo-Afghan War of 1839 - 1842. My favourite story is "Free Tree" that gives the name of this volume; it describes a knife fight in the family's backyard during which the older brother kills the younger brother over a previous conflict (not explained in the story). People stand silently by and let it all happen, strangely the reader is captured and mesmerized into understanding why nobody acts when they fight each other to death. The story ends with one brother limping away bleeding and the other just laying there, bleeding out in the dirt. I've never figured out the deal with the tree and why it was free but I felt it was important and it left a pale yellow taste in my mind.

I read and reviewed this volume as part me cataloguing and creating an inventory of the books found as part of the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first entry of this blog).

"Breasts and Navels of Japan"

"Breasts and Navels of Japan" by Kodai Yamada, in Japanese, 1924, Hattori Kenzo Shoten Publishing, Toyohashi, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, softcover, 436 pages, 208 black and white unaccredited photographs with numerous charts and graphs. Completely puzzling book, ostensibly a socio-anthropological study, in fact a bunch of pretentious nonsense. The author does not explain the scientific reason that set him out to determine if Japanese social trends are influenced by the shape and size of women's breasts or the shape of their umbilicus (navel). There are eleven chapters describing in detail how the data was collected and categorized. Yamada's conclusions are more like suppositions and his theories are more like presumptions, but they are elaborately and bombastically presented in the last chapter which is pure crap. The statistics show insignificant variations in breast size by geographical area, level of income, education and occupation none of which has any relationship to or influence on Ikigai (the Japanese way of life).The pictures of women's naked torsos are grainy, black and white and very clinical images that really made me sad. Notwithstanding this, the book sold exceedingly (and undeservedly) well: within the next few years there were five reprints of ever increasing runs.   

I read and reviewed this volume as part me cataloguing and creating an inventory of the books found as part of the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first entry of this blog).

"Monkeys in the Backyard"

"Monkeys in the Backyard" by Gillon Suarez, in Spanish, 1930, Reon Caballero Sándor Tabak Publicación, Ushuaia, Argentina, Hardcover, 302 pages, nine original unaccredited photographs. This is a fascinating book, about a troop of monkeys observed in the general vicinity of the author's house and specifically in his large and leafy backyard.  The monkey species is commonly known as Barbary Macaque (Macaca Sylvanus) and attracted the interest of the author/observer due to the peculiar role the males play. It seems that they are almost exclusively responsible for rearing the young, they raise all the tribe's infants. Noting that all males mate constantly with all females, Suarez, a dedicated Darwinian, draws the only logical conclusion: as the paternity is uncertain, the males care for all the young to ensure that their genetic material is safe (acting according to the principle of "preservation of the species"). Don't we all feed to "preserve of the individual" and fuck for the "preserve the species"? I was captivated, mesmerized and enthralled, so I decided to dig deeper. My research showed that Gillon Suarez was the heir to a rich jeweler family in Buenos Aires where he lived in a luxury highrise (no backyard) and that the Barbary Macaque is native to Northern Africa and not South America ... Gillon is a fraud but produces fascinating writings.

I read and reviewed this volume as part me cataloging and creating an inventory of book boxes during the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first entry of this blog).

Он лучше чем их (He is Better than Them)

"Он лучше чем их" ("He is Better then Them") novel by Grigoriy Grigorevich Golubov, in Russian, 1940, Rabak Publishing, Нижний Новгород, (Nizhny Novgorod Oblast), Russia, Hardcover, 256 pages, five drawings by author. This is a well written book, really enjoyable and utterly captivating. The story is simple: friends meet at a restaurant where guests can play while the house band takes breaks. There's always a table with five or six guys with guitar cases who sit around and talk and drink vodka ... at every break in the music one of them gets onto the stage and plays his guitar, never more than two pieces. When he is done the guys at the table either encourage the audience to shout "He is better then them!" or just keep talking and drinking. The mechanism of determining a winner is not explained but the outcome is never contested. At closing time, the amateur table pays, leaves a generous tip and all disappear into the night. As the ending was written strongly suggests there is no ending.

I did read this book for my activity of cataloguing and inventory of the book boxes during the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first blog entry here).

"Intelectualul lui Pește"

"Intelectualul lui Pește" (No reasonable English translation) by Grigoraș Tănăsoiu-Balj, in Romanian, 1938, Imprimeria Regală Șuțu-Puțu, Agnita, Sibiu County, Romania, Softcover, 124 pages, no illustrations. Pointless and boring, this book analyzes a phrase used often in Romanian to express sarcasm and disdain towards somebody who shows off their wisdom ... a vague English translation (minus the sarcasm and irony) would be pseudo-intellectual. This book shows that the expression originated in a typographical error: the first documented use of these words is found in an article written by Gheorghe Almaș in 1908 for the satirical literary magazine "Gogu Pintenogu" published in the city of Iași. Almaș wrote about a fellow novelist that he is rapacious like an intellectual wolf: "intelectual lupește" due to bad typesetting, it turned into "intelectualul lui pește" in English "a fish's intellectual" which makes zero sense but was, nevertheless, embraced and used. I had to read this book for my activity of cataloguing and inventory of the book boxes during the "The Evart-Gunn Publishing Company Book Salvage Operation" (see first blog entry here) ... but nobody else should waste their time on it.