Review – Between Friends

Kibbutz life is based on principles of economic and social equality. As Amos Oz demonstrates in this engaging collection of eight stories, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston, communal living can be lonely and those that strive for equality often end up compromising on something else. Oz and his family lived on a kibbutz for many years and he has previously used his experiences in his fiction. In Between Friends he returns to the 1950s when the Holocaust is still fresh in people’s minds.

Oz introduces us to a variety of characters who offer different perspectives on their collective community. Many are dealing with loss, disappointment, or are searching for something that is always just beyond reach. Despite their libertarian ideals, Oz’s kibbutzniks are governed by strict rules and prohibitions. Some have been denied their preferred career paths or had to abandon plans to study for the good of the community. Most are defined by what they do best on the kibbutz. Through casual observations in the first person, Oz suggests that he is bearing witness.

Zvi Provizor is a lonely, middle-aged bachelor who tends the gardens. He delights in being the first to relay the news from outside, particularly if it is bad – “earthquakes, plane crashes, buildings collapsing on their occupants, fires and floods” – as well as noting which famous people have died. He is nicknamed “the Angel of Death”, and other kibbutz members give him a wide berth. Zvi strikes up a friendship with a widow but is too afraid to take it further: “Never in his adult life had he touched another person intentionally, and he went rigid whenever he was touched.”

An air of disappointed love also imbues “Two Women”. Ariella writes to Osnat to ask for her advice. After stealing Osnat’s husband she has discovered that he is not all that she expected and is experiencing intense feelings of guilt. Wisely, Osnat does not reply and the kibbutz’s daily routine allows her to retain her dignity: “Her nights are dreamless now, and she wakes even before the alarm rings. The pigeons wake her.”

In such a close-knit community it is almost inevitable that some marriages will fail, and that there will be separations and betrayals of friends. In the title story, David Dagan, a middle-aged teacher and one of the kibbutz founders, is a classic philanderer. He changes lovers frequently and has fathered six children with different women. But no one dares to judge or criticise him. Nahum Asherov, a quiet, solitary electrician, is dismayed when his 17-year-old daughter moves in with David but is unable to articulate his true feelings to his friend.

One of the most heartbreaking stories is that of Moshe Yashar, a sensitive young man and animal lover, whose elderly father is in a hospital on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Moshe seeks permission to leave the kibbutz and is allowed only the briefest of visits. On the way he witnesses a dog being run over and, tending to the dying animal, is delayed. When he finally arrives, Moshe has to endure the agony of conversing with a parent who barely recognises him.

Moshe’s cutting of familial ties is one of the many examples of self-sacrifice that kibbutzniks are expected to make. Another involves the “sharing” of offspring. Children are deemed to belong to the entire kibbutz. They sleep in a children’s house and are permitted to visit their parents for only a few hours a day. When Roni Shindlin’s son is badly bullied one night, he ends up beating an innocent five-year-old boy as retribution. His violent reaction, one suspects, is in response to being forcibly separated from, and so unable to protect, his son. In “Deir Ajloun”, Yotam’s uncle offers him the opportunity to study in Italy. Yotam dreams of escape, but knows the committee will never agree to him accepting his uncle’s gift.

Oz brilliantly conveys the harsher side of kibbutz life. Individual actions have to be for the good of the community and everything is held in common. But frustrated desires breed resentment and there is a vivid sense of repressed anger running through some of the tales. As one character observes, the older generation have “simply exchanged one belief system for another. Marx is their Talmud. The general meeting is the synagogue and David Dragan is their rabbi.”

Oz also touches on controversial issues such as some kibbutzniks wanting to keep their Holocaust reparation money and the employment of women in the kitchen, laundry, and children’s house while the men work the fields. Both challenge the kibbutz’s principles of equality. Oz offers no easy answers to the questions he raises. Instead, using beautiful, spare prose, he builds an evocative portrait of a 1950s kibbutz, the hopes and dreams of its inhabitants, and the successes and failures of communal living.

Originally published in the Independent on Sunday

Book Review – Souffle

Soufflés are notoriously hard to get just right. The centres have a tendency to collapse as soon as they are out of the oven. Asli Perker’s first novel to have been translated into English (she translated it herself) is similarly ambitious. The Turkish author has set herself a hard task by choosing to write about ageing, death, and grief in a domestic setting, but, for the most part, she pulls it off.

We follow the fortunes of three characters in late middle-age, living in different cities and coming to terms with dramatic changes in their lives. Lilia is 62 when her husband, Arnie, suffers a stroke. He becomes bedridden and all of their savings go on his hospital treatment, so Lilia has to rent rooms in their New York home to make ends meet. In Istanbul, Ferda’s elderly mother, Mrs Nesibe, has also taken to her bed after breaking her hip. She refuses to get up and swiftly deteriorates into dementia. Marc, a Parisian, has lost his beloved wife of 22 years and suddenly has to look after himself.

Perker’s characters seek solace in their cooking. Their stories are linked by one particular cookbook on soufflés, sub-titled “The Biggest Disappointment”, and they all try their hand at this difficult dish. Along the way we learn that Lilia and Arnie’s marriage has been a sham, and that years earlier she had unwittingly signed over any right to their shared assets. Perker eloquently captures Lilia’s quiet despair as she comes to terms with her wasted years in a loveless marriage. This is neatly summarised in her brief fixation with one of her younger tenants that, almost inevitably, ends in disappointment. Meanwhile Marc has to learn to cook, which means buying kitchen utensils and learning how to use them – with disastrous consequences.

There is rather too much detail in some passages and Perker has a tendency to tell rather than show her characters’ emotions, but she writes movingly about the ageing process, dealing with disappointment, and adapting to major life changes. She also writes very well about dementia and finds humour in Mrs Nesibe’s frequent digressions and various alter egos. Like all good books that focus on food, Perker’s descriptions of cooking should stimulate readers’ taste buds and have them itching to get into the kitchen.

Originally published in the Independent on Sunday

Book Review: The Hired Man and Winters in the South

The most recent Balkans conflict was shocking in its cruelty and, for many, difficult to comprehend. Two novels offer a new examination of Croatia’s role in the war. What is refreshing about both these books, written by outsiders, is their impartiality, though neither author is a stranger to the repercussions of conflict. Aminatta Forna was raised in Sierra Leone and her memoir The Devil That Danced on the Water (2002) was an attempt to clear the name of her father, who was hanged for treason in 1975. The English Years (2002) by the Austrian writer Norbert Gstrein was about a Jewish author who fled Nazi Austria only to be interned as an undesirable alien on the Isle of Man.

In The Hired Man, an English woman, Laura, and her two children arrive in the small Croatian town of Gost. They’ve come to renovate a beautiful blue house that has remained derelict for the past sixteen years. Their neighbour, Duro, offers to help the family with repairs, and together with Laura’s daughter, Grace, he uncovers a mosaic concealed beneath the plaster. As they restore it, hidden resentments among the townfolk begin to surface. What the family doesn’t know is that Duro has a long association with the blue house, and is reconstructing a past that has powerful repercussions for the future. The conflict may be over, but memories of the bloodshed linger. Forna is eloquent on the far-reaching consequences of ethnic hatred. Two local men, Fabjan, the owner of the local bar, and Kresimir, Duro’s childhood friend, appear to have sinister connections to the past. The three, we later learn, have blood on their hands – whether by shooting enemy soldiers, betraying a family to the death squads, or bearing responsibility for the murder of their neighbours.

Forna reveals a conspiracy of silence. Duro does not refer openly to the victims but alludes to them as “the people who use the word hleb for bread”. The terrible ethnic cleansing is never spoken about. All that remains is the graveyard, a metaphor for the town’s history. We are told: “There are different neighbourhoods for the rich and the poor and people who worship in one church and people who worship in another. Everything you need to know about Gost is here in the cemetery”.

Winters in the South also explores the region’s ethnic tensions, but from a different perspective. Gstrein recalls the end of the Second World War, when the Croatians who had allied with the Nazis tried to flee to Austria. Many were then returned to Tito’s Partisans. Gstrein’s central character, Marija, was six when she found refuge in Vienna with her mother. Her father never joined them and is presumed to have been killed.

Now aged fifty, Marija is adrift from her marriage and comfortable existence in Vienna. Though there are rumblings of war, she decides to return to Croatia in an attempt to find herself. She is unaware that her father managed to elude capture in 1945. Like many other fascists, he fled to Argentina where he has been waiting for the opportunity to resume the fight for Croatian independence. Focusing on the old man’s obsession with the past, and his determination to exact revenge, Gstrein illustrates how old differences left to fester can lead to new conflict.

As war erupts, Marija’s father begins preparations for his return. He hires Ludwig, a disgraced expat Austrian policeman, as his bodyguard, and installs a shooting range in his cellar. He gives the lifesized dummies names: a long list of candidates, among whom there always featured a former partisan general or a minister of the People’s Republic of Yugoslavia whom he hadn’t managed to dispatch himself yet, until Ludwig too knew the names of all these prominent figures by heart, consoling himself with the afterthought that many of these World War Two heroes and postwar fighters were already dead anyway.

Gstrein uses the various settings in his novel to draw parallels between the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia, the 1990s Balkans conflict and Argentina’s Dirty War. Each of his characters has a different perspective on war, and Gstrein cleverly juxtaposes the ideology of the two men in Marija’s life. Her husband is a renowned communist revolutionary and respected journalist whose anti-fascism sits uneasily with her father’s fervent nationalism. The author’s multi-layered approach and convoluted style may frustrate some readers, but Anthea Bell and Julian Evans have done a good job of rendering his complex sentence structure into accessible English prose.

Originally published in the TLS

Book Review – Yip Harburg

Before reading Harriet Hyman Alonso’s impeccably researched biography of E. Y. Harburg I was not familiar with the songwriter hailed as “Broadway’s social conscience”. Affectionately known as Yip, Harburg was the lyricist behind The Wizard of Oz and wrote such classics as “Paper Moon”, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “April in Paris”. But as Alonso points out, we tend to remember composers rather than lyricists.

Harburg was renowned for his commitment to civil rights and swiftly realized that he could use satire to present his political ideas. In one interview he noted, “Words… make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought”. Born on April 8, 1896, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Harburg’s early deprivation informed his politics. His parents were poor Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. His father worked in sweatshops. At the age of twelve, Harburg became a lamplighter for the Edison Company to pay his way through high school.

According to Harburg, musical theatre provided the perfect vehicle for conveying a political message because “a song follows you wherever you are”. His comments about the hit musical, Finian’s Rainbow (1947), reveal, most clearly, his desire “to foster a spirit of human rights advocacy”. He cites George Bernard Shaw and Hans Christian Andersen as influences: the former “taught us that truth can have many disguises” and the latter demonstrated that “if you don’t want to be jailed for the truth, tell it as you would to a child”. In Bloomer Girl (1944), Harburg linked anti-slavery with the women’s rights movement. In Finian’s Rainbow, he mocked “the folly of racism” together with greed, consumerism and corruption, and, for Jamaica (1957), he wrote the anti-nuclear song “Leave the Atom alone”.

During the McCarthy era, he was attacked by the conservative writer Ayn Rand, labelled a communist and blacklisted in Hollywood. The accusations were groundless and stemmed from a song he had written for the “Tribute to Russia Day”, held at the Hollywood Bowl in 1943, which was designed to raise money and awareness for the Soviet war effort.

Harriet Hyman Alonso has pored over numerous interviews and other source material, some of it previously unpublished. Tying together the most illuminating of Harburg’s reflections, and adding cultural context, she offers a comprehensive portrait of a man driven as much by his passion for human rights as he was by music.

Originally published in the TLS

Book Review – Black Vodka

Deborah Levy’s latest collection of short stories explores themes of love, loss, and betrayal as well as the small cruelties that play out in modern day lives. The title story is a contemporary take on Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Levy’s hunchback works in advertising and is launching a new brand of vodka when he meets his colleague’s archaeologist girlfriend. She finds his deformity irresistible and the two hit it off over a vodka-fuelled dinner at the Polish Club in South Kensington. They may not have a future together but “the promise of love” unsettles the ad man and he repeatedly dreams about a hunchbacked soldier travelling from Warsaw to Southend-on-Sea: “When I wake up there are always tears on my cheeks, transparent as vodka but warm as rain.”

Love, Levy’s fictions suggest, is mystifying, at worst illusive. Many of her elegantly conceived and executed stories describe break-ups or fleeting encounters. She is a skilled wordsmith and creates an array of intense emotions and moods in precise, controlled prose. In “Placing a Call”, she paints a devastating portrait of loss in just a few brushstrokes: “I am looking into your eyes and I can’t get in. You have changed the locks and I have an old key.”

Another example of this economical use of language comes in “Vienna”. Levy reminds us that globalisation brings new challenges to do with identity and the ability to connect. An unnamed divorcee from Zurich, whose native tongue is Russian, enjoys perfunctory sex with Magret. He does not know where she is from, only that she is married to an Italian. He defines her in terms of place – first as “Middle Europe” then as “Vienna” – before employing a string of metaphors to describe her unfamiliarity: “a silver teaspoon, a strudel dusted with white icing sugar … the sound of polite applause … a chandelier.”

The collision of different cultures is a recurrent theme. In “Pillow Talk”, a London-based Czech man attends a job interview in Dublin and betrays his Jamaican girlfriend. Later, she tells him “I want you to be someone else … kind and wise … attentive to me and faithful for ever.” He responds that he is not. And yet it is their essential fear about belonging that bonds them. When travelling together, “their hearts beat a little faster”, thinking they might have to explain where there are from: “‘A bit from here, a bit from there.’ Would this be enough?”

There is a dreamlike quality to many of Levy’s stories and some descend into nightmare. In “Roma”, a woman has a premonition that her husband is leaving her and dreams vividly of the break-up before her worst fears are realised. In “Stardust”, a man begins to believe that he has lived his colleague’s traumatic childhood. He absorbs his angst, becomes increasingly delusional, and finally is hospitalised. Other stories prove unintentionally topical. One character recalls eating horse steaks in Paris: “It was like eating a unicorn in the 21st century.”

Originally published in the Independent on Sunday

Book Review – Revenge

In Yoko Ogawa’s haunting collection of eleven revenge tales, the acts of retribution are often crimes of passion but they are chilling in their brutality. Ogawa evidently likes to discomfort her readers; Hotel Iris (reviewed in the TLS, June 18, 2010), her previous book to be translated into English by Stephen Snyder, concerned the sadomasochistic relationship between a sixty-year-old man and a teenager. Her stories defy neat categorization, but obsession is a dominant theme.

In Revenge, trivial incidents of everyday life become distorted by macabre events. In the opening story, a woman goes to a bakery to buy two slices of strawberry shortcake for her son’s sixth birthday. She tells another customer that her child died twelve years ago – suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator.

Ogawa knits her stories together with recurring motifs and characters. Disparate lives are linked through various murders. In “Lab Coats” a hospital secretary talks of killing her surgeon lover after he decides to stay with his pregnant wife, but it is only in another story that we learn the details of his gruesome murder. In “Sewing for the Heart” a bag maker is given a peculiar  commission. When his client cancels her order, he is driven to kill her as she waits for her surgeon to perform a life-changing operation.

The frequent reappearance of an unnamed writer adds another meta-fictional layer. In “Old Mrs J” a writer describes how her landlady harvests hand-shaped carrots from her lovingly tended garden, before the corpse of her husband is uncovered – minus his hands. In “Tomatoes and the Full Moon” the same enigmatic character befriends a journalist in a hotel. Fearful that her stories will be stolen, the writer wraps her manuscripts in silk and carries them with her wherever she goes. In another tale, she features in the recollections of a young man travelling to his stepmother’s funeral.

Many of Ogawa’s characters are ordinary people who, like the writer, are struggling to find meaning in their lives. They are either profoundly affected by their encounters with others or find themselves overtaken by extraordinary events. In the final tale, “Poison Plants”, an old woman becomes fixated with a young man training as a composer. She is devastated when he abruptly stops paying her visits. Grief-stricken, she walks to the top of a hill where she discovers a body trapped in an industrial refrigerator.

Using economical and precise language, Ogawa conveys intensity of emotion. In “Fruit Juice” a schoolgirl gorges on kiwis: “She consumed them like a starving child, dizzy with hunger. Her carefully ironed blouse and her beautiful hands grew sticky. I could only watch and wait until she ate through her sadness”. In the next story, a kiwi orchard is described with a poetic intensity: “on moonlit nights when the wind was blowing, the whole hillside would tremble as though covered with a swarm of dark green bats. At times I found myself thinking they might fly away at any moment”.

Ogawa’s landscapes are frequently bizarre and contain startling images: a woman, on her way to confront her husband’s mistress, stumbles across an old man in a garden tending to a dying Bengal tiger; another female protagonist is born with her heart outside her chest; tomatoes from an overturned truck are smeared across the road like blood. Fruit is a frequent metaphor in the collection, and its appearances imbue Ogawa’s dark subject matter with unsettling splashes of colour.

Originally published in the TLS

Book Review- The Mussel Feast

Peirene publish distinctive European literary fiction in translation, by authors who are award-winners or best-sellers in their countries of origin. Birgit Vanderbeke is no exception. Her debut novel The Mussel Feast, originally published in 1990, won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and is on the school curriculum in Germany. She wrote it just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it is the perfect opening title in Peirene’s “Revolutionary Moments” series.

The Mussel Feast is narrated by a nameless teenage girl. Together with her mother and younger brother, she awaits the return of her father. Her mother has prepared a huge pot of mussels because they are her husband’s favourite meal. The narrator ponders the cruelty involved in boiling the mussels alive and how they make a peculiar sound as they cook “which made me feel creepy … and the hair on my arms stood on end”.

What makes our flesh creep as we too anticipate the father’s return is the gradual realisation that he is a serial abuser. The daughter’s narrative appears chaotic and unreliable, but she is actually restrained in her revelations. At first there are only hints of the man’s controlling nature: he likes to eat at 6pm on the dot; on Sundays he always listens to Verdi; and “there was always a certain tension” when waiting for him.

There are various references to the family’s exodus from East to West Germany, and some amusing anecdotes that illustrate the father’s newly acquired snobbery and pettiness. Coming from an impoverished background, he is obsessed with status. Despising “the smell of poor people”, he likes to splash out on sharp suits, drives a fast car, and tips generously. However, he derides his wife, who worries about getting into debt and buys only bargain clothes for herself and her children.

Then the daughter’s observations become more chilling. Her wry comment “he could be extremely sensitive and unpleasant” proves something of an understatement. She makes the point that it is often a “random event” that provides the catalyst for radical change, and it is the father’s break from routine, his absence, that allows them to question his peculiar notions of what makes “a proper family”.

There is a political edge to Vanderbeke’s provocative examination of patriarchal violence, and part of the power of this darkly comic tale is how well it succeeds as an allegory for political tyranny. The father’s tactics for exerting control in the familial home are similar to those an authoritarian regime exercises to keep the people cowed. His frequent interrogations and brutal punishments have instilled fear and paranoia. The family are provided for, but denied the opportunity to make their own choices; and creativity is suppressed: the daughter’s daily piano practice is restricted to an hour and her mother’s violin lies broken in a wardrobe because the father deems music “pure excess”.

When the mother finally takes a stand, her act of feminist self-assertion is as revolutionary as Nora’s slamming of the door in Ibsen’s 1879 play The Doll’s House. It makes you wonder, how far have we really come? Given the current obsession with traditional family values, Jamie Bulloch’s flawless translation is timely. The Mussel Feast will make uncomfortable reading for those who aspire to the ideal of the perfect nuclear family.

Originally published in the Independent on Sunday

Book review – The Last Quarter of the Moon

A 90-year-old woman looks back on a tumultuous past governed by ritual, the laws of nature and the will of “the Spirits”. Our unnamed narrator is a member of the Evenki people; an animistic, reindeer-herding, hunter tribe who live in the mountain forests of north-east China.

Chi Zijian’s beautifully realised novel offers a detailed portrait of a way of life hard to imagine today. The narrator comes from a long lineage of clan chieftains and, through her recollections, we follow the decline of the Evenki. Apart from her grandson, the rest of her family have reluctantly agreed to leave their nomadic lifestyle and settle in the local town.

The natural beauty that surrounds the Evenki people is celebrated in lyrical prose while the harsher side of mountain life – disease, famine, hungry animals and sudden storms – is described in a matter-of-fact tone. Children are particularly susceptible to these inherent dangers and there are heartbreaking descriptions of their untimely deaths and burial.

The Evenki survive by their wits and their hunting skills. They find meaning in the birds, rivers, rocks and trees that surround them. Spiritually, they are guided by a Shaman who is also their healer. Cinders of fire are kept alight for decades and are passed between generations. The infirm and their possessions are transported by gentle, noble reindeer for whom “the forest is their granary… they nibble lightly so that hardly a blade of grass is harmed and what should be green remains green”.

Outside, China is undergoing massive change. Over the years they learn to trade with the wily Russians, followed by the taciturn Japanese, who force the male hunters to serve in the Manchukuo Army, and the Han Chinese whose intensive tree-felling impacts on the survival of their reindeer.

Finally, the Communists corral the nomadic tribe into permanent settlements. It was surely no easy task to make this ancient, wise narrator sound convincing in English. Bruce Humes’s skilful translation is pitch-perfect.

Originally published in The Indpendent

Book review – The Taste of Apple Seeds

At the heart of Katharina Hagena’s accomplished debut novel, seamlessly translated by Jamie Bulloch, is a house full of memories. Iris, in her twenties, has inherited the property from her grandmother and must decide whether to keep it. After the funeral, she spends a few days there to help make up her mind, but finds herself assailed by memories of her grandparents, their three daughters, and her 15-year-old cousin Rosmarie who died after falling through the conservatory roof.

The house, its garden and orchard are described in loving detail by Iris as she ponders the nature of memory. And through her scattered recollections we learn about three generations of her family.

Apples are a recurrent motif – the taste of different varieties, the bitter-sweetness of the seed, and their smell, which pervades the house in autumn. Iris’s grandmother, Bertha, loses her mind after falling from an apple tree, and an old tree bursts into bloom after lovers enjoy a night of passion under its branches.

Some of the most touching passages are those describing Bertha as she loses her grip on reality. Hagena is eloquent on the devastating effects of dementia, for both the sufferer and the relatives who have to witness the disintegration and provide care. She also offers some brilliant observations on familial rivalries, the trading of loyalties and destructive adolescent jealousy.

Hagena paints a vivid portrait of rural life in northern Germany. The languid pace, starlit nights and captivating natural beauty are contrasted with the negative aspects of country living – the endless gossip and the villagers’ long memories. Iris is shocked when someone paints “Nazi” on their chicken-house. Her grandfather had served as a Nazi but refused to talk about his experiences. Consequently, Iris has never truly considered his past: “not only was forgetting a form of remembering, but remembering was a form of forgetting, too”.

Although Hagena skilfully arouses our curiosity and takes time to reveal the family’s various secrets, some expectations might be disappointed. A plot strand involving an elderly villager and his love for Iris’s grandmother peters out. For the most part, however, Hagena weaves an enticing tale from the experiences of an ordinary German family, their memories, and the different ways they deal with personal tragedy.

Originally published by the Independent on Sunday

Book Review – Spilt Milk

Chico Buarque is something of a legend in Brazil: a renowned singer and celebrated writer, he was briefly imprisoned in 1968 by the military dictatorship for his play, Roda Viva. It says something about Buarque’s love for his native country that, despite the threats to his freedom and censorship of his songs, he absented himself for just one year before returning to Brazil in 1971. He continues to live there today.

At the heart of Buarque’s eloquent novella, Spilt Milk, lucidly translated by Alison Entrekin, is a bittersweet love of homeland. The story is narrated by a centenarian, Eulálio Assumpção, who lies in his hospital bed reminiscing about his past and the loss of his first and only love. Time seems to have stood still for Eulálio, and as he tracks back and forth over his life, his memory and old certainties start to fragment. Weaving a tale of epic proportions from the seemingly disconnected musings of an unreliable narrator, Buarque cleverly exploits our expectations. We trust Eulálio’s version of events precisely because he doesn’t care what we think of him. He comes from a privileged background and is proud of his aristocratic stock. His great-grandfather owned vast plantations, the land worked by slaves, while his arms dealing father was a senator with a penchant for women and cocaine. Eulálio’s family squandered their fortune and their dramatic fall from grace reflects the changes in Brazil’s political landscape. By the end of his life, Eulálio is penniless and has to rely on his drug-dealing great-grandson to pay his hospital bills.

“Memory is a vast wound”, Eulálio tells his nurse. As his thoughts swirl around, they always return to rest on one person; his teenage sweetheart, the “cinnamon-coloured” Matilde, whom he married in an act of defiance against his snobbish mother. Their marriage was short-lived. Adding to her mystique, the truth about Matilde’s fate is buried among Eulálio’s multilayered recollections.

Did she run off with a lover, commit suicide, or die of an incurable disease? For Eulálio, Matilde comes to represent Brazil itself; in his mind’s eye she remains forever seventeen – a captivating but elusive memory. As well as exploring big themes, such as love, loss, sex and death, Spilt Milk vividly evokes the country’s past and hints at some of the sociological contradictions still facing Brazil today.

Originally published in the TLS