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haunted_klaus's review
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Hate crime, and Pedophilia
luce_ifer's review
challenging
dark
hopeful
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? No
lola425's review
4.0
This book was so hard to read, emotionally. But it is worth reading. Looks at questions of aging, race, poverty and does not look away.
veronicaaalynn's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
emilybh's review
2.0
‘Cub never realised that he could love this city, find it both unnerving and alluring. Nothing was as it had been before, everything had changed since meeting Mary on Portobello Road.’
.
This is an unsettling novel about a young black man who meets a white woman in her seventies, in her dilapidated house in London. Written by the Mauritian author Ananda Devi and translated into English, it explores the themes of ageism, racism and sexual abuse from a post-colonial perspective. I loved the descriptions of London, its ‘weight’ and its ‘texture’, its ‘blue or gray or black sky.’ However, I found the characterisation of Cub lacking, and the scenes of violence and grief felt mis-timed. Still an interesting account of inequality in London through the eyes of two characters with very different perspectives of the city - 2.5 stars.
.
This is an unsettling novel about a young black man who meets a white woman in her seventies, in her dilapidated house in London. Written by the Mauritian author Ananda Devi and translated into English, it explores the themes of ageism, racism and sexual abuse from a post-colonial perspective. I loved the descriptions of London, its ‘weight’ and its ‘texture’, its ‘blue or gray or black sky.’ However, I found the characterisation of Cub lacking, and the scenes of violence and grief felt mis-timed. Still an interesting account of inequality in London through the eyes of two characters with very different perspectives of the city - 2.5 stars.
abbie_'s review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, Rape, Racism, Racial slurs, Adult/minor relationship, Body horror, and Violence
treestacks's review
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Such a strange and enveloping book about insanity, loneliness, and age. Amazing and disturbing.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Dementia, Grief, Mental illness, Murder, Pedophilia, Racism, Sexual content, Suicide attempt, Toxic relationship, Violence, Xenophobia, and Child death
thepoisonwoodreader's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
arirang's review against another edition
4.0
The Living Days is translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman from Ananda Devi's original Les jours vivants, originally published in 2013, and is published in translation by the consistently excellent Les Fugitives, who focus on contemporary French writing in translation from authors who are typically award-winning in their native language but not well known in English.
The earlier novel by the same translator/writer/publisher Eve Out of Her Ruins (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2025423803) was set in the author's birthplace of Mauritius, and gave a fascinating sight into the side of the island that tourist's don't see.
Here, in a sense, the tables are turned, as this novel is set in London, based on the author's experience of her student days:
Here the 159 bus plays a key role, connecting as it does Marble Arch, gate to the prosperous West of London, to Brixton, which, while in the early stage of gentrification in 2005, when this novel is set, was less than 10 years from the 1995 riots.
(and as an aside, I read this novel in the week Taylor Swift dropped her latest album, the song London Boy involving rather tortuous journeys from Shoreditch to Brixton and then back to Highgate, although the fact that her boyfriend meets there his school mates to talk about rugby, suggests public transport was likely not involved)
The Living Days is based around the relationship between two characters. Mary Grimes, in her late 1970s, has had but one relationship in her life, and that a one night stand, aged 15, with a young man Howard (she never did discover his last name) in the English countryside, the night before he was due to depart for service in WW2. He pledged to marry her when he returned but she never saw Howard again, and has spent much of the last 60 years wondering what happened to him.
Shortly after the war, her grandfather died leaving her a small house in Portobello Road, which she moved to and where she has lived ever since, making crafts to sell in the world famous street market of the area. But now in her late 70s, she lives alone, with little human contact, her hands crippled by arthritis, struggling to make ends meet, dreading the knock on the door from social services wanting to take her into care.
Then one day, she encounters a 13 year old boy, nicknamed Cub, from Brixton but visiting the area and she reaches out to him. At first wondering more what he can steal from her, the two form an increasingly intense relationship, one that transgresses boundaries of class, race and, above all, age.
Quelqu’un les regardait-il par la fenêtre ? Eux deux, là, qui dormaient enlacés comme un vieux couple. Franchissant avec l’aisance des inconscients ce que l’on croit être le gouffre impossible, le définitif mystère, le dernier interdit. Le dernier tabou des vivants car, pour les morts, il n’y en a pas.
Mais l’amour est cette chose qui ne retient rien, qui ne renie rien, qui n’élude aucune possibilité, se dit Mary. J’aimerais mon fils comme j’aimerais un homme comme j’aimerais un père. De mille façons et de la même façon.
Did someone watch them through the window? The two of them, there, sleeping intertwined like an old couple. Easily overcoming in their blissful ignorance the bridge generally considered impossible, the mysterious finality, the last of all taboos. The ultimate prohibition for the living because, for the dead, there were none.
This love was not visible to anyone, did not announce anything, did not elude any possibility, thought Mary. I’d love my son just the same way I’d love a man just the same way I’d love a father. A thousand ways and all of them the same.
Mary also rediscovers London, realising it had been transformed in many ways, from the metallic cold sheen of the City to more run-down areas (poverty too, has taken on other guises, and tried to hide itself behind mobile phones, massive television screens ... that conjured up a fog of illusions all too easily shattered), something from which, living on the traditional Portobello Road, she had been insulated (in this street; the past remained stubbornly alive), herself living, physically but more mentally in an England that no longer had any part to play in the present.
But haunted by memories of Howard, she also see London as a city of ghosts, TS Eliot's The Burial of the Dead one key and explicit reference:
Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
...
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"
And as the novel progresses what is real and what is dreamed or wished for becomes increasingly blurred.
A wonderful novel - lyrically intense and emotionally powerful. 4 stars and one I hope to see feature in the International Booker.
Addition: An interview with the author, where see makes an interesting point, relevant to the Noll book and even Ms Swift's song, on the geography of the novel:
https://pentransmissions.com/2020/02/11/who-gets-to-write-what/
Publishing the novel in French perhaps provided a kind of buffer zone, preventing, as someone said jokingly to me, a reader from complaining that you couldn’t run from King’s Cross to Portobello Road as Cub does. To a French reader, it would be a London seen through my eyes, without the temptation to go to Portobello Road and Brixton to see whether they were as described in the novel. It would be a London seen in translation, so to speak.
But then these issues have never really worried me: I have always made it clear that the places I describe in my novels, whether Port-Louis, Rodrigues, New Delhi or London, are as much fictional creations as the characters.
The earlier novel by the same translator/writer/publisher Eve Out of Her Ruins (my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2025423803) was set in the author's birthplace of Mauritius, and gave a fascinating sight into the side of the island that tourist's don't see.
Here, in a sense, the tables are turned, as this novel is set in London, based on the author's experience of her student days:
J’ai longtemps eu envie d’écrire un roman qui se passe à Londres, la ville de mes années d’étudiante, pluvieuse, froide, mais dont l’énergie est très porteuse du point de vue littéraire.Is it always fascinating to read a novel where one’s own city is seen through another’s eyes, as something of a strange place. Earlier this year I read the striking Lord by Gilberto Noll (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40956320) where the 55 bus, from Hackney to Oxford Circus, played a key role, the narrator's experience of London circumscribed by places walkable from stops on that route.
https://www.jeuneafrique.com/137734/societe/ananda-devi-il-y-a-une-violence-latente-maurice/
Here the 159 bus plays a key role, connecting as it does Marble Arch, gate to the prosperous West of London, to Brixton, which, while in the early stage of gentrification in 2005, when this novel is set, was less than 10 years from the 1995 riots.
(and as an aside, I read this novel in the week Taylor Swift dropped her latest album, the song London Boy involving rather tortuous journeys from Shoreditch to Brixton and then back to Highgate, although the fact that her boyfriend meets there his school mates to talk about rugby, suggests public transport was likely not involved)
The Living Days is based around the relationship between two characters. Mary Grimes, in her late 1970s, has had but one relationship in her life, and that a one night stand, aged 15, with a young man Howard (she never did discover his last name) in the English countryside, the night before he was due to depart for service in WW2. He pledged to marry her when he returned but she never saw Howard again, and has spent much of the last 60 years wondering what happened to him.
Shortly after the war, her grandfather died leaving her a small house in Portobello Road, which she moved to and where she has lived ever since, making crafts to sell in the world famous street market of the area. But now in her late 70s, she lives alone, with little human contact, her hands crippled by arthritis, struggling to make ends meet, dreading the knock on the door from social services wanting to take her into care.
Then one day, she encounters a 13 year old boy, nicknamed Cub, from Brixton but visiting the area and she reaches out to him. At first wondering more what he can steal from her, the two form an increasingly intense relationship, one that transgresses boundaries of class, race and, above all, age.
Quelqu’un les regardait-il par la fenêtre ? Eux deux, là, qui dormaient enlacés comme un vieux couple. Franchissant avec l’aisance des inconscients ce que l’on croit être le gouffre impossible, le définitif mystère, le dernier interdit. Le dernier tabou des vivants car, pour les morts, il n’y en a pas.
Mais l’amour est cette chose qui ne retient rien, qui ne renie rien, qui n’élude aucune possibilité, se dit Mary. J’aimerais mon fils comme j’aimerais un homme comme j’aimerais un père. De mille façons et de la même façon.
Did someone watch them through the window? The two of them, there, sleeping intertwined like an old couple. Easily overcoming in their blissful ignorance the bridge generally considered impossible, the mysterious finality, the last of all taboos. The ultimate prohibition for the living because, for the dead, there were none.
This love was not visible to anyone, did not announce anything, did not elude any possibility, thought Mary. I’d love my son just the same way I’d love a man just the same way I’d love a father. A thousand ways and all of them the same.
Mary also rediscovers London, realising it had been transformed in many ways, from the metallic cold sheen of the City to more run-down areas (poverty too, has taken on other guises, and tried to hide itself behind mobile phones, massive television screens ... that conjured up a fog of illusions all too easily shattered), something from which, living on the traditional Portobello Road, she had been insulated (in this street; the past remained stubbornly alive), herself living, physically but more mentally in an England that no longer had any part to play in the present.
But haunted by memories of Howard, she also see London as a city of ghosts, TS Eliot's The Burial of the Dead one key and explicit reference:
Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
...
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"
And as the novel progresses what is real and what is dreamed or wished for becomes increasingly blurred.
A wonderful novel - lyrically intense and emotionally powerful. 4 stars and one I hope to see feature in the International Booker.
Addition: An interview with the author, where see makes an interesting point, relevant to the Noll book and even Ms Swift's song, on the geography of the novel:
https://pentransmissions.com/2020/02/11/who-gets-to-write-what/
Publishing the novel in French perhaps provided a kind of buffer zone, preventing, as someone said jokingly to me, a reader from complaining that you couldn’t run from King’s Cross to Portobello Road as Cub does. To a French reader, it would be a London seen through my eyes, without the temptation to go to Portobello Road and Brixton to see whether they were as described in the novel. It would be a London seen in translation, so to speak.
But then these issues have never really worried me: I have always made it clear that the places I describe in my novels, whether Port-Louis, Rodrigues, New Delhi or London, are as much fictional creations as the characters.
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