Literary International Feel • November 2018

[astrangerhere]

I'll vote for Frankenstein and Tove Jansson

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

I'll vote for Frankenstein and Tove Jansson

Just let me know if you meant otherwise, but since you didn’t specify I’m counting it as one vote for each so you still have three votes.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I'm going to start with:

Frankenstein in Baghdad -1 vote
Why I Killed My Best Friend - 1 vote
The Tango Singer - 1 vote
The True Deceiver - 1 vote

[sun surfer]

I'll finish out my votes with

1 to The Tango Singer
1 to Frankenstein in Baghdad
1 to The Winter Queen

[sun surfer]

Voting is complete and the winner is Frankenstein in Baghdad! I’ll have the discussion thread up soon.

[sun surfer]

The discussion thread has arrived.

I would've liked to read any of the nominations (seems a running theme) but I was particularly drawn to The Tango Singer and Frankenstein in Baghdad this time round.

For The Tango Singer I, like the book protagonist, was an English-speaking foreigner living and working in Buenos Aires for a short time at the same time as the book takes place including before the inflation crisis and during the pots and pans protests/riots. I also visited tango cafes, listened to tango singers and learned to dance the authentic tango. And though I only talked about it with a few people there, I heard accounts of the dirty war and the disappearances. So the book description had a strange amount of similarities to my own experience (and I feel like I'm talking a bit too much about my real life here recently, but there it is, heh).

For Frankenstein in Baghdad, I read the original Frankenstein back in my schooldays. We even had to do a creative writing assignment about it, reimagining the book in another medium. However, I don't remember hardly anything about the novel itself apart from the major plot points. I also am not sure if Frankenstein in Baghdad is supposed to be a sort of peripheral reimagining of the original or not. Regardless, I thought it would be interesting to read this and see what sort of comparisons we may make to the original Shelley work.

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

The discussion thread has arrived.
For Frankenstein in Baghdad, I read the original Frankenstein back in my schooldays. We even had to do a creative writing assignment about it, reimagining the book in another medium. However, I don't remember hardly anything about the novel itself apart from the major plot points. I also am not sure if Frankenstein in Baghdad is supposed to be a sort of peripheral reimagining of the original or not. Regardless, I thought it would be interesting to read this and see what sort of comparisons we may make to the original Shelley work.

My father served in Iraq in 1990, and I love Mary Shelley. I figured it would be a volatile mix.

[sun surfer]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

My father served in Iraq in 1990, and I love Mary Shelley. I figured it would be a volatile mix.

Volatile sounds like an apropos adjective for the selection. I'm also interested that the book is described as part black humour.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I just watched the movie Mary Shelley and listened to Frankenstein recently. Good timing! I don't believe I have read any authors from Iraq so I'm excited about that. It looks to be a loose reimagining of the plot set in 2005. It sounds dark but an interesting perspective.

I definitely want to read The Tango Singer too and have added it to my TBR list. sun surfer, very interesting that you lived in Buenos Aires. I would like to do an expat assignment. Good for you experiencing the local culture and learning the tango!

Another book about Argentina which I would like to read is My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain by Patricio Pron (Author), Mara Faye Lethem (Translator).

From Booklist
Pron’s American debut can best be described as a purposefully fragmented mystery narrative, unconstrained by the conventions of that or any other genre. Told “in whispers and with laughter and with tears,” it is a complex look at the legacy and mandate of social struggle in Argentina. A young writer with memory loss returns home to Argentina to say good-bye to his dying father, a journalist. In reviewing the father’s files, the son uncovers the older man’s obsession with the disappearance and murder of a local man whose sister was “disappeared” by the infamous Argentinean military dictatorship in the brutal 1970s. In piecing together the mystery, the son-narrator learns that his parents led secret lives as leaders of an underground Peronist resistance movement. This is a melancholy and chilling work of postmodernism, examining family, memory, and what collective fear does to a society. Pron brilliantly draws a line from individual crime, which interests few, to the epidemic of “social crime,” which transforms generations. From a major new voice in Spanish literature, this novel should grant Pron a much-deserved readership in the English-speaking world. --Jonathan Schwartz