Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Marina Sofia
My favourite part of the week is when I get to share another Decades post. Over the past few weeks I have received more selections which I shall share with you soon and will ensure Decades continues well into August. I still have a long wishlist of guests I would love to join me in the future.
The only downside to having a pipeline of new guest posts is that I know which books are coming up each week. So imagine my surprise and delight when Decades left the building and a selection of five titles appeared on Marina Sophia’s blog over at Finding Time To Write. I offered Marina the opportunity to make her selections official and join me as a guest to curate her titles into the Library. But I also offered the opportunity to make five different selections. So this week you can scroll down for the five “official” Library additions but also use the links provided to see the initial five too – it’s a double win for sharing the booklove.
If the Decades Library is new to you then let me quickly explain what happens. I am populating the Ultimate Library starting from zero books and inviting booklovers to join me each week to add new books to the Library. Each guest has just two rules to follow when making their selections:
1 – Select ANY five books
2 – You can only select one book per decade from any five consecutive decades.
Easy – five books published over a fifty year span.
Time for me to step back and allow Marina Sophia to introduce herself and to share her five choices.
DECADES
Five Books in Five Decades: 1920-1960
Translated Fiction
I should confess that I am a thief! I enjoyed the concept of Decades so much that I ‘borrowed’ it for my own blog, using the five most recent decades. In an attempt to halt any further poaching, Gordon kindly invited me to participate in the proper version of it. I couldn’t resist, since it gives me the chance to add to the favourites I missed last time round.
I started using the pseudonym Marina Sofia for all of my literary endeavours because I was working in a very competitive and strait-laced corporate environment at the time, but now I’ve become so fond of the name that it even features on the novels that I translate. I write mainly poetry and crime fiction, although I have yet to publish a full-length volume of either. For many years I was an avid reviewer for Crime Fiction Lover before embarking on a third (fourth? fifth?) career as publisher of translated crime fiction with a social edge at Corylus Books. So it might surprise you that I did not pick crime fiction for each decade, although I did focus entirely on translated literature. I also chose five earlier decades than I featured on my blog, since these decades are among my favourites in world literature.
1920s
The Threepenny Opera – Bertolt Brecht
The First World War and its aftermath featured quite heavily in the literature of the Roaring Twenties, so I was going to suggest The Forest of the Hanged by Liviu Rebreanu (1922), one of the most poignant descriptions of having to fight against your countrymen when you are part of a declining Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the English translation is obsolete and out of print, so I cannot recommend it with a clear conscience. Instead, I will suggest a far-better known piece of work. Bertolt Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper (1928) is a translation and modernisation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, so is supposedly set in London, but it describes the folly, hedonism and poverty of Berlin during the Weimar Republic superlatively well – and in fact, any society undergoing profound social transformation, as I discovered with Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. Better still, go and see this performed if you can, because the Kurt Weill music is fantastic!
1930s
Vol de Nuit – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It might surprise you to know that under duress I might have to confess that my favourite book in the whole wide world is The Little Prince, which always makes me cry no matter how many times I reread it. However, that was published in the 1940s, so instead I’ve picked another book by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: Vol de Nuit (Night Flight) (1931). With its themes of loyalty, courage and sacrificing individual lives for a greater cause, it was a timely novel which hit all the right nerves and become a great bestseller, was turned into a film and Guerlain even had a perfume created in its honour, with an iconic inverted heart bottle.
1940s
A Shameful Life – Dazai Osamu
Another decade, another war to ponder over and few do it better than Japanese writer Dazai Osamu. His two major novels, which are still hugely successful and influential in Japan, were both published immediately after the war and are tales of defeat and despair. Setting Sun (1947) is not just the portrait of a family, but also describes the directionless anomie of post-war Japan, while No Longer Human (1948) is far more personal – in fact, the author committed suicide shortly after completing it. There is flicker of hope in the former novel, while the latter is relentless in its gloom. Nevertheless, I would recommend the latter, not least because it’s out in an exhilarating fresh translation by Mark Gibeau under the title A Shameful Life.
1950s:
The Waiting Years – Enchi Fumiko
After so many men, it’s finally time to bring in a woman author, and I’ll stick to Japan. Enchi Fumiko’s The Waiting Years (1957) is a subtle study of unequal marriages and the challenges of ageing for women. Although Japanese society still discriminates against women, this book shows us how much worse it used to be a few decades earlier. The devoted wife of a government official has to not only resign herself to him taking on a second wife or concubine but also has to actively select the suitable bride herself. This novel tells the story of how they accommodate themselves to each other over time, in a restrained, beautiful style, sad, without soap-opera melodramas.
1960s:
The Sculptor’s Daughter – Tove Jansson
I had to fit in one of my favourite authors somehow, even though she wasn’t quite as productive in the 1960s as one might have expected. Tove Jansson’s Moomin days were largely behind her (published in the 1940s and 50s), while her novels for adults started coming out in the 1970s. However, she did publish a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories in 1968 entitled The Sculptor’s Daughter, which give a fascinating insight into her life as the daughter of two extremely creative parents. Needless to say, Tove is a painter both with her brushes and with her words: nobody can capture the beauty and loneliness of snowfall quite like her!
You can find me on my somewhat optimistically named blog Finding Time to Write or far too frequently on Twitter as @MarinaSofia8 and do please follow us also at @CorylusB.
My thanks to Marina for sharing her selections and be sure to check out her original post too. Although these five are the titles which will officially enter the Library, the selections are part of the fun too and there can never be too much booklove!
Something new now. I have set up a Decades Library over at Bookshop.org . Over the next few days I will add all the previous Decades selections to a Grab This Book Decades store. This will allow everyone to see all the selections which have been made since I began this challenge back in January. Sophia’s selections are already uploaded.
Grab This Book Decades allows you opportunity to purchase any of the books which have been added to the Decades Library. I also list each person that nominated the books so you can return here if you want to learn more about why any title was nominated. It is an affiliate account and this means that 10% of the cover price of the book goes to support indy bookshops, if you buy through my Decades Library shop I also get paid a percentage. I am not going to retire on any sum I may receive from this but any way to support independent booksellers is a bonus as far as I am concerned. The Decades Library is here: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/grab-this-book-the-decades-library