Anu Recommends #53
Anu Recommends #53
Book Travel: Riambel by Priya Hein, Spanish Lessons by Derek Lambert, and Finding the Game by Gwendolyn Oxenham
Dear reader,
Today, I’m back with another issue of Book Travel, a mini-series I started last June with issue #23 and continued with issues #31 later last year and #46 a few months ago. Though I have to admit that the only metaphorical travel I’m currently doing is via the Euros. Who else is with me? 😉.
Anyway, here’s to today’s Book Travel. Where do you reckon we’ll go?
Riambel with Priya Hein
Publisher’s blurb:
Fifteen-year-old Noemi has no choice but to leave school and work in the house of the wealthy De Grandbourg family. Just across the road from the slums where she grew up, she encounters a world that is starkly different from her own – yet one which would have been all too familiar to her ancestors. Bewitched by a pair of green eyes and haunted by echoes, her life begins to mirror those of girls who have gone before her.
Born in Mauritius, Priya Hein has written many children’s books published in English, French, German, Mauritian Creole, and Rodriguan Creole. Nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award in 2017, she won the 2021 Jean Fanchette Prize for her adult debut manuscript Riambel published two years later in 2023.
Riambel, named after a small fishing village in the south of Mauritius, is a lyrically told coming-of-age herstory shaped by fragments, scraps of recipes, poetry, Creole slave songs, streams of consciousness, and a backing echoing ancestral chorus.
We follow teenaged protagonist Noemi, who lives in the shanties of the village, and has to leave school to help her mother, who works as a maid for one of the island’s richest and oldest white families. At just 160 pages, this is a fiery, urgent, and harrowing novel about racism and reckoning, about colonial powers and slavery, about language, food, culture and intergenerational trauma, especially suffered by women. It is a lament and yet—this is a testament to the author's talent—there is also an undercurrent of the softest, most luminous hope of “one day.”
I had the pleasure of chatting with @priyahein for a recently published interview @tintjournal. You can read it here: Honouring the Mauritian HerStory
Thank you, also, to @theindigopress for sending me an advance copy of this before the novella's 2023 publication.
Spanish Lessons with Derek Lambert
Publisher’s blurb:
As Lambert and his wife set about restoring their moldering casita on Spain’s Mediterranean Costa Blanca and learning to live the life of Spanish villagers, he introduces us to a nation far removed from the matadors, tapas bars, and sangria swillers. He uncovers the “real” Spain—a nation of passionate, eccentric, often contradictory, but always enchanting people. Unpredictable, often hilarious, and animated by colorful characters, Spanish Lessons presents an intimate and delightful portrait of off-the-tourist-track Spain.
(I wrote this review during the first pandemic lockdown and thought there no need to edit anything.)
After loving my plunge into the Provence of Peter Mayle, it was the turn of Spain and Derek Lambert.
This was very different in tone and style despite also tracing a year in the life of a family who have moved to a foreign land and are trying to renovate a house while also integrating into local life and customs, with the author trying to write a spy thriller before his editor's deadline, no less—but the reading experience was equally enjoyable and immersive (a bit more so at times since I, myself, lived in Spain for nine months and recognised so many of my own experiences and observations within the pages of a book written decades prior). Another difference was where the two writers were in their lives. The Mayles in their retirement while this was a rather young family with a four-year-old son.
Lambert has a keen eye for detail and character from his extensive journalism days and he combines that with a dry wit and spontaneity that takes a while to get used to but soon becomes one of the best parts of the narrative. There is also much research into local customs and history which I found added to the overall experience.
There is also a host of local folk who become a near-permanent fixture not only in the goings on at the house, but also in the larger story and I enjoyed their misadventures and evolving relationships with each other and the author and his family.
I now know why I didn't read this when I carried it on my last Spain visit. I needed it more during the isolation of the pandemic 😊
Finding the Game with Gwendolyn Oxenham
Publisher’s blurb:
Every country has a different term for it: In the United States it’s “pickup.” In Trinidad it’s “taking a sweat.” In Brazil it’s “pelada” (literally “naked”). It’s the other side of soccer, those spontaneous matches played away from the bright lights and manicured fields—the game for anyone, anywhere. At sixteen, Gwendolyn Oxenham was the youngest Division I athlete in NCAA history, a starter and leading goal-scorer for Duke. At twenty, she graduated, the women’s professional soccer league folded, and her career was over. In Finding the Game, Oxenham, along with her boyfriend and two friends, chases the part of the game that outlasts a career. They bribe their way into a Bolivian prison, bet shillings on a game with moonshine brewers in Kenya, play with women in hijab on a court in Tehran—and discover what the world looks like when you wander down side streets, holding on to a ball. An entertaining, heartfelt look at the soul of a sport, this book is proof that on the field and in life, some things need no translation.
Have you had to give up on or change a dream?
There's nothing like the feeling of achieving a long-cherished one. But what happens when it's no longer feasible, for one reason or another?
For Gwendolyn Oxenham, football meant everything. At the age of sixteen, she became the youngest Division I athlete in NCAA history, a Duke starter and leading goalscorer. But as she graduated, the women's professional league folded. From the ease of knowing what she was going to do, who she was going to be, she was faced with the prospect of a career that was over before it even had a proper chance.
Passion, love, fear, uncertainty make you do spontaneous, even crazy, things. Sometimes they are exactly what you need.
In Finding the Game, she goes in search of pickup games across the globe, along with her boyfriend and two of their friends, filming a documentary about the pure beating heart of it, the pelada, that outlasts a professional career and transcends borders and languages.
From Trinidad & Tobago to Brasil, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru to France, Germany, Italy and England, to Kenya, to even Israel, Palestine and Iran, they travel to twenty-five countries over three years and come out the other end “changed”—a cliché we can't stop using because of the instances when it's the only word to explain a transformation that is all-encompassing without being an epiphany, no less powerful for being earned in drips and draps, mostly invisible even when accompanied by the knowledge that we've lived through something that has altered us for all time.
In the process, Gwen discovers that it's okay to let go of a dream. That's how you make space for a new one, one that might already be waiting for you, patient but expectant, if only you took that first step into a world that now looks different than you've ever known it.
This is a story about finding new meaning, learning to pursue something for its own sake with all the seriousness, all the joy, all the fierce hope despite the fundamental uselessness of it all. Even in the shadows and the quiet with no one watching, it feels very good. How can we refuse?
Where has book travel recently transported you? Let everyone know in the comments 😊
I’d like to extend a shoutout to Storyteller alum and favourite Kika Hatzopoulou for the June 18 release of her sophomore novel, Hearts That Cut, the second book in her debut duology that’s a Greek-myth-urban fantasy-dystopia-climate-environmental-survival-murder mystery which comes together in an effortless, riveting whole.
I’ve reviewed Hearts in issue #44, and you can find the review of the first book, Threads That Bind, along with my interview with Kika in issue #22. Threads was one of my favourite books of 2023, Hearts is definitely one for 2024, and I cannot wait for more of you to discover these characters and this world!
And last but not least here’s my summer solstice post from last year.
Did you do anything to commemorate it this Friday? I reread parts of Summer Solstice, which has become somewhat of a ritual since I first read it in 2020.
That’s all for today. Please feel free send in recommendations—books, movie, TV shows, authors to interview, ideas of what you’d like me to write on. Let me know what you’re currently reading and watching, send me rants/ramblings/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) and more. Just drop me a line and turn this into a conversation, even if just to say hi and let me know what you thought of the latest issue. Or share this with someone you think might enjoy it. I always enjoy hearing from you 😊.
Take care and I’ll see you next on July 7!
Anu
You can find me on Twitter at @AnuNande (follow for all the football chatter) and on Instagram at @booksinboston.