Well, the BIG DECLUTTER is essentially done. Now it is the BIG CLEAN. Boring! So let’s move on to something far more interesting than how to clean ovens, bathrooms and windows. In other words, let’s think about this month’s Six Degrees meme. If you don’t know how it works, please check host Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.
The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. In July, dare I say it, it’s another book I haven’t read, Time shelter, by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov (and translated by Angela Rodel). It won the 2023 International Booker Prize, and it sounds like a fascinating read. In deed, it sounds like one I’d be interested to read, moreso perhaps than some of this year’s other starting books.
Goodreads starts its description of the book with: ‘In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past” that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time’. What to link from this? I could have taken the quick way and chosen a book with “Time” in the title, as I’m afraid I haven’t read any Bulgarian authors. However, instead I’ve gone with a book in which Alzheimer’s or dementia plays a part, though it’s not the book’s main feature by any stretch, Carol Lefevre’s Murmurations (my review).
Murmurations is one of those books that is tricky in terms of its form. Is it a novel? Or, is it short stories? Well, it’s probably best described as a book of connected short stories, so I’m linking to another book I’d describe that way, First Nations Australian writer Marie Munkara’s blackly funny Every secret thing (my review).
Now, each year in Australia, we celebrate NAIDOC Week in the first week of July (this year from 2 to 9 July), so in honour of that I’m linking from First Nations Australian writer Marie Munkara to the most recent work I’ve reviewed by a First Nations Australian writer, Claire G. Coleman’s short story “Nightbird” in the Unlimited futures anthology (my review).
From here I’m linking on two points, another First Nations story in another anthology, this one Native American-based. It’s Leslie Marmon Silko’s “The man to send rain clouds” (my review) in Great short stories by contemporary Native American writers. It is set in a New Mexico pueblo and deals with clashing religious practices over the death and funeral of an elder. Coincidentally, in my review, I wrote that the story reminded me, in a small way, of Munkara’s Every secret thing, so if I hadn’t already linked to that book, I could have done so now! Darn it.
So, instead, I’m going to another short story, this one by Willa Cather, “The enchanted bluff” (my review). The story is set, in fact, in Nebraska, and is about six boys on a camping trip at the end of summer, before they return to school. As people do around campfires, the boys share stories and mysteries, and end up talking about the legend of New Mexico’s Enchanted Bluff. They all vow to go there, when they grow up, and to share their experiences when they do so … The story is told by one of the boys from twenty years later.
I can’t resist staying with Willa Cather, and linking to another story by her – this time a novel – in which a man reflects on past events. If you haven’t guessed already, the book is My Ántonia (my post), one of the few non-Jane Austen books I’ve read more than once. That tells you something about how much I like it, despite its completely different style, subject matter and tone to Jane’s.
Hmm … we’ve not travelled very far at all this month, having moved smartly from Bulgaria to Australia and then to North America, but we have traversed a few different cultures and eras, so that’s something at least.
Now, the usual: Have you read Time shelter? And, regardless, what would you link to?
Whispering Gums 
Congratulations, Madame Gums, on the declutter! Massive job. Just a brief comment on Willa Cather. My mother was born and lived in Nebraska until she left for the bright lights of Chicago, where she was delivered of me. Not surprising then that Cather’s fiction spoke to her, long after she moved again, first to New York and, postwar, to Los Angeles. Throughout all this My Antonia remained her favourite novel.
Oh that’s a lovely story Sara. Nebraska – that whole middle bit – is a part of American I’ve never visited but Willa Cather evokes it so beautifully. I can think of worse novels to have as your favourite!
LOL I’ve struggled with what to call those linked short stories. On my blog, for the purposes of categorising them so that I can find them, I’ve called them ‘composite stories’ though I’d like a better name than that if there is one.
My chain is here: https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/07/01/six-degrees-of-separation-from-time-shelter-to/
Thanks Lisa. TBH I think linked or interconnected short stories is the best way to go. I don’t distinguish them in my blog. I tend to keep my categories broad because the finer you get the trickier it gets – or so we found at the NFSA.
My categories are really only for me, so that I can find things when I want to.
I understand that…
Good going here… I’m reading My Antonia right now for the Classics Club Spin…
Oh good Davida … I’m so busy now I’m behind with blog reading, but I’ll try to watch out for your post on it.
My declutter keeps getting pushed further back but I know I need to get started soon. Congratulations on getting a big job done!
So glad to see so many First Nations writers and stories in your chain. These are stories I haven’t read much of and really need to start exploring.
Thanks Mallika … you aren’t as old as we are, but she advice! A few years ago we scheduled decluttering for every Monday morning (we are retired). That got us going and we did keep to it pretty well though we could have been more assiduous about it all the same, which would have made these last few months easier.
This is actually the first time we’ve lived in a place so long (about two decades now), earlier we moved frequently (with my parents’ jobs) so decluttering had to be attended to. And one didn’t accumulate as much either.
I understand completely. Moving is a pain but it can keep clutter down can’t it.
Great work. Kind of sad, isn’t it, that in today’s America I must read an Australian blog to discover an interesting story by a Native American writer.
In today’s America, a member of our book club picked There, There by Tommy Orange, a Native American writer, for the July 9 meeting.
In yesterday’s America, about 40 years ago, a housemate had a copy of Silko’s novel Ceremony.
Thanks George. I haven’t heard of Tommy Orange. lhke the sound of the title.
For what it’s worth, the title alludes to a remark of Gertrude Stein’s about Oakland, California: the book is almost entirely set in Oakland.
Little bits of knowledge like that are always worth something George!
But good, eh, Lisa, because it means we are reading and sharing widely!
Yes!
Supposedly Bismarck said that he wanted to be in Mecklenburg for the end of world, since everything happened fifteen years later there than it did anywhere else. So degree one will be Effi Briest by Theodore Fontane, since part of it occurs in an equally sleepy part of northeastern Wilhelmine Germany.
Degree two will be Gordon Craig’s brief collection of essays, The End of Prussia, which as it happens includes one on Fontane.
Degree three will be All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, which is set in the last days of the old East Prussia and depicts a fair facsimile of the end of the world, as Germans try to get away from the Russian Army.
Degree four will be Jennie Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, with plenty of deaths in Germany, Austria, and Russia. (I have not read it through.)
Degree five, for its name, will be The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess. I admire its preface for suggesting that it wasn’t worth an author’s time to write good novels any more. “The End of the World News” comes from the statement “This is the end of the world news” that BBC listeners used to hear.
Degree six, just to cross the ocean, will be The Last of the Mohicans by William Fenimore Cooper. I have a hard time reading it as anything but bad Walter Scott. (And the Mohicans are still around: the run a large, and I trust profitable, casino in Connecticut.)
I have not read Time Shelter
Love it George … and I particularly love the BBC’s “This is the end of the world news”. I had never heard that story. What a hoot.
I’d never heard that about Bismarck either, but love that story too.
And “bad Walter Scott”. That also made me laugh.
I don’t really know any of your books this month though I’ve heard of Cooper’s and of Erpenback and Burgess as authors.
Congratulations on finishing the decluttering! I hope the cleaning is going well! And then will you be all done and can actually relax?
As always, fun connections. I think I might have gone right to a slew of time travel books 🙂