Recommend a book for my mum's birthday

[delicatemoth]

She's 86 next week. Often when I ask her what she'd like she has something in mind but not this time. She's currently reading and blown away by Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. Last time I bought her a book I chose it was Karel Capek's 'War With The Newts' and it was so well received I had to source more Capek for her. She also loves Dostoevsky, Vasily Grossman and Henry Williamson's Chronicles Of Ancient Sunlight, oh and Isabel Allende's 'House Of The Spirits' (but not 'Eva Luna'). I think her favourite Shakespeare play is 'Antony And Cleopatra'. Go!

[via vicaria]

A lady of good taste, your mum! The first book that springs to mind based on some of that list would be To Live by Yu Hua.

As a random lucky dip, maybe something by Ismail Kadare. I'd go for Broken April.

[Various Artist]

Does it have to be literary fiction, DM?

For my neighbour's 90th birthday last year, I got her Mark Forsyth's The Etymologicon, a "circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language". It takes an apparently random series of words and delves into the history and derivation of each, then links onward to the next word by some thematic connection, and so on to create a vast wandering sequence. It's the kind of thing one can dip in and out of at one's heart content as it lends itself to reading either one or two entries or loads and loads in a row. My friend who I got it for, who's a lover of language, thought it was marvellous.

[delicatemoth]

Thank you both, will look those up. It doesn't have to be 'literary', the ones I mentioned are just the things that came to mind.

via vicaria - absolutely. I consider myself incredibly lucky and privileged to have grown up in a house full of books and music, courtesy of both parents.

[ursus arctos]

It doesn't surprise me at all that your mum has such excellent literary tastes.

Ferrante has a new book out, but I don't think it has been translated yet.

Given Grossman and some of the others, perhaps something by Svetlana Alexievich?

War's Unwomanly Face is a novel, Last Witnesses is the kind of oral history she won the Nobel for. Zinky Boys and Voices from Chernobyl are both excellent for anyone interested in the subject matter (the Afghan War and Chernobyl)

[via vicaria]

Does it have to be literary fiction, DM?

For my neighbour's 90th birthday last year, I got her Mark Forsyth's The Etymologicon, a "circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language". It takes an apparently random series of words and delves into the history and derivation of each, then links onward to the next word by some thematic connection, and so on to create a vast wandering sequence. It's the kind of thing one can dip in and out of at one's heart content as it lends itself to reading either one or two entries or loads and loads in a row. My friend who I got it for, who's a lover of language, thought it was marvellous.

I bought my TEFL friend that as part of a bundle of his books - The Etymologicon, the Horologicon (lost words of the English language) and The Elements of Eloquence (memorable and interesting turns of phrases). Highly recommend them all!

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

I think she sounds like she needs a bit of light relief. How about "Keith Lemon: the rules : 69 ways to be successful"?

[slackster]

My mum’s 86 too, but I’m not sure I can help here, DM. The heights of her literary aspiration is something like Jilly Cooper, whilst she’s also happy to graze a gushing biography of some Royal, celeb or posho.

I’ve never been exactly sure where I got my love of reading from. Mum’s occasional pulp fiction and puff-piece biographies aside, Dad was barely literate, nobody else in my circle of influence read much, and in childhood I was fobbed off with Enid Blyton, a Readers Digest almanac and, as a teen, the likes of Alistair MacLean. I only really started devouring “better” books when I got to about 17. I think I was considered a bit peculiar once I started helping out in a second hand bookshop at weekends when I was 19. Lolz.

[matt j]

"War with the Newts" is such a good read. I've plowed through a fair amount of Capek myself, so looking at my shelf behind me for somewhat possibly obscure things I'd suggest:

Journey Round My Skull - Frigyes Karinthy
Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi

If you think she'd like some fantasy-type things:
The Raven Tower - Ann Leckie
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke

Non-fiction:
Harpo Speaks - Harpo Marx & Rowland Barber
Zeitoun - Dave Eggers
The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson
The Map that Changed the World, The Meaning of Everything - Simon Winchester

And super-duper obscure:
The Murder of Aziz Khan - Zulfikar Ghose

[Levin]

Be careful with the Alexievich, Penguin have had P&V do some of the translations (although other people might not mind).

I'd strongly recommend Odessa Stories by Isaac Babel from Pushkin translated by Boris Drayluk.

Has she read any Sebald? Rings of Saturn is excellent.
Pale Fire by Nabokov
Some Eileen Chang
The Tower, Uwe Tellkamp - Family novel in 80s East Germany
Traveller of the Century, Andres Neuman - my favourite novel, a 'historical' novel about ideas and history and a love story.

[Amor de Cosmos]

If she liked Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight then she's probably read Tarka the Otter but if not...

[WOM]

Skylark - Dezso Kosztolanyi

I traveled all the way here just to suggest this, and would recommend it doubly-so if she has a thing for Dostoevsky, et al. It's a wonderful, light, funny, but thoughtful book.

[ursus arctos]

Levin, we can't use diacritics at the moment, so very few people will understand the point you are making

[Levin]

Oops, that was just an ampersand. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated The Unwomanly Face of War and their translations are, divisive, let us say. The translations do tend towards the literal.

[San Bernardhinault]

As a random lucky dip, maybe something by Ismail Kadare. I'd go for Broken April.

I have no idea if it's any good for Ms DM Sr, because I only know the Ferrante of the listed books, but I still want to add some praise for Kadare, and Broken April in particular. Just a fantastic book. One of my favourite novels.

The General of the Dead Army, and The File On H would probably be the next two Kadare novels I'd recommend.

[matt j]

I traveled all the way here just to suggest this, and would recommend it doubly-so if she has a thing for Dostoevsky, et al. It's a wonderful, light, funny, but thoughtful book.

I don't want to hijack this thread, but Skylark was a book I stumbled upon in the stacks at the University of Texas main library when I'd just wander through and pick things off the shelf that looked interesting. I read it in basically one sitting that night, and ordered a personal copy the next day. Over the next few years I went out and found just about everything I could by Kosztolanyi (and anything I could about him), including some real old school cross-Atlantic purchases from a seller in Hungary that had a few English editions. One of which was a collection of short stories printed in Hungarian on one page & English on the other.

The best of the others I acquired is Anna Edes, a really quiet work that I'd put nearly at the same level as Skylark. The opening line of that one is: "Bela Kun was fleeing the country in an aeroplane." Which in a just world, would be one of the classic opening lines of literature.

After being practically obsessed, I'd quickly exhausted my avenues of research in the early days of the internet, and then just let things sit for a long time. Around 2010, a friend gave me a copy of his New York Review of Books to read an article about spatial topology, and much to my shock there was this review in the same issue:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/201...ering-perfect/

It was like someone mentioning an old forgotten friend, and I could barely do anything but just produce my older edition and hand it back with a the issue opened to this review.

So yeah, I wholeheartedly recommend it and probably have done so on OTF before, probably many times.

[WOM]

Someone here recommended it years ago (maybe you?) and I flew through it. I also recently received Kornel Esti, but I only got one chapter into it before some non-fiction book grabbed me. If I'm reading fiction and some long-awaited non-fiction arrives, I'll almost always ditch the former for the latter. I've recommend Skylark to at least a dozen people.

[matt j]

Just over 10 years ago. I'm nothing if not consistent:

https://www.onetouchfootball.com/for...tering-perfect

(even called out War with the Newts then too.)

I'm also sitting on Kornel Esti, and feel bad for not finishing it. I need to make some time for that.

[matt j]

Also Pale Fire is great, never been disappointed in anything I've read by Nabokov, but this one stood out as special. (Lolita, obviously is too.)

Lightweight but fun, if she hasn't read Jasper Fforde's Thrusday Next series, that could keep her busy.

non-fiction again:
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre is also fun.

[ad hoc]

I read Pacsirta (skylark) thanks to your recommendation Matt. It's a great book. (And as a bonus it's one of the bird names I know in Hungarian)

[via vicaria]

I'm fairly sure there's a thread on OTF from days past, which was dedicated to Skylark. I first heard of the book here, and it's the reason I bought and read it. Fully endorse the enthusiasm other posters in this thread have as well, it's an excellent book.

[delicatemoth]

What a great response, thank you. Alexievich sounds promising - she's a bit of a russophile - and Skylark. We both like Sebald, The Emigrants is my favourite (not read Austerlitz though). Yes she's read Tarka, and Salar. I've read a couple of the Ancient Sunlight books and they really are something, intensely detailed and bleak.

Can't remember if I ever got her any Joseph Roth, that would probably work. We love talking about books.

[sw2borshch]

Although I am not a literary reader, Alexeivich's "Unwomanly..." sprang to mind as soon as I read your OP, so count it as another 'vote'.

[Sam]

If she likes Shakespeare enough to have a favourite play by him, she might well enjoy Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, which I'm currently reading. It's about how Hamnet Shakespeare's death from (in the novel) plague affects his family, and it's about, well, Hamnet's family, and in particular his mother, Agnes (which was what she'd have been called by those who knew her, apparently, rather than Anne). William himself is in it, often around the edges, but never actually named. I know, because Maggie O'Farrell's talk at the recent online Hay Festival was one of the ones I watched, that one of her interests in writing it was grief, because for all that we hear about how kids died so often back in Shakespeare's day that parents wouldn't have been bothered by it, there's reason to believe that's not necessarily the case for this family, because after Hamnet Shakespeare died his dad wrote a load of works which tower over world literature and are infused with grief for lost family, lost children, for a lost twin (Hamnet was one of twins), and one of which was titled Hamlet, which in the English of the time was literally the same name.

I'm currently about 60% in (I wanted to get it in hardback, but COVID-19 has stopped imports – it was only published in late March – and I got impatient, so I'm reading it on my Kindle), and Hamnet isn't dead yet, but I'd already heartily recommend it.

[Sam]

Oh, and it's also about a pandemic, in a way. So it's topical an' all.