Cristina Fernández Cubas, Nona's Room, Trans. by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles, Peter Owen Publishers, 2017.
excerpt
excerpt 2
An award-winning collection of Gothic and uncanny stories from one of Europe's most celebrated contemporary writers of short fiction. In Nona's Room the everyday fantasies of women slowly turn into nightmare, delusion and paranoia. A young girl who is envious of the attention given to her sister has a brutal awakening. A young woman, facing eviction, misplaces her trust in an old lady who invites her into her home. A mature woman spends the night in a hotel in Madrid and falls into a time warp... Cubas's stories are suffused with the chilling tones of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and the psychological intensity of Paula Hawkins's The Girl on the Train.
"There is mystery almost from the first sentence of every story. Each detail shatters our inertia and forces us to reappraise a shifting panorama." —El Pais
"Masterfully blends the commonplace with the fantastic, achieving the essence and vitality inherent in the best examples of this literary genre." —Selection Panel, Premio Nacional de Literatura
"Cubas stories create one of the most extraordinary universes in contemporary literature, where the commonplace and the unexpected, normality and the unexplainable intertwine to offer a singular vision of human experience." —abc
“There’s an especially lovely story of that last, skeptical kind in Cristina Fernández Cubas’s remarkable collection . . . In these six elegant stories she’s most interested in the ambiguities and periodic disturbances that plague the imagination, and reports on them with the appropriate sense of awe, even of dread.” —New York Times
It doesn’t take the reader long to realise that nothing is quite what it seems in Cristina Fernández Cubas’s short story collection Nona’s Room. The book – the first of Cubas’s work to be translated into English, by Kathryn Phillips-Miles and Simon Deefholts – is an invitation to step through the looking glass. The slight shift in perspective that this entails is all that’s needed to expose the blackness lurking all around – from actual monsters hidden behind closed doors to the horrors of strange tricks played by unstable minds.
In the story with which the collection opens (and from which it also takes its title), a teenage girl struggles with the attention given to her “special” sister Nona, a description that the girl comes to understand “didn’t necessarily mean something good”. As it’s slowly revealed just how unreliable a narrator we’re dealing with here, what begins as a tale of seemingly ordinary sibling rivalry soon morphs into something much more distressing. Interestingly, the same topic rears its head in the concluding story, A Few Days with the Wahyes-Wahno. This time, however, it’s adult siblings who play out the pattern of “bitterness and hatred” forged during their childhoods. Unconsciously transmitting this model of interaction from one generation to the next, this jealousy bubbles along in the background while a narrative concerning their formative years takes centre stage. While their father lies gravely sick at home, the 13-year-old narrator and her younger brother are sent to spend the summer with their aunt and uncle, “to breathe the pure mountain air, eat fresh eggs and drink goat’s milk straight from the goat.” Of course, what this so-called rural idyll actually offers them is far from a life of straightforward, carefree simplicity.
Adolescence, with all its emotional turbulence and physical transformation, naturally allies itself with Cubas’s slightly off-kilter worldview. As such, when she turns her attention to older protagonists, the effect is slightly less successful. The mature woman who checks herself into a Madrid hotel in A Fresh Start actually encounters the opposite. Stuck in what appears to be some kind of time warp, she finds herself somehow reliving episodes from her youth: “Today, the present has slipped into her past”. The story makes for disconcerting reading, but it lacks the punch of some of the other tales. Not that this change of pace isn’t welcome, if only to provide some variation on a modus operandi that might otherwise come across as repetitive. Nestled, for example, in between two narratives that deal in subtler shocks, is Chatting to Old Ladies. Of the six stories in the collection, this is the one that deals in more traditional horrors of Grimm’s fairy tales, albeit with a contemporary twist: Room meets Hansel and Gretel.
All the same, Cubas’s take on the Gothic is not quite like anything else I’ve read, not least because of the arresting central story in the collection, Interior with Figure – which takes its name from a painting by the 19th-century Italian artist Adriano Cecioni that features a young, scared-looking girl crouching beside a bed in a sparsely furnished room. By this point we’ve been lulled into assuming that what we’re reading are works of fiction, but no, this is something else entirely: an account of an unnerving encounter that took place in Cubas’s own life (or so we’re led to believe) is the “inspiration” for a story (or so she declares). But whether this is it, we can’t be quite sure. The girl in the painting reminds Cubas of a character in one of her stories –Nona – she explains, but there’s another girl here who piques her interest more: a jittery schoolgirl also visiting the art gallery. Rather than re-establishing our connection to the real, this fusing of fiction and actuality right in the middle of the book is surprisingly unsettling.
Phillips-Miles and Deefholts’s translation breathes just the right amount of animation into Cubas’s work. Further evocation of the uncanny atmosphere that infuses the text, the lucidity of their prose sits gloriously at odds with what it’s describing. “It’s as if she’s not seeing the same thing as everyone else,” says Cubas of the schoolgirl transfixed by the Cecioni painting, “or at least not in the same way.” The strange creepiness of these stories suggests the same might be said of Cubas herself. She’s able to cut through reality and see something else within– things the rest of us don’t, can’t or won’t allow ourselves to see. Reading this collection illuminates the darkness, but be prepared: it’s not a pretty picture. - Lucy Scholes
https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/book-review-in-nona-s-room-cristina-fern%C3%A1ndez-cubas-brings-darkness-to-light-with-uncanny-flair-1.76298
My first book for Spanish lit month is the first of the three from the second |Peter Owen World series were they are every year publishing three books from a certain country the first in the series was Slovenia this second series is three books from Spain. The first book is from Cristina Fernandez Cubas she has bee writing since the 1980’s this is her first book to be translated into English, she has written ten books, including one using a male pseudonym, this collection won National Narrative and critics prize when it came out.
Today I’m looking at another title from the Peter Owen/Istros Spanish Spring trio (the last I reviewed was Inventing Love). The author biography tells me that Cristina Fernández Cubas is one of Spain’s most highly regarded short-story writers — and that Nona’s Room is her first book to be translated into English. After reading these six stories, I can see why Cubas has such a high reputation; and I’m keen to read more of her work.
The opening title story sets the tone of the collection. When the narrator’s sister Nona was born, her mother told her that Nona was special, and not to forget that “special is a lovely word.” Well, maybe that was how it happened. Whatever, the narrator knows that she has felt sidelined since Nona came along:
Yes, I am tiptoeing around something that I don’t want to reveal. But I don’t want to give the impression that this story is ‘all about the twist’: ‘Nona’s Room’ writhes and shifts all the way through, with a constant sense that something else is set to emerge.
That same sense comes right to the fore early on in ‘Interior with Figure’, when the narrator describes the Cecioni painting of that name and says that the girl depicted “reminds me of a character in a short story I wrote recently whom I called Nona.”
The narrator of ‘Interior with Figure’ admits to being a writer but stops short of revealing her name. Still, that mention of Nona tempts us to perceive this story as being closer to reality than some of the others. Our narrator goes on to recount seeing a school party at the gallery she is visiting, and hearing one girl who has a particularly dark interpretation of Cecioni’s Interior with Figure. The girl speculates that the figure in the painting is hiding from her parents, because she knows they want to kill her for what she has seen.
It strikes the narrator that the girl’s comments on the painting may actually be a coded cry for help. She wonders what she should do: go to the police? But what would she tell them? ‘Interior with Figure’ is a story about interpretation: a series of subjectivities which crystallise into a whole all unto itself. That’s my interpretation, anyway…
‘The End of Barbro’ sees a woman drive a wedge between the man she marries and his three daughters. What makes this story particularly striking is that it’s narrated by the three sisters collectively:
https://www.davidsbookworld.com/2017/07/13/nonas-room-cristina-fernandez-cubas/
"It’s as if she’s not seeing the same thing as everyone else”
--- "Interior With Figure"
Nona's Room puts together six short stories narrated by women, and it isn't long into the first story that I realized I had something unique in my hands. The publisher's description of this collection labels these tales as "Gothic and uncanny stories," but I think a better way to describe them is to say that they're off-kilter, taking the reader right away into a strange sort of universe where he/she will have no idea what to expect at any moment. That impression was cemented in the first story, "Nona's Room," a tale of two sisters that is utterly mind blowing once the author turns a certain corner in the telling. Then another surprise, with "Chatting With Old Ladies," which starts out with a woman trapped in a desperate situation who, as it turns out, hasn't even begun to understand the meaning of either "trapped" or "desperate." This one reads like a mix of horror story and fairy tale, and I heard myself actually gasp at the ending of this one. By this time on full alert, I moved on to what I consider to be the best story in this book, "Interior With Figure," in which a writer visiting an art museum stops to listen to a group of children giving their own interpretations of a particular painting, finding one little girl's thoughts beyond disturbing. However, it's this child, not the painting itself, that captures the writer's imagination...
"The End of Barbro" brings three sisters together to reflect on their past, while "A Fresh Start" finds a woman wanting to start all over discovering that "the present has slipped into her past;" "A Few Days with the "Wahyes-Wahno" follows two children as they visit their aunt and uncle while their father is ill; the idyllic retreat will become something they will remember for the rest of their lives. "..a sad happiness or a happy sadness," only the reader can judge.
The quotation with which I began this post really says it all -- "It’s as if she’s not seeing the same thing as everyone else," since it seems to me that Ms. Cubas has this rather eerie way of looking at things through a set of lenses that focus on the spaces between reflections and illusion, past and present; but most of all between borders and boundaries that we as readers don't get to see very often. It's not an easy read, and it does take a lot of active thought, but the patient reader will be highly rewarded. And I have to say that as I turned the last page, I had to go sit and focus on more mundane things to shake off my sense of being left totally off balance. When a book can provoke a reaction like that, it's one well worth reading. - NancyO
http://www.readingavidly.com/2017/10/nonas-room-by-cristina-fernandez-cubas.html
In the story with which the collection opens (and from which it also takes its title), a teenage girl struggles with the attention given to her “special” sister Nona, a description that the girl comes to understand “didn’t necessarily mean something good”. As it’s slowly revealed just how unreliable a narrator we’re dealing with here, what begins as a tale of seemingly ordinary sibling rivalry soon morphs into something much more distressing. Interestingly, the same topic rears its head in the concluding story, A Few Days with the Wahyes-Wahno. This time, however, it’s adult siblings who play out the pattern of “bitterness and hatred” forged during their childhoods. Unconsciously transmitting this model of interaction from one generation to the next, this jealousy bubbles along in the background while a narrative concerning their formative years takes centre stage. While their father lies gravely sick at home, the 13-year-old narrator and her younger brother are sent to spend the summer with their aunt and uncle, “to breathe the pure mountain air, eat fresh eggs and drink goat’s milk straight from the goat.” Of course, what this so-called rural idyll actually offers them is far from a life of straightforward, carefree simplicity.
Adolescence, with all its emotional turbulence and physical transformation, naturally allies itself with Cubas’s slightly off-kilter worldview. As such, when she turns her attention to older protagonists, the effect is slightly less successful. The mature woman who checks herself into a Madrid hotel in A Fresh Start actually encounters the opposite. Stuck in what appears to be some kind of time warp, she finds herself somehow reliving episodes from her youth: “Today, the present has slipped into her past”. The story makes for disconcerting reading, but it lacks the punch of some of the other tales. Not that this change of pace isn’t welcome, if only to provide some variation on a modus operandi that might otherwise come across as repetitive. Nestled, for example, in between two narratives that deal in subtler shocks, is Chatting to Old Ladies. Of the six stories in the collection, this is the one that deals in more traditional horrors of Grimm’s fairy tales, albeit with a contemporary twist: Room meets Hansel and Gretel.
All the same, Cubas’s take on the Gothic is not quite like anything else I’ve read, not least because of the arresting central story in the collection, Interior with Figure – which takes its name from a painting by the 19th-century Italian artist Adriano Cecioni that features a young, scared-looking girl crouching beside a bed in a sparsely furnished room. By this point we’ve been lulled into assuming that what we’re reading are works of fiction, but no, this is something else entirely: an account of an unnerving encounter that took place in Cubas’s own life (or so we’re led to believe) is the “inspiration” for a story (or so she declares). But whether this is it, we can’t be quite sure. The girl in the painting reminds Cubas of a character in one of her stories –Nona – she explains, but there’s another girl here who piques her interest more: a jittery schoolgirl also visiting the art gallery. Rather than re-establishing our connection to the real, this fusing of fiction and actuality right in the middle of the book is surprisingly unsettling.
Phillips-Miles and Deefholts’s translation breathes just the right amount of animation into Cubas’s work. Further evocation of the uncanny atmosphere that infuses the text, the lucidity of their prose sits gloriously at odds with what it’s describing. “It’s as if she’s not seeing the same thing as everyone else,” says Cubas of the schoolgirl transfixed by the Cecioni painting, “or at least not in the same way.” The strange creepiness of these stories suggests the same might be said of Cubas herself. She’s able to cut through reality and see something else within– things the rest of us don’t, can’t or won’t allow ourselves to see. Reading this collection illuminates the darkness, but be prepared: it’s not a pretty picture. - Lucy Scholes
https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/book-review-in-nona-s-room-cristina-fern%C3%A1ndez-cubas-brings-darkness-to-light-with-uncanny-flair-1.76298
My first book for Spanish lit month is the first of the three from the second |Peter Owen World series were they are every year publishing three books from a certain country the first in the series was Slovenia this second series is three books from Spain. The first book is from Cristina Fernandez Cubas she has bee writing since the 1980’s this is her first book to be translated into English, she has written ten books, including one using a male pseudonym, this collection won National Narrative and critics prize when it came out.
My sister is special. That’s what my mother told me at the time she was born in the bright and sunny room in that hospital.She also said, “Special is a lovely word.Never forget that “. I’ve never forgetten, oif course , but it’s more than likely that the scene I’ve described didn’t happen in the hospital but much later in some room and that Nona wasn’t a newborn or even a baby but rather aa little girl of three or four years old .Cubas is well known for putting her female characters in very unsettling situations or out of their comfort zone. The first story is told by an older sister about her young sister Nona of the title of the book. As the story unfolds as told by a child you sense something is very wrong with her younger sister almost unnatural in a way. The next story follows a young woman who is about to meet a friend in a cafe feels sorry for an older woman Ro as she finds out that is sat by herself in the cafe looking lost and lonely.The young woman called Alicia is in need of a place to stay and this older woman offer hers a place in her flat, encourages her to see the flat before her friend arrives. She does but does she return and is all as it seems is this older lady whom she seems. Then a story revolving around a picture that is a girl looking for something under a bed another strange figure leads a writer to she the picture in person. There are three other stories.
Nona isn’t what we think this is the start but as the story unflds it takes more turns.
Alica thought Ro was charming , a charming old lady.This is a collection of slightly creepy stories , I was reminded of Roald Dahl short stories, at times she is almost a female version of his tales of unexpected where everything isn’t what it seems on the surface the perfect example is the second story talking to old ladies that until the last third seems a simple story of an older lady offering a younger a place to stay but no there is a classic twist in the tail, which is what Dahl did so well in his tales of the unexpected stories .I’m surprised it has taken so long for her to be translated into English- https://winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2017/07/06/nonas-room-by-cristina-fernandez-cubas/
“I’m on the fifth floor.”
Alicia imagined the fifth floor was like. There would be an enormus flat full of keepsakes. It would be a flat typical of the Ensanche district. There would be the dining room and a glazed veranda at one end and the master bedroom at the other .There would be a long corridor, which Ro would struggle up and down a thousand times a day. Ro, she said to herfself .Now she thought about it , her last chance was actually RO
Ok I’ll come in for a bit, just for a bit
Alicia goes to see a flat but is that All ?
Today I’m looking at another title from the Peter Owen/Istros Spanish Spring trio (the last I reviewed was Inventing Love). The author biography tells me that Cristina Fernández Cubas is one of Spain’s most highly regarded short-story writers — and that Nona’s Room is her first book to be translated into English. After reading these six stories, I can see why Cubas has such a high reputation; and I’m keen to read more of her work.
The opening title story sets the tone of the collection. When the narrator’s sister Nona was born, her mother told her that Nona was special, and not to forget that “special is a lovely word.” Well, maybe that was how it happened. Whatever, the narrator knows that she has felt sidelined since Nona came along:
Because my life was very different before Nona came into the world. I don’t remember it very well, but I do know it was different. I’ve got loads of reasons to think that it was better, too. Much better. But once Nona was born things changed for ever, and that must be why I got used to thinking that my mother said those words the day she came into the world. That’s the day when I started a new life as well. My life with Nona.This kind of uncertainty, and a slippery hold on reality, permeates all of Cubas’s stories. In this particular example, the narrator has started to lose her sense of having a life in and for herself when her parents focus all their attention on special Nona at her special school, Nona with her array of imaginary friends. It’s when the narrator sees something inexplicable happen to her sister that she becomes determined to find out the truth, and discover what secrets lie behind the door of Nona’s room…
(translation by Kathryn Phillips-Miles and Simon Deefholts)
Yes, I am tiptoeing around something that I don’t want to reveal. But I don’t want to give the impression that this story is ‘all about the twist’: ‘Nona’s Room’ writhes and shifts all the way through, with a constant sense that something else is set to emerge.
That same sense comes right to the fore early on in ‘Interior with Figure’, when the narrator describes the Cecioni painting of that name and says that the girl depicted “reminds me of a character in a short story I wrote recently whom I called Nona.”
The narrator of ‘Interior with Figure’ admits to being a writer but stops short of revealing her name. Still, that mention of Nona tempts us to perceive this story as being closer to reality than some of the others. Our narrator goes on to recount seeing a school party at the gallery she is visiting, and hearing one girl who has a particularly dark interpretation of Cecioni’s Interior with Figure. The girl speculates that the figure in the painting is hiding from her parents, because she knows they want to kill her for what she has seen.
It strikes the narrator that the girl’s comments on the painting may actually be a coded cry for help. She wonders what she should do: go to the police? But what would she tell them? ‘Interior with Figure’ is a story about interpretation: a series of subjectivities which crystallise into a whole all unto itself. That’s my interpretation, anyway…
‘The End of Barbro’ sees a woman drive a wedge between the man she marries and his three daughters. What makes this story particularly striking is that it’s narrated by the three sisters collectively:
We hardly spoke a word and didn’t dare look each other in the eye, but with a few drinks inside us we sorted through our thoughts and memories as if they were scenes from a film fast-forwarding at a frenetic pace and featuring only two protagonists: Barbro and our father. And when we remember her appearing on the doorstep barely a week earlier it seemed as if years and years had gone by. They weren’t the same, and neither were we.The effect of this narration is quite eerie, because we lose sight of the sisters’ individual lives and personalities (perhaps reflecting how they feel squeezed out by Barbro), which makes it harder to imagine them as characters. In turn, that makes the story’s sense of reality unstable… and there we’re back to the normal state of affairs in Nona’s Room. -
https://www.davidsbookworld.com/2017/07/13/nonas-room-cristina-fernandez-cubas/
"It’s as if she’s not seeing the same thing as everyone else”
--- "Interior With Figure"
Nona's Room puts together six short stories narrated by women, and it isn't long into the first story that I realized I had something unique in my hands. The publisher's description of this collection labels these tales as "Gothic and uncanny stories," but I think a better way to describe them is to say that they're off-kilter, taking the reader right away into a strange sort of universe where he/she will have no idea what to expect at any moment. That impression was cemented in the first story, "Nona's Room," a tale of two sisters that is utterly mind blowing once the author turns a certain corner in the telling. Then another surprise, with "Chatting With Old Ladies," which starts out with a woman trapped in a desperate situation who, as it turns out, hasn't even begun to understand the meaning of either "trapped" or "desperate." This one reads like a mix of horror story and fairy tale, and I heard myself actually gasp at the ending of this one. By this time on full alert, I moved on to what I consider to be the best story in this book, "Interior With Figure," in which a writer visiting an art museum stops to listen to a group of children giving their own interpretations of a particular painting, finding one little girl's thoughts beyond disturbing. However, it's this child, not the painting itself, that captures the writer's imagination...
"The End of Barbro" brings three sisters together to reflect on their past, while "A Fresh Start" finds a woman wanting to start all over discovering that "the present has slipped into her past;" "A Few Days with the "Wahyes-Wahno" follows two children as they visit their aunt and uncle while their father is ill; the idyllic retreat will become something they will remember for the rest of their lives. "..a sad happiness or a happy sadness," only the reader can judge.
The quotation with which I began this post really says it all -- "It’s as if she’s not seeing the same thing as everyone else," since it seems to me that Ms. Cubas has this rather eerie way of looking at things through a set of lenses that focus on the spaces between reflections and illusion, past and present; but most of all between borders and boundaries that we as readers don't get to see very often. It's not an easy read, and it does take a lot of active thought, but the patient reader will be highly rewarded. And I have to say that as I turned the last page, I had to go sit and focus on more mundane things to shake off my sense of being left totally off balance. When a book can provoke a reaction like that, it's one well worth reading. - NancyO
http://www.readingavidly.com/2017/10/nonas-room-by-cristina-fernandez-cubas.html
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.