Faces on the Tip of My Tongue

by Emmanuelle Pagano, Jennifer Higgins (Translator), Sophie Lewis (Translator)

Meetings, partings, loves and losses in rural France are dissected with compassion.

The late wedding guest isn’t your cousin but a drunken chancer. The driver who gives you a lift isn’t going anywhere but off the road. Snow settles on your car in summer and the sequins found between the pages of a borrowed novel will make your fortune. Pagano’s stories weave together the mad, the mysterious and the dispossessed of a rural French community with honesty and humour. A superb, cumulative collection from a unique French voice.

Why Peirene chose to publish this book:

This is a spellbinding web of stories about people on the periphery. Pagano makes rural France her subject matter. She invokes the closeness of a local community and the links between the inhabitants’ lives. But then she reminds us how little we know of each other.

This volume contains a selection of stories from Un renard à mains nues.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, France, French Literature, International, Female Authors

136 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2012

About the author

Emmanuelle Pagano, alias Emmanuelle Salasc, née le 15 septembre 1969, dans l'Aveyron, est une écrivaine française.

Emmanuelle Pagano was born in Aveyron in September 1969. She lives today in Ardèche, with three children, born in April 1991, September 1995 and May 2003. She graduated in Fine Arts, and has done university researches in the field of esthetics in the cinema as well as the multimedia.

Reviews

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2020

This collection missed out on last week's Booker International shortlist, and I failed to find time for it before the announcement. It is a fine collection of linked short stories, distilled from a larger original book and rearranged to make it easier to see the links. They are all set in a remote hilly area of France, and the cast is full of slightly eccentric characters, who are gently mocked at times but emerge as rounded characters. This made it quite a pleasant antidote to some of the heavier and darker books on the longlist.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker
Sad, turbid stories, told with violence and precision

Read for Women in Translation month, Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is the latest book from the consistently excellent Peirene Press, who indeed are having a year of only publishing women in translation.

Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis, whose translation of Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre I was proud to shortlist as part of the jury for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize.

The book consists of a series of short-stories - 13 over just 115 pages - stories that are so connected that this may perhaps best be seen as a novella rather than a collection.

Set in rural France, these are first person tales telling, with compassion, of disturbed people. In the words of the final tale, they are sad, turbid stories, told with violence and precision, with echoes of Ariana Harwicz's also RoC shortlisted Die, My Love. Although here the madness is mostly observed and commented on, rather than inherent in the narrator themselves, typically of people trapped in the past, who life is passing by, literally in some cases, such as a man ('the roadside loony') who waits for years each day at the mountain road bend where his wife and daughter lost their life, hoping for their return, or the woman with her 'retarded' daughter, with who waits at a bus stop each day for years for the doctor who she was tricked into believing is coming to ask for her hand in marriage.

It was a place where there were strange stories going around, unsavoury ones, legends of foxes killing themselves, of a little girl made into fertiliser for pumpkins, all quite hard to believe and told by a mad-old [Polish] man they called the automatic tour guide, whose mouth would open as soon as you passed the door of his hut.

The translators acknowledge the robust language used, noting that the author's "characters don't mince their words ... [she] describes people who have been rendered marginal by trauma, abandonment, original disability or bad luck ... she honours them with the closeness of her observations, with the care and humour with which she portrays them.

Peirene state that they "only publish books of less than 200 pages that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a film. We pride ourselves on publishing truly big stories in small packages" - and this is a good example of both the strength but also one consequence of that stance. Emmanuelle Pagano's French original Un renard à mains nues (A Fox with My Bare Hands) was over 300 pages long. The translators explain in an afterward that they worked with Pagano to "make a selection for this English edition that focuses on a brings out the connections between the stories ... we have privileged those that add up to fuller stories in themselves and point to fuller relationships between the characters", whereas in the original sometimes the connections were as subtle as a repeated sound or word (both the English and original French titles are recurrent phrases). It's an approach that certainly produces an intriguing and tight result - I kept reading back to spot links - although I would love to read a translation of the complete collection.

This interview with the translators adds more on both the editing down of the original and the change in title: https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/lite...

The narrator of the final story is a lover of demanding books ... difficult and demanding, discouragingly long and imposing ... stalks, nuts and bolts around my bones and in my head, making me stronger, solidifying me. Most of her friends read more shallow literature, limp, shiny books ... for a book to change us, to cleanse us, it must get deep inside, and those pink books, as I've told them hundreds of times, stay on the surface. They reach only our outer layers of our skin ... they smooth over worries with illusory balm. But borrowing books from the library, she takes fellowship in the signs of previous readers:

I don't just read the lives of my books' characters any more, I also read the lives of the people reading the stories. When I borrow books, I take with me glimpses of their daily goings on, all the little doings that fill our own stories and mingle with those in the books, sometimes to the extent of leaving their marks on the pages ... a squashed fly, a feather marking a page, tiny pieces of bread, still fresh, or stale old breadcrumbs.

Recommended and a 2020 Booker International contender.

[Antonomasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Litfic by numbers, as far as I'm concerned, though a pretty good example of it. The short stories interlock subtly and meticulously. There are a few great insights into /descriptions of certain states of mind. I really liked the setting of rural France, and that it includes non-agricultural work as part of rural life. Some of the characters stick with you. Writing this post nearly a month after reading the book, that includes the old man nicknamed the automated tour guide, a compulsive storyteller; the hitchhiker who gets kicks out of standing in drivers' blind spots - simply because other readers seem to mention him most in discussions, though I thought him an example of a sort of mildly sinister, insidious character commonly found in recent litfic. And especially - because she was, and was presumably designed to be, a contrast to the relatively comfortable middle-class world of most of the characters, and directly challenges it - the impoverished, ageing diabetic accidental wedding guest.

I for one am glad this translation only contained about half of the stories from the French original: being such a short book, it did not outstay its welcome. I basically enjoyed this, whilst conscious I may not have enjoyed twice as much of it. I might have found this collection impressive years ago, before I had read so much similar stuff - and it undoubtedly takes skill to write and translate fiction of this quality - but now too many of its characters and settings feel somewhat hackneyed in the context of contemporary literary fiction. Unless you really like this sort of thing.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was aware when I started this book that it began life as a much longer book written in French. The English version, I knew, was created in collaboration with the author by selecting from a set of loosely linked short stories to build a shorter collection in which, mostly, the links are more concrete. In fact, as presented to us in English, it reads far more like a novella than a short story collection.

The story connnections require the reader to keep alert, although a lot of them sit in plain view requiring just a quick check back to be sure you are reading what you think you are reading. The focus is a community is rural France and we quickly realise that we are seeing the same events several times but from different perspectives and with a different person’s perspective.

Previous experience suggests I respond well to books translated from French. I don’t know if that relates to the source language or to the job done by the translators. Here, I found the writing atmospheric and the ongoing discovery of links meant I was engaged, if sometimes slightly distracted, all the way through.

3.5 stars rounded up.

[Vesna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved everything about this book, from the beauty and simplicity in shaping sentences, the themes (compassion, interconnected lives even if time or space seemingly separate them, elusive memories, and so much more), the subtlety with which different characters reappear in different stories, shifting viewpoints that show a deeper side of someone's life that appear only fragmentary in the eyes of others, ... by the end of the book, I wanted to read so much more and hope that the entire collection of these interlinked stories, which is three times larger than this selection in translation, will eventually be published in English.

It's also a major feat in the process of co-translation, uniformly rendered as if in the hands of a singularly talented translator. And the fact that it was published by a small press (Peirene Press), their choice of the charity for 5% of their proceeds echos the book's empathy for those on the margins of society (just one of its themes), all of it adds up to a marvelous whole.

I was not familiar with Emmanuelle Pagano and am overjoyed to discover such a superbly talented writer whose prose speaks quietly (for the lack of a better term) but it's profoundly moving about the issues of life that everyone can relate to in one way or another.

[verbava · Rating 3 out of 5]

збірка оповідань, яка була значно довша в оригіналі (французькому). у післямові перекладачки пишуть, що вибирали тексти, які один одного доповнюють, і що для них важливі були оповідання про дорогу. власне, це ті, які мені найменше зайшли: монологи (часто, але не обов'язково, внутрішні) персонажів, що їдуть гірськими трасами. із них справді складається більша історія, але в тій історії якось небагато цікавого.

найприємніше: перше оповідання з дитячими спогадами, де нараторка каже, що була улюбленицею озера; історія про дівчинку й велетенське дерево – одної ночі воно падає, і батьки переймаються, що дівчинка сумуватиме, але вона радісно біжить і робить собі схованку в порожньому стовбурі; останнє оповідання, про читачку, яка в певний момент (дуже конкретний момент – сидячи у ванні з бібліотечною книжкою) розуміє, що тексти єднають її з іншими читачами. маленькі коштовності, уповні варті часу, витраченого на збірку.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

“They [her friends who read escapist romantic fiction] hope to find something in these sickly-sweet pages to help them forget their dirty lives, but it doesn’t work. For a book to change us, to cleanse us, it must get deep inside, and those pink books .. stay on the surface. They reach only the outer layers of our skin, our thoughts and memories ………..

Now longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize.

This book was published by the UK small press, Peirene Press “a boutique publishing house with a traditional commitment to first class European literature in high-quality translation” and whose style is described by the TLS as “Two-hour books to be devoured in a single sitting; literary cinema for those fatigued by film”

This approach often leads to books being adapted as part of their translation process and this book (jointly translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis - who, as a judge for the 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize, I was delighted to shortlist for her translation of “Blue Self-Portrait”) is a perfect example of this: a 300 page collection of more of less strongly linked short stories effectively transformed into a coherent novella told via more strongly connected stories.

The stories are set around a community in mountainous rural France – and as the stories progress we see the same characters and incidents recurring but told over very different times and different narrators:

- Two near identical cousins – one who left the region many years ago, one who stayed but is increasingly suicidal and the accidental extension of a wedding invite to an alcoholic with the same name as the exile;

- A local eccentric who waits every day by the mountainous bend where his wife and child were killed in a crash many decades previously – his vigil interrupted by the re-routing of the road by indifferent local authorities;

- Another local eccentric with a handicapped daughter; some young children who play a cruel trick on her and raise her hopes that a local Doctor will propose to the daughter, a hope which becomes an obsession long after the original practical joke;

- A famous lime tree which becomes a symbol of the break up of a family who live there;

- An “automatic tour guide” who sits outside a local gite and tells part real/part invented local tales in a monotone to anyone who will listen;

- A girl who strangles a dying fox with her bare hands (a story which gives the title to the original French translation).

And most weakly ....

- A hitchhiker whose technique (and far too long story) seems to rely on a complete misunderstanding of the physics and concept of a blind spot (this being the one serious mis-step in the collection and a story largely best skipped);

Overall an atmospheric and enjoyable collection which takes some involvement from the reader to extract full value – very much literary cinema rather than escapist cinema.

I’m alive and I read real books. Not dead books that simply submit to being read”

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Pagano's interesting use of language, and the odd little motifs that recur through the stories.

[Natalie (CuriousReader) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020.

Emmanuelle Pagano's book is described as a collection of interconnected stories depicting rural life in France, showing human compassion in the way she supposedly explores love and loss and general connection with other people in small communities. It is true that because this is compiled of interconnected stories, several characters re-appear in the various stories and of course all in different guises as we see the same person from someone else's point of view. One such instance works particularly well, when a male hitchhiker narrates an entire chapter directed equally at his driver and the reader - the scene turns into something quite different when later, you hear this story from the driver's perspective. For the most part, the links between the characters are visible - you remember having met that person before, but they don't seem to mean much. Sure, you saw that person on a different street but so what if you see them again in a different setting if they don't have any particular significance to you? And for me, these characters never felt alive so it mattered little how and if they knew each other. I found the writing generally sparse, which is fine if there's enough excitement in the rest of the book - but if there was suppose to be suspense or tension here then it was hardly perceptible.

Furthermore at the very end of this book, you will find that the translators' share the little tidbit of information that this book has gone through cuts - in fact, this volume isn't complete. It has been cut to strengthen the general essence of the book or some such thing. Not only does this feel strange as an editing choice but to find this out at the end only strengthened my annoyance with the book - which honestly might not have been stronger without said-cuts (as it is, I didn't particularly enjoy most of this book) but I find myself wondering what kind of a book this would've been originally. Certainly different as perhaps some of these characters would've had time to linger and become familiar to the reader, or else structurally might've been more interesting - as the translators' make the point, some of the connections are harder to see in the text so does that mean the more challenging bits of the book has been removed?

Either way, I will say there were moments of beauty in the book - in particular the young girl growing up alongside a tree and its significance not only for her but for her parents, and the regular visitors of it. It had become something like a totem or a signpost for a pilgrimage, and the way a particular spot can become so meaningful for so many different reasons I thought was quite beautiful. The last chapter too, about a woman reading books from the library and ultimately becoming more interested in the other readers of the books than the stories themselves I thought was interesting, as I'm sure many people enjoying the layered experience of vintage books could understand. "I don't just read the lives of my books' characters any more, I also read the lives of the people reading the stories".

On the whole, this book didn't do much for me and I'm still a bit puzzled by the choice of making this book an abridged version.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a huge sucker for interlinked short stories. The problem is that not too many seem to come my way so I was quite eager to read Faces on the Tip of My Tongue. This is a selection of short stories taking place in rural France.

The collection starts off well with the Lake’s Favourite, which is about a narrator reminiscing about her love of water, when she was a child. It’s a good opener.

However things get even better with The Jigsaw Puzzle which is part coming of age story and a depiction of a marriage falling apart, using a lime tree as a metaphor.

From there onwards characters start to reappear and mingle with each other but what really struck me is that Pagano presents different viewpoints of the reoccurring characters. The story The Short cut is about a woman who dies in a car crash but in Three Press-ups and Unable to Die we readers really find out what has happened to the woman. A hitchhiker makes some brief appearances before getting his own story, same with the village lunatic.

Piecing together the stories and characters adds a fun dimension to the text, I enjoy making connections so I viewed Faces.. as a sort of game. By the end of the book the readers gets a picture of this French village; one that has a varied cast of characters who suffer love, loss and moments of happiness with the odd coincidence thrown in – like life.

I liked the translation and even though it has been edited, this is mentioned in the translators end note, Faces is still feels like a whole novel, like every good interconnected short story collection should.

Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is the third and last part of Peirene Press’ Here be Monsters series. ( My review of the previous part is here ) Over the past year I have discovered many amazing small presses but one of my favourites is Peirene as they manage to publish interesting translated fiction from around the world. Next year there will be a new series and I am wondering what will be next. As always support Indie presses because they are the vanguard of publishing innovative literature.

Many thanks to Peirene Press for providing a copy of Faces on the Tip of My Tongue in exchange for an honest review.

[Marie-Therese · Rating 4 out of 5]

An exceptional collection of tenuously linked short stories. As she displayed to such great effect in Trysting, Pagano possesses a remarkable ability to bring characters to heartbreaking life in very few words. I'm curious as to why Peirene decided to abridge the original collection for publication in English (I didn't find their afterword all that convincing) and I'd love to read the whole thing, as I found the cumulative effect of the stories, as links gradually came clear, very effective. Guess I need to brush up on my French.

Still, even in curiously truncated form, this is a beautiful little book and well worth reading.

[Huy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sách mỏng với bầu không khí khá ngột ngạt với những câu chuyện kết nối với nhau, mỗi chuyện chỉ một vài trang thôi, có những kết nối rõ ràng nhưng cũng có những kết nối sâu xa và đầy dụng ý hơn mà chỉ khi đọc kỹ càng ta mới nhận ra (cũng giống như kết nối của ta với những người khác trong cuộc đời này thôi). Nhưng đúng là văn chương Pháp, giọng văn rất mượt mà và giàu nhạc điệu khiến ta có cảm giác có thể đọc mãi, đọc mãi những câu chuyện không đầu không cuối về những số phận tù túng đang bị mắc kẹt đâu đó trên mặt đất này.

[Abbie | ab_reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

(#gifted @thebookerprizes) I have to admit, I was a little underwhelmed by the only short story collection on the International Booker longlist, but it wasn’t a bad read! Through a series of loosely interconnected stories, Faces on the Tip of My Tongue explores life in a small community in rural France, aiming to remind us that the people we think we know can always surprise us in ways we least expect.
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A few of the stories left little to no impression on me, but I did really enjoy The Lake’s Favourite, Mum at the Park and Just a Dad, while the last story, Glitter, struck a chord with me, and would with all readers likely! What you initially think is book snobbery turns into a homage on the wonderful way all types of books bring all types of readers together.
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The translation is another joint effort from two translators, Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis - a common feature on this year’s longlist, one of four translator duos. It’s so interesting to read about their efforts translating together on @thebookerprize’s website, and it’s likely that the exceeding smoothness of the prose is due to having two pairs of eyes and ears checking over it.
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Interestingly, the French edition of this book is 300+ pages, but the decision was made to shorten the English version - which Pagano admits to being initially disappointed by, but she has come around to it. This was down to myriad reasons, including the fact that Pereine only publish books 200 pages or less that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a film, and also to heighten the nuances of these interconnected lives. I’m a bit put out by this decision though, as I can’t help but wondering what we’re missing by reading the abridged version. I felt somewhat disconnected from the stories - would I have developed stronger feelings towards it if it had been twice the length?
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Not a favourite, and not a contender for the shortlist in my opinion, but a sleek collection!

[All My Friends Are Fictional · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Sad, turbid stories told with violence and precision". The quote from the book which perfectly describes its content. One of the reasons why I love Booker Prizes is that they help me discover titles I wouldn't even know existed. I was completely transferred to rural France where these thirteen somewhat dark but at the same time glittery stories take place, and I wouldn't mind reading some more (that's why four stars because apparently Peirene Press decided to cut some of the original stories for the English edition). Although I get the reasoning behind it, I wonder if the novel would feel more complete if I had a chance to read it all.

[Elena Sala · Rating 5 out of 5]

FACES ON THE TIP OF MY TONGUE (2019) is a collection of stories, or rather, vignettes, set mostly in rural France, with a range of characters seemingly unconnected, but actually woven together in unexpected ways.

At the center of these stories are people rendered marginal for different reasons: illness, loneliness, abandonment, loss, trauma. Their stories are often sad but Pagano's distinctive narrators show compassion, gentle humour and kindness.

This short collection is a moving portrait of a rural French community, showing how the different inhabitants' lives are frequently woven together. Deserves to be on the 2020 International Booker Longlist.

[Serena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was glad to read something from rural France as a terrible city person who has only ever visited Paris. I think the little quirks of village life (I very much like the automatic tour guide, and am interested in how its translation was settled on to convey his character) are balanced delicately with people’s complicated frustrations and difficulties with monotony or feelings of being caged in.

I actually hadn’t heard of a gîte before but interesting to think about in the context of this collection.

“The short cut was a country road that had brought me almost directly from the station to the cemetery. But I had stages to pass through: the city, the river at its edge, between the centre and the zone, the narrow iron bridge between the two where the city seemed to choke and where the traffic jams were all part of the journey, the zone itself, the industrial no-man’s-land, the in-between places.”

“They don’t come for the automatic guide, they come for the drama of the panoramic views, or just for the shrill, brutal air of the plateau, for the blue-shadowed snow on very cold days, for the autumn blaze of the maples, the great daubs of green in summer. Some end up in the area more or less by chance and the tourist office sends them along without warning them. They’re surprised, that’s for sure, and sometimes taken aback.”

And finally my ‘would love to asks’ for the translators (who clearly make an excellent team and this is a very fine piece of work by them):
-“a load of old twaddle”
-“caddish”
-statement in the translators’ note that the English book is shorter.

[Louise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an abridged, and therefore inferior, version of Pagano's wonderful collection of linked short stories titled Un renard à mains nues in its original French. I am glad I was able to read the original 34 stories in French because this abridged adaptation including only 13 stories, while better than nothing, paled in comparison.

[Jackie Law · Rating 3 out of 5]

Faces on the Tip of My Tongue, by Emmanuelle Pagano (translated by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis), is the third book in the publisher’s 2019 ‘There Be Monsters’ series. It is a collection of thirteen interlinked short stories set in France across several decades. The initial tales, whilst evocative, struggled to capture my full attention. As reading progressed common threads and characters emerged. Meaning and depth increased thereby strengthening engagement.

The collection opens with The Lake’s Favourite which tells of an almost too perfect period in the narrator’s childhood. At just a few pages in length this offered a snapshot with little development.

The Jigsaw Puzzle, whilst still short, offered more to consider. It portrays a marriage faltering in the shade of an old and popular lime tree that draws visitors to the remote location. The couple’s young daughter happily copes with each change in circumstance until her mother tries to impose her concerns on the child, against the girl’s will and that of her father. I was pleased when, later in the collection, this family was revisited from several perspectives.

The Short Cut is set largely around a funeral. A woman is returning to an area she left as a teenager to watch as her cousin and doppelgänger is buried. The women made choices when they went their separate ways but neither could predict where these would lead.

“I knew what frightened her most: it was the life that I had chosen where nothing is known. She had tried to persuade me not to leave, telling me other places were the same as here but worse”

I read through this story twice and still it remained elusive until the characters were revisited in subsequent tales.

Blind Spots is told from the point of view of a hitchhiker who has worked out a way to gain lifts by taking drivers by surprise. I found this story overlong and repetitive although it had a good ending. It turned out to be a pivotal tale in the collection.

“The faster you go, the less you can see on either side. The bigger your blind spots. On the motorway it’s as if we’re looking down a tunnel […] lots of people go about with blinkers, not just on motorways. They’re not really driving their lives. I mean, not leading their lives. Instead of leading their own lives they let themselves be carried along in their restricted view of things. Social conventions, appearances, all those things, you know, all those things that shrink your field of vision.”

The Loony and the Bright Spark is one of several stories looking at the elderly and misfits in society – how they came to be where they are and the strange rituals they adopt to give them some reason to keep on living.

Mum at the Park is a snapshot of a child’s view of their book reading parent who has no interest in other people or playing childish games. The city doesn’t suit her but the boy regards it as a playground filled with potential friends.

I enjoyed Just a Dad – another view of a parent as seen through the eyes of their child. By this stage in the collection the reader is observing recurring characters at different times in there lives. This fragmented approach to storytelling added interest but required a going back to reread previously portrayed details.

Over the Aquaduct tells of a childish joke that has unintended consequences, driving apart good friends.

The penultimate story, The Dropout, revisits characters, this time at a wedding where a wrongly invited guest causes the bride to behave badly.

“life is just that, a whole lot of hitches, contradictions, mishaps and revisions, and it’s all the better for that. It’s the opposite of inertia.”

Having read each tale I would say that overall I enjoyed the collection even if it was quite a slow burner. The writing is choppy in places as is the subject matter. The sense of place is strong and the characters interesting. I suspect this is a book that would offer more on rereading.

[Zitrolena · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5
The book got better and better as it went on somehow, probably because you could recognize little glimpses of the other stories - resembling the interconnectedness of the lives we all live. The last chapter was my favorite, summarizing this book perfectly: We live and read for ourselves, by ourselves. But we still live side by side, getting experienced by others and experiencing them. In some ways, writing the story of each others life together

[John de Vos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting ‘short-stories’ that on occasions interlink. Ultimately felt somehow repetitive and not sure how this made the Booker International longlist (though this opinion might change once I’ve read the full longlist).

The final story ‘glitter’ as a stand alone though is a superior 5 star story.

Odd to read in the translator’s note that the original novel has more stories but some were left out (what?!); also the original title was changed in translation (why?!).

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short interlaced stories about the condition of life which isn’t always easy.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up

[Ed Cook · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of short stories, tangentially connected. None were particularly interesting, and the sum here was no greater than the parts. Language was colourful and fun at times, but some metaphors didn’t quite work - may be a translation issue, but regardless fell flat.

[Nieves Batista · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nota para mí misma: Nieves, a ti no te gustan los relatos. Así que, por muy bien que te hablen de un libro, por muy nominado que esté para cualquier premio, no lo leas. No te va a gustar y luego te sentirás tonta.

[Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Downbeat with Some Dark Humour
Review of the pre-release paperback (2019) (136pp) translation of selections from the French language original Un renard à mains nues (2012) (A Fox With Bare Hands) (340pp)

As explained by the excellent translators Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis in their afterword to Faces..., this collection of stories has been chosen based on character and incident connections i.e. where each story references people from another one. This tightens the bonds of the book turning it into a novel-in-short-stories. It also helps it adhere to the readable-in-one-sitting house style of Peirene Press.

It does seem though that the resulting selection has made this more of a depressing and downbeat affair with a few too many stories revolving around hitchhikers lurking or planning suicides on hidden highway approaches and/or the strangling of foxes with bare hands (to put a mortally injured animal out of its misery). I certainly did not feel like reading this in one sitting as it just became too depressing after a while. Spreading it over several days may cause one to miss some of the internal cross-references though. You can see from a comparison to the French original (340pp) that almost 2/3rds of the stories have been dropped in the translation (136*pp). I wonder if any of those had a bit more joy and happiness to them?

I mostly enjoyed "The Automatic Tour-Guide" with its permanent gîte**-resident spinner of local tourist trivia tales (partially invented by themselves) and "The Dropout" with its wedding crasher.

Faces... is part of Peirene Press's subscription series where direct purchases from the publisher are shipped 1-2 months in advance of the official publication date and availability through other retailers. Faces... will be officially published October 22, 2019.

* 136pp is the official page count from the publisher, but I have the book in hand and it is only 128pp even if you count the 4 unnumbered pages at the back end.
** small furnished tourist cabins or houses in rural France.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a novel in the form of a number of short stories connected and yet distant. The setting is rural France. The writer starts off brilliantly and ends with seemingly unconnected ruminations. This book seems to call out for a second read. As the wooden puzzle in one story, the interconnected pieces are sometimes subtle.

Sentences like these are in the first few pages:
"I was the lake's favorite."
"I pick out the edge pieces first, always start with the edge pieces, and it's then that I find a few hairs among the pieces, hairs lost among cardboard sections of branches, hairs the color of her eight or ninth year."

The book was just released a few days ago in English translation from the French done by Jennifer Hughes and Sophie Lewis. The translator's notes indicate that this English edition is shorter than the French edition. They assure the reader that they collaborated with the author and emphasized the connections between the stories. I am uneasy about this.

This is part of a subscription series from Peirene Press ("literary cinema" Times Literary Supplement) with a small portion of the purchase going to Basmeh & Zeitooneh - a charitable group for Syrian refugees. The cover letter from the Publisher asks the reader to "read it in one go." At least, I read it in one day interspersed with the book mentioned above.

[Dylan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first thing I must acknowledge is that Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is an excellent title for a book. Thankfully, the quality of Pagano's writing does not stop at the naming of this collection - every story is a pleasure to read (certainly some more than others, as tends to be the case with collections of stories). The connections between the stories are sometimes direct and sometimes fleeting but I do feel that these connections, while strictly speaking unnecessary to the enjoyment of any individual story, elevated the overall experience of the collection.

Sadly, the description of this book does not do it justice. In fact, it sounded quite unimpressive based on its blurb - which, admittedly, is accurate in its depiction but fails to capture the wonder I felt while reading these stories. Who knew I might find a rural French community so enthralling.

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Being the first of the 2020 Booker International titles I've read, I would think Faces on the Tip of My Tongue deserving of a spot on the shortlist - but without having read the other nominees it's possible there are six better books on the list...

[Harriet Hatwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories, characters and events are woven together in an eerie tapestry that loops back on itself in multiple layers.

When you start to see the threads connecting across the stories, you want to go back and review the earlier chapters, looking in from other angles. The writing (and translation) has fluidity, ease, an abstraction that sometimes feels detached but still keenly observed enough to provide engagement. I will likely try to track through the stories again.

[Elizabeth Mayes · Rating 5 out of 5]

A return to home always brings back memories, and the people living in a small french isolated village are bought to life in a series of sketches about the villages inhabitants. People, their lives, characters, hopes and dreams are revealed and a complex community shared with the reader. Hope it wins the manbooker.

[Thomas Pugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Faces on the Tip of My Tongue is sold as a short story collection, but this is not entirely accurate. The book is structured much like When I Sing, Mountains Dance (the subject of the last post) - though the point of view is restricted to humans this time. Each chapter takes a different point of view, and though they seem disparate at first, certain characters and events begin to recure, and it becomes evident that the book is a cohesive work rather than a true collection of short stories.

Pagano/Salasc uses second person narration to great effect throughout the book, a nice little nostalgic blast for those of us who grew up with Fighting Fantasy (YOU are the Hero!). It somehow gives the reading experience a cohesion. Though the narrative jumps around through time and perspective, often with few initial clues as to where we now are, the consistent referral to 'you' ties it together, giving the book a dream-like feeling, as is we, the reader, are the town - a kind of collective consciousness, we see everything at a closeness of perspective which is initially slightly bewildering - like looking at a cell through a microscope. It isn't until we see enough different details, from enough different angles, that the big picture starts to make sense.
The prose in Faces is reserved, poetic in a sparse and understated fashion. From reading the notes of the translators (who did a sterling job) it seems great attention was paid to the language, with sounds specifically chosen to create recurring motifs, matching the imagery and the themes which reappear time and again, building upon themselves as the book progresses.

This review is taken from my world literature blog: https://theworldisabookblog.blogspot....