Two more for #NovNov25 : Tawada and Bemelmans

I’ve done well on short books for Novellas in November, hosted by Rebecca and Cathy, reading nine including the Seascraper – the buddy read. Here are short reviews of numbers 7 & 8. The ninth, The Cat, by Georges Simenon, I’ll be reviewing for Shiny soon.

The Bridegroom was a Dog by Yoko Tawada, Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

This is really one of those short stories published singly and thus masquerading as a novella, with a smaller hardback format and 85 well-spaced, larger font pages. The story was originally published in 1993, and the translation five years later, so this is one of her earliest works. Indeed, it’s very different to The Last Children of Tokyo.

Miksuko Kitamura is a schoolteacher, 39 years old, loved by her pupils, but is, it is rumoured, rather unconventional if the stories that come home from the pupils are to be believed.

Take, for example, what some grade school kids were reporting to their mothers about “snot paper”: “Miss Kitamura says wiping your nose with snot paper you’ve already used once is nice, because it’s so soft and warm and wet, but when you use it a third time to wipe yourself when you go to the bathroom, it feels even better.” Mothers blushed to hear this from a son or daughter of theirs, wanting to scold but not sure exactly why or how, and in the end just telling them, “You mustn’t say ‘snot paper,’ it’s ’tissue,’ ” only to find that, no matter how determined they were not to imagine their child’s beautiful teacher sitting on the toilet wiping herself with that lovely moist tissue, Miss Kitamura’s smiling face inevitably rose before them.

She also tells her pupils an old folk tale about a princess who married a dog, a rather strange tale. Then one day during the summer recess, a man in his mid-twenties arrives at her house announcing he is there to stay. She should call him Taro, and soon he has his way with her, not exactly with consent, but Mitsuko seems to accept it, and they settle into a weird relationship, you might even say it has the air of dogs about it! Soon the neighbours’ tongues are wagging, Mrs Orita reckons she knows who he is…

I won’t say more. The blurb says this is a ‘disarming’ story, ‘turning the rules of folkore and fable on their head’ – I just found it rather distasteful instead – but in an inscrutable way! Very strange, and not worth the £12.99 cover price for a single hardback long short story (the paperback, now out is a bit cheaper!).

Source: Own copy! Granta hardback (2024), 85 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link. (Free UK+ P&P)

Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans

This is a memoir of working at a New York hotel in the 1930s. Bemelmans emigrated from Austria to the USA aged sixteen in 1914, working in hospitality until he became a full time writer and cartoonist. Originally published in 1941, Pushkin Press’s 2022 reprint preserves his original cartoons that headed each of this book’s chapters, which are comic interludes, vignettes from his life working at the hotel working his way up from being a humble busboy to head of banqueting. He never tells us the real name of the hotel, just calling it the Splendide. He starts off as a bus boy, assigned by maître d’, Monsieur Victor, to the waiter Mespoulets.

Monsieur Victor used our tables as a kind of penal colony to which he sent guests who were notorious cranks, people who had forgotten to tip him over a long period of time and needed a reminder, undesirables who looked out of place in better sections of the dining room, and guests who were known to linger for hours over an order of hors d’oeuvres and a glass of milk while well-paying guests had to stand at the door waiting for a table.
Mespoulets was the idea man for Monsieur Victor’s purposes. He complemented Monsieur Victor’s plan of punishment. He was probably the worst waiter in the world, and I had become his bus boy after I fell down the stairs into the main part of the dining-room with eight pheasants à la Souvaroff.

Bemelman’s stories about Mespoulets are brilliant, but my favourites were those involving Professor Maurice Gorylescu, a magician and mindreader who was frequently hired to entertain at private dinners, earning a lot of money with his flat fee of a hundred dollars, but having two former wives and a host of girlfriends to keep up with. Gorylescu loved the ballet, and one day when the Russian ballet was in town, he secured a date with a ballerina who would bring her friend for Ludwig – little did he know but twelve ballerinas turned up, so there was little dallying to be had. Gorylescu’s encounter with a psychoanalyst who tries to trick him up (unsuccessully) was also fun.

It was hard work, but there appears to have been much fun, whether it be baiting Monsieur Victor, eating the left-over caviar and finishing champagne bottles to sleeping in vacant suites when there wasn’t time to go home. Bemelmans is a delightful companion, and although his stories would make wonderful fiction, you can believe that they happened, bringing to life a bygone era. Dare I say it, this charming short memoir would make a wonderful stocking filler, which is actually how I acquired it.

Source: Own copy. Pushkin Press, flapped paperback 191 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK+ P&P)