Bottled Goods audiobook

My reviews can also be seen at: https://deesradreadsandreviews.wordpr...An interesting and unique read!“Bottled Goods is written in short bursts of “flash fiction” and explores universal themes of empowerment, liberty, family, and loyalty.”Bottled Goods is set in the 1970’s Romania during Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s repressive regime. Alina and her husband, Liviu are both teachers living in Romania. While life is far from easy, they are relatively happy.Then came the Saturday when everything changed…They arrive home one afternoon and find two men in grey suits waiting for them. “Please come with us. We have to ask you a few questions.”It seems Alina’s brother-in-law; Mihai is not planning on returning to Romania. They are persecuted for Mihai’s defection and immediately put under surveillance. They are harassed by authorities and ignored by their friends. Alina is visited by the secret police weekly, and the visits become even more terrifying.Alina and her husband struggle for freedom. But freedom can come at a great cost.How can they possibly escape if the government is watching and listening? Plus there are others who may want to jinx their plans.Will Alina’s Aunt Theresa be able to help?To be honest, “Bottled Goods” is not likely a book I would have chosen for myself. However, I’ve been trying to broaden my horizons by reading books I might not normally read.This was a very quick read at 192 pages, and the short chapters seemed to make it go even faster. The story is told from Alina’s point of view.The author created some very intriguing characters, especially the superstitious Aunt Theresa. I couldn’t help but feel for Alina and I can’t imagine how I would have handled the situations she was in. I enjoyed learning more about Romanian folklore, and while I’m not a huge fan of magical realism, it seemed to fit in well here. I’m not sure how I felt about the ending but overall, I thought this was an enjoyable read.I'd like to thank the publisher for providing me with a copy of this novel. All opinions are my own.

Now longlisted for the Women's Prize 2019.Re read following its longlisting for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.This book is published by Fairlight Books, a new UK small press which “has one aim – to celebrate quality writing and promote the best of new and contemporary literary fiction.” and with a mission “to promote contemporary literary fiction and quality writing, whatever the genre and however it is published”This book is one of the first of their Fairlight Moderns series, a series of aesthetically designed, pocket sized books, introducing new writers and contemporary themes from around the world. This was my introduction to the publisher and to the series. I found the book ideal for travelling, as an additional book to slip into a bag alongside weightier tomes and it worked perfectly on a flight where I had finished my main book and wanted to start on another book before resting. It is a tribute to the book that I ended up reading it cover to cover. The book is set in Romania (where the author Sophie van Llewyn, a flash fiction and short story writer, was born) at the end of the 1960s, early in Ceausescu’s near 25 year reign as leader of the country. The style of the book is very innovative and effective, a novella told in flash fiction. More than 50 pieces of flash fiction in total (a number of which could and did function independently) which range across the first and third (and even at one stage) second person; the majority in traditional narrative form but a number presented differently: timelines of a day, a brief curse filled invective, postcards, a list of items and what they were traded for, a note to Father Frost, commented quotes. The story is a simple but harrowing one - Alina is set partly adrift by her mother when she marries into poorer stock, but her marriage, life and teaching career (as well as that of her husbands) are all cast under a permanent threat when her husband’s brother defects to the West; which threat becomes even greater and personal when she fails to report a young child in her class with an illicit comic and attracts the terrible and abusive attention of a secret service agent. With her mother unwilling to help, she turns to her Aunt, well connected in the Party but also a practitioner of traditional rites and believer of folk customs. She is introduced in the first chapter, as she summons Alina to a secret burial of a grandfather she did not know existed, a grandfather whose burial casket is rather small and who was sometimes kept in a bird cage. And immediately we have a hint of magic realism, something that broadens out later in the book. Overall the magic realism offset against the modernist brutality as well as reminding me of Latin American novellas, effectively conveys Ceausescu’s Romania’s terrible mix of poverty and repression. Further the novella-in-flash form functions well to capture the way in which a totalitarian society can lead to a strict compartmentalism of one’s private and public lives. Recommended.

I think I’ve only read one other book set in Romania, a historical, The Girl They Left Behind. Bottled Goods is a slim novel at less than 200 pages and was nominated for the 2019 Women’s Prize. The book is set during the 1970s when Communist dictator Ceausescu was in power.Alina seeks freedom. She is a teacher, along with her husband, Liviu. When her brother-in-law defects, it leaves Alina and Liviu under suspicion and harsh surveillance. Alina is surrounded by difficulty - her mother, an angry student, and a Secret Services agent. On top of it all, her marriage has gone sour, and it appears Alina is completely stuck until her aunt offers a solution involving magic.Bottled Goods is perfectly written in a nuanced style. I loved how the author included magic and folklore in the storytelling in a well-integrated way. The book has an exceptionally fast pace, accelerated by short chapters, some only a page in length. Bottled Goods is a novel well worth the acclaim it has received and then some.I received a gifted copy. All opinions are my own. Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: www.jennifertarheelreader.com and instagram: www.instagram.com/tarheelreader

Read this in one sitting. Amazing, cute design, and the story is so well written in with a distinctive style, I'm not surprised van Llewyn used to write Flash Fiction!So good, full review soon.A message to GR: When you will let me allow giving 4.5 stars! Grr!

4.5I read Bottled Goods in two sittings. It's a small book which I found extremely compelling.First of all, I had no idea what flash fiction was, but whatever the definition is, I liked it. A lot.This book resonated with me on a personal level, as I am a Romanian child of the 70s, so many of the stories, descriptions, foods, rituals, behaviours, social and work relations were very familiar.I thought van Llewyn accomplished so much with so little. The structure worked incredibly well to put together a jigsaw puzzle of life in Communist Romania, to make up a picture that was pretty realistic, simple yet complex. I couldn't stop asking myself whether my assessment was objective, even knowing there is no such thing as objectivity when it comes to any form of art. I've been told that I can be harsher or too critical when it comes to anything Romanian. It's complicated. I loathe nationalism/patriotism and while I am not ashamed to be a Romanian, I also don't feel pride. I like to think I'm more than geography, while also having the geography in my blood, to a certain extent. I am happy that I got to experience some Communism but was lucky to be a teen when it ended so I didn't get brainwashed. I can smell propaganda like a bloodhound. Anyway, what I'm trying to say in my convoluted, unedited way, is that I believe this is an objectively good book. There is one magical element to the story, which didn't quite work for me, even though I understood it served a purpose and added a bit of quirk to a bleak story.So, yeah, I'm glad I read Bottled Goods and I'm grateful to Deanna for bringing it to my attention.I hope this book finds a bigger readership and I'm looking forward to reading more from Sophie van Llewyn (I'm guessing it's a pen name as it's not Romanian in the least).

Right from the first chapter the reader is left with no doubt that this book is steeped in magical realism. Alina is on her way to bury her Grandfather who was shrunk by her Grandmother to escape capture when the communists took over Romania. It’s as if the author, Sophia van Llewyn, is saying, if you don’t like magical realism then get out now.Alina is twenty years old, a teacher, living in Communist Romania. The year is 1967. The Cold War is still encasing the country in ice. Things start to go wrong for Alina when her husband’s brother defects to France. Soon two Secret Service agents arrive and take her husband away for three days. Alina, especially after the episode with her husband, realises she should have known better when one day she turns a blind eye to one of her pupils having a magazine which is prohibited by the government. Another pupil points the magazine out to Alina and she still ignores them. She realises the severity of her mistake when a Secret Service agent turns up at her home. The reader is given a sense of what it must have been like living in a communist country during the Cold War. The anxious, claustrophobic feeling that anybody could be an informant and that you must stop and filter everything you say would have been horrible. The isolation experienced once there is even the slightest hint that you are on the list of people that the Secret Service is watching. Suddenly your friends don’t return your calls, your work colleagues no longer have lunch with you, you have become a social pariah. Alina hates living like this, cannot live like this. It is slowly destroying her. She must escape this life. The question is how?This is a very short novel with a strange structure. Some chapters are lists with points of things that Alina feels she should or should not do with regards to various problems. For the most it works well. A novel way of delivering Alina’s thoughts to the reader while also informing the reader of some of the taboo activities in the Communist country. There is some great writing. “Every time the Secret Service man comes, she waits for the sword to fall and cut deep, but this is not his weapon of choice. He squeezes the air out of her lungs little by little, tightening her chest with menaces”, passages such as this show that this author has talent. This novel has been described as a novella in flash fiction. It is short in length and some chapters are only a page long, but I found this worked well and gave the book a frantic pace, which suited the narrative of Alina and her husband trying to escape Romania. I enjoyed this novel and although it would have been hard in such a short book, I would have liked to have seen the character of the Auntie fleshed out. Upon finishing, I thought that the choice of title for the book was brilliant. It’s impressive for a debut. 4 Stars.

LONGLISTED FOR WOMEN’S PRIZE IN FICTION BOOK 10 OF 16 READ SO FARI was very much enamoured by this short novel about the struggles of a young Romanian wife living under the claustrophobic eyes of the Stalinist regime, perfectly capturing the tone of life during that period and using a dash of magical realism to metaphor the lengths one went to escape. Just as fascinating is how this book was put together, a series of separately written works of flash fiction brought together in this unitary form. In doing so we get writing that plays with form and perspective in a very creative fashion. An excellent debut worth of being longlisted for the Women’s Prize.

Like most of my GR friends, I was enticed into reading this slim volume due to its inclusion on both the Women's Prize and RofC longlists... as well as the intriguing cover (the mystical black cat looks a lot like my own Priyanka!). I more or less read it on one sitting, which I think helped - not much to say about the actual storyline; I didn't know a LOT about the Romania/Ceausescu regime, and so I learned a lot in a somewhat 'fun' fashion, which is not something usually associated with the topic. And although not a great fan of magical realism, I thought it worked well here.

L’autrice racconta la vita di una giovane coppia nella Romania di Ceausescu in 51 brevi capitoli in cui l’oppressione del regime, la privazione della libertà, il trattamento riservato ai dissidenti entrano a far parte della quotidianità, senza scalfire la decisione dei due protagonisti, Alina e Liviu, di non rinunciare ai propri sogni e a fuggire dal paese. Capitoli brevi da cui emergono frammenti di vita, gesti, ironia e credenze popolari, in un alternarsi di toni - da realistico a magico a cupo - che rende la lettura estremamente piacevole e sottolinea l’importanza della lotta per la libertà.

‘’Please make me a child again. A teenager. A student. A girl who hasn’t lost her father yet or her romantic views concerning the world, poverty, kindness, a parent’s love.’’ “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given,” James Baldwin wrote while contemplating the manner in which we imprison ourselves, “freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.” In other words, the idea of freedom is not absolute. Rather, it exists as a relative entity, guarded by its own whims and fancies. This notion of freedom becomes even more vulnerable during times of personal and political turbulence, when one's desire to embrace freedom might simply mean submitting oneself to a relatively better, less traumatizing imprisonment. A first glance at this slender, nonchalant novella of seeming alacrity is severely deceptive, for its apparent accessibility belies the immense weight of the ideological, social, economic, political, and psychological forces that define its demeanor. At the same time, it is also a repository of the relentless, thudding melancholy of the human emotions of anxiety, fear, grief, loss, despair and spiritual ennui that are diagnostic of war-trampled society. Set in the communist Romania under Ceaușescu in the 1970s, Sophie van Llewyn's debut offering Bottled Goods is a collection of 51 mismatched stories, some contemplative, some factual, most meandering in between, narrating the story of Alina, whose life is embroiled in a constant tussle between a desire for affinity to a life that she deserves and a longing for an alienating otherness characteristic of the existential tumult of a postmodern world. Alina's troubled relationship with her mother, an irate professional undertaking, and a lifeless, robotic relationship with her husband Liviu are perilously set against the backdrop of an immensely oppressive, stifling and surveilling communist regime. Her threadbare relationship with Liviu becomes even more vitriolic when her brother-in-law decides to defect to the West, an act that forces the couple to subject itself to the exasperatingly humiliating situations set by the authorities that demand them to prove the loyalty to their motherland. Their panoptic gaze begins to ruthlessly monitor every private and social moments of their lives in an effort to extract a confession out of them.Ostracized by people who begin to regard them as a traitors, and cleaved from aspirations they held dear, Alina and Liviu are reduced from cheerful, hopeful and promising individuals to treasonous cogs in the wheel, a vexatious, rough-edged fester disrupting the genteel contours of order and subservience. Sophie van Llewyn's prose is supremely atmospheric and starkly eloquent, its staccato rhythm complementing the incoherent texture of the lives of the protagonists. Her writing voice is extremely experimental, deftly combining realism with Romanian folklore and magic realism to lend a surreal gravity to a historical fragment that was equally absurd. The hasty shifts and turns of tone and subject in each chapter readers are a grim reminder of the extraordinary macabre surrounding the lives of individuals who are forced to confront the realization that the waxy uncertainties and the annihilating horror of their lives are not passing moments, but quotidian fixtures. Bottled Goods is a powerful, haunting narration of the clash between the personal and the political, freedom and security, magical and the banal, and the wry futility of lives that are caught withing their folds.

Now Longlisted for the Women’s Prize 2019!also Longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness PrizeThe RoC judges' citation:This time last year, Fairlight Books announced its arrival on the small press scene with the beautifully designed Fairlight Moderns. Its first submission is Bottled Goods: a wholly successful attempt at creating novel(la)-length flash fiction. An assured debut which is part-absurdist, part-thriller, part-social realism. If you’re looking for intrigue, psychological depth and the darkly comic in a book that can be read in one hour, this is for you.Small independent publisher Fairlight Books has, in their words, “one aim – to celebrate quality writing and promote the best of new and contemporary literary fiction,” and their Fairlight Moderns series is a new collection of short modern fictions from around the world.Sophie van Llewyn was born in Romania and later moved to Germany.  Bottled Goods was written in English (as she explains in this interview http://www.fairlightbooks.co.uk/sophi...) and draws on her family’s knowledge of both life and folklore in Romania.  As a fan of translated fiction I mean it is as a compliment to the book’s authenticity and ‘other word’ flavour as well as the excellence of the prose that I found myself looking for the translator’s name to compliment him/her in my review.The publisher describes it as a “novella-in-flash blending magic realism and everyday troubles of Communist Romania,” and it is rather difficult to improve on that description.Alina is from a rich family, at least rich pre the Communist era, but marries Liviu, a history student from a much poorer background, to her mother’s scorn. When Liviu’s brother defects to the West, their lives, and indeed their marriage, become very difficult and they themselves look for an opportunity to get to the west. Their quest is hindered by her mother’s determination to show loyalty to the regime and disown her landowner roots and yet her contradictory hostility to Alina’s marrying ‘down’.  But Alina is aided and abetted by the colourful Aunt Theresa, her mother’s sister, who has connections both within the Romanian secret police but also in the supernatural world of the Sanziene, the fairies.The novella’s first chapter (or story as it was one of those published stand-alone) at first appears rather anomalous, more of a teenage dream.   Set in 1967, Alina is summoned on a trip with her Aunt and two cousins, which transpires to be one to bury the tiny body of her maternal grandfather, a grandfather she was unaware still lived.  Aunt Theresa explains: I suspect your mother never told you about your grandfather,” she says. “He would have liked an open casket. But we never kept him in a cage, you see. He liked to walk around the house. He must have fallen. We searched like crazy, but found him days after he disappeared, between the living room couch and the wall.” A sharp sound, like a banshee shriek, escapes between her sentences. “We found him because of the smell.”The priest and my cousins are standing next to the little hole in the ground, waiting. She gestures for me to grab the basket, while she extracts the wooden box from the back seat.“We went to visit your mother once— and she promised that if we ever come to her house again, she’ll tell the authorities where they can find him. The bitch!.” She pauses, caressing the lid of the box like the fur of a beloved pet. “You know what— tell her about this. Tell her she wasn’t invited,” she says.*In the car, Aunt Theresa can’t stop speaking. If she stops, she sobs and she must watch the road. Night has fallen.“It was right after the communists came to power,” she says. “They were after him— your grandfather had been an important member of the Liberal Party. His friends, they all died while digging the Canal. Killed, beaten, tortured. What was my mother to do? She did what she could, God bless her soul. She shrunk him. Your mother— she wanted to have nothing to do with him. Nothing.” Her voice rises in the cigarette smoke that’s clouding the interior of the Volga. “She never came to see him— not even once. The idiot. How he missed her!”The smell of putrefaction lingers in the overheated car. I mean to ask how my grandmother shrunk him, but I’m too afraid to interrupt.But this tale becomes increasingly real as the novella progresses and Van Llewyn cleverly brings the novel full circle.Stylistically the story is told via (At a quick count) 51 pieces of flash fiction over 190 pages, in a variety of styles and narrated in the first, second and third person.   The pieces could stand alone, indeed several have been published independently (see https://sophievanllewyn.com/publicati...) but are presented linearly so as to provide a consistent narrative arc that takes us through Alina’s life from, childhood up and until well after she leaves the country and the later fall of the Communist regime, which she witnesses on TV from exile.    The flash form gives the narration an energy and immediacy, which is particularly effective where there are jumps in time between chapters.Overall a quick but very different and highly worthwhile read.

I'm finding this one difficult to rate and review, because it was unlike anything I've ever read before. On reflection, I feel that the use of the "flash fiction" style (which I'd never encountered before) was successful with this material - rather than a traditional narrative, the chapters comprised standalone vignettes set at various points along the timeline of the story. Indeed, several of the chapters contained within "Bottled Goods" have previously been published individually as short pieces.I recall hearing about and watching footage of the fall of the totalitarian Ceaușescu regime when I was a teenager at the end of 1989. Coming only 6 months after the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, it was horrifying to see civilians again being fired upon indiscriminately. Equally heartbreaking were the images coming out of Romania in the aftermath of the revolution, detailing the desperate circumstances in which many Romanian citizens had been living under Ceaușescu and the crowded orphanages, full of abandoned and neglected children and babies.The story contained within "Bottled Goods" takes place more than a decade earlier, during the height of Communist Rule. Alina and her husband attract the notice of the Secret Police after his brother defects to the West. The situation worsens when Alina, a teacher, turns a blind eye to a young pupil bringing a forbidden Western comic book to school, and is reported by another student. Alina and her husband decide that their only chance of a future is to defect themselves, and start making plans to disappear during a "research tour" to Germany. Unfortunately, Alina's mother is so desperate to stop her leaving that she threatens to turn them in to the Secret Police, even if this means that they'll be imprisoned, brutalised or worse.From this point in the storyline, the magical realism element kicks in, as Alina seeks the assistance of her well-connected but somewhat mysterious Aunt, who suggests an unorthodox solution to the problem... readers will really need to suspend their disbelief during the last one-third of the novel. The "Bottled Goods" of the title do not refer to jams or chutneys.For me, this one falls between a solid three stars and a tenuous four. I certainly found the characters engaging, particularly the central character Alina and her fabulous Aunt Theresa. There were many similarities in theme evident between this and Anna Burns's "Milkman", both stories exploring the experience of a young woman navigating a society where to attract attention is to court danger. The flash fiction style could have left the novel feeling disjointed, but I felt there was a clear narrative arc and I enjoyed the forays into Alina's obsessive list-making and several Romanian folk-tales. Recommended for those willing to try something unusual and a little mind-spinning.