Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

I have been sitting on this book and then the review for a while. I must start off by saying that the book was not for me, but I worked my way to the end. This last part means I should talk about what I liked and disliked, unlike a book that I did not finish (which also happens infrequently enough).
This is a big book, especially given its content. It started off with an interesting premise. We have an aged Japanese man who has more facets than his appearance would let others believe. There has been a big disaster in the country, and that his him taking a train of thought into all that it means to be alive and to survive tragedies. As flashbacks, we are given an utterly detailed-filled tour of four old relationships he had with different women in different parts of the world. Each is narrated in the woman's voice, which did nothing to improve either party in my eyes. The women were three-dimensional but came off as the injured party in some form or the other because the man in the narrative moves on much more quickly!
It was a winding storyline, and I did not appreciate the content. Then, in between, we come back to Mr Watanabe, who is questioning his own mortality and how that thought has haunted him throughout his life. There was a point to the entire book hidden somewhere, although I did not grasp it.
The translation is seamless. I did not realise I was reading a translated book until the very end. If it was shorter, or I felt there was some sort of resolution in the entire thing, I might have liked it. I read the whole thing with that hope but was disappointed. I did get to know important points in International history, which were littered as crucial goalposts to our leading man's life changes.
If you have the time and like the idea of living in many different countries through time, this book might just work for you!

I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

This was okay, but ultimately I was a bit disappointed. The writing was very flat, and to be honest a bit cliché and sentimental at times.. It kept me at arm's length so that I could never fully get involved with the story. I will definitely seek out other books by this author, though.

Fracture centres around the life of Yoshie Watanabe, a survivor of both the Hiroshima and the Nagasaki nuclear bombings. The narrative is split between Yoshie's present (but actually set during the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster), his reminiscences of the past and, in chronological order, his past lovers' account of that past.

A fundamental theme underpinning the novel is the Japanese art of kintsugi, whereby broken pottery items are skilfully repaired with lacquer and the fractured lines are highlighted by mixing gold into the lacquer. The philosophy behind it is that, rather than being disposable and irreversibly damaged by the scars life gives us, we are better for them. It is related to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, whereby the flawed and imperfect is embraced. The reference to kintsugi is also evident in the cover of the book.

Kintsugi gives the structure and purpose to the narration of Yoshie's life, but also extends to that of his past lovers and more generally to the nuclear bombings. Contrary to the teachings of kintsugi and wabi-sabi, the hibakusha (literally “atomic bomb-affected people”) are a source of shame to their fellow Japanese - scars are to be hidden under shirts, anger and grief are to be shushed. The histories and traumas of each lover are also assessed in their own narratives, for instance that of Argentina's junta and disappearances (the author is an Argentinian whose family sought refuge in Spain during the dictatorship) and that of the Shoa (the author is Jewish as are a couple of the women).

After a life of workaholism and of moving from country to country and finding a new identity with each new country, language and lover, Yoshie can no longer repress his emotions towards what is the most impactful event in his life and he decides to return to Japan.

When Fukushima happens, he will have the opportunity to find some catharsis not afforded to him before.

Other recurring themes in the book are that of language and translation as transformative forces, of the interconnectedness of the world (slightly less successfully realised in my opinion) and the choices we make when assessing the life we have lived.

I enjoyed the majority of the book and would have given it a 4/4.5 stars rating. I find the premise very moving and interesting. The last 30% of the book though was hard going and not as well written. I struggled to keep my interest once the narrative moved into the reality of 2011 and going through the account of the last lover who I didn't like. It's a shame, but it made me go for a 3.5 rating to account for what felt like a slog in the end.

I would recommend the book though as others may not feel like that . There are certainly many good passages in the book and I did find myself highlighting a lot of them.


Many thanks to Granta Publications and NetGalley for sending me a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I'm really not sure what to make of this book, I found it to be 5 fascinating short novellas and a half finished thought that appeared to have more importance than it did - in fact this strand was so unresolved I'm not quite sure what the point of it was.

Yoshie Watanabe's story was the most fascinating stand to me (although the descriptions of his sexual proclivities came as a surprise), and I enjoyed seeing him through the eyes of four women important in his life as well as the snapshots of different decades in different cities. The 1/2 strand of the journalist just went nowhere and seemed ultimately like a clumsy dues ex machina.

For the most part I enjoyed this novel but I never quite immersed myself in it, like watching a film of a play rather than a play live I felt kept at a distance

Strangely distanced read .. perhaps required to compensate for overwhelming and unimaginable nuclear bomb in Japanese past our protagonist recalls. Wantanabe is irksome unlikeable chap .. and the sexual encounters sort of implausible although I understand serious intentions.

Yoshie Watanabe lived through the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - he has the psychological and physical scars to prove it. For most of his life he's tried to avoid dealing with the trauma, but then an earthquake, tsunami and subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster strikes. Yoshie can no longer run away from his past, instead he runs towards it and travels to Fukushima to confront it head-on.

Full review on the blog: https://wanderingwestswords.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/fracture-andres-neuman/

The subject of ”Fracture” is Mr Yoshie Watanabe, now retired and a hibakusha, a double survivor of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He lives in downtown Tokyo in a spacious apartment with his collection of banjos. It’s 2011, on the day of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The earthquake on that day “fractures the present, shatters perspective, shifts memory plates” and Mr Watanabe decides to visit Fukushima. The part of the story which is set in 2011 is told by a conventional narrator while the other parts of Mr Watanabe’s past are narrated by four different women which formed part of his life at different times in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and Madrid.

The Fukushima disaster unleashes an avalanche of memories and forces Mr Watanabe to face the traumatic beginning of his life and his status as a ‘survivor’. Added to that, Mr Watanabe has a whole life of memories filled with people and places and languages. Mr Watanabe tells one of his partners that “we visualize our personal memories in three speeds...There are memories that come to mind over and over again, obsessively, in slow motion. Then those that seem to skip constantly, as though missing some important scenes. And those that always go by too fast, that we’d like to slow down but don’t know how.” She remarks that “if there’s any truth in this, it occurs to me that the first and second speeds would be the speeds of trauma. The third would be more like pleasure.”

My only criticism, and hence the 4 stars rather than 5, would be that at times I felt that the poignancy was a bit forced and therefore a little artificial. For example, when Mr Watanabe enters his home after the earthquake he “discovers that a few volumes on the uppermost shelves have been dislodged. Is there a pattern to these literary movements? Might they make up a kind of seismic anthology? Might certain authors be more predisposed to being displaced?”.

‘Fracture’ is a meticulously crafted and introspective novel about the interplay of history, memory, trauma, and disaster. Neuman has written a quietly excellent novel about what it means to survive and to remember as we become older.

With thanks to the publisher for the digital review copy via Netgalley.

I've been making a deliberate push for a while to read more translated fiction, a reaction, I suppose, to the world we find ourselves within at the moment and the way that even the bottom of the road seems a little unknowable and a little distant. I want to connect, I think, I want to read about the cultures and the worlds that I can't go to just yet, I want the barriers to fade away into nothing, I want to live.

And living comes through literature, specifically translated literature, the sort that takes language and gives it something new and fresh, each word paying tribute to the story it translates but also the story it wants to tell, this delicate narrative formed somewhere in between two worlds and giving me a snapshot of the world within its pages. Translation is hard, and I admire those who do it. I also want more of it, more of these books that challenge me to read outside of my experience and my worlds, and I am so grateful for those books that make me pause and realise something new, something acute and sharp and deliciously big about life.

My first such moment came in the opening chapters of Fracture, a novel I picked through nothing more than some determined searching on Netgalley, and it was a sentence that made me pause and think: so you are to be this sort of book, are you? A line, so simple, but one that shot through all of the mugginess I've been having whilst reading lately, a line that made me sit up and really see Fracture for what it was. For what it was going to be.

And it is good this book, it is good and big and full of being. It is about those things that connect being, those lines that form between us all and connect and pull and tease and fracture, those moments that echo for years and worlds to come.

Mr Yoshie Watanabe is a survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And when an earthquake strikes Tokyo in 2011, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster, his memories of those prior disasters bring him to make a decision that will change his life. During all of this, four different women share their memories of their time with Yoshie, reflecting on a life lived and loved across the globe. And through it all, the memories of conflict, of disaster - of moments that reverberate for so long, too long, not long enough.

I liked this a lot. Neumann's writing is lyrical, artistic, and though at some points I felt it got away from him, they were few and far between. The overall impression is of a writer who knows what he wants to say about the world and how he wants to say it; these are big, moving questions and to be able to articulate them is a gift. Fracture is a big, big book that pushes the world open and lets you see it for what it is. Highly recommended.

My thanks to the publisher for approving me on Netgalley.

Neuman's "Fracture" emerges against the backdrop of the earthquake that rattled Fukushima but also spans over the tumultuous 20th century; fragility, breakage and memory are the motifs the authors uses to tell the story of change and loss.

"An earthquake fractures the present, shatters perspective, shifts memory plates."