It’s not often that I encounter any translated Welsh language author. Flowers of War is a translation of Llŷr Gwyn Lewis’s prose work, Rhyw Flodau Rhyfel, first published in 2014 and won the Creative Non-Fiction Category in the 2015 Wales Book of the Year award. I don’t know how challenging it is to translate prose from Welsh into English, but I’ll have to praise the beauty of Katie Gramich’s translation of this book. The book is divided into three parts which begin in 2011 and end the year after that. The premise is quite interesting. The author is a wanderlust and he has travelled a lot during his years as a university student and afterwards when he’s become a lecturer. Partly, this book is a reflection on the states of mind of the author over the course of his travel, but there’s also some uneasiness over the question of his identity as a Welsh and his family’s involvement in the Second World War when many Welshmen were drafted to serve the British Empire, while also in between there is an interesting travelogue of the author’s trip to some places in Europe.

The book begins with a sheer coincidence. The author has just received a folder full of documents from his grandfather, which contains mementoes and letters of his grandfather’s deceased brother, John. John was killed in Syria during the Second World War, fighting against the Frenchmen who fought for the Vichy France, aged just 24. The author questions the nature of the war, which he thought was fought against the Germans, but turns out that there were also Frenchmen who fought alongside the Nazis in the Axis. The front in which John fought was also far from the main theatre of the war, which is in Syria. And lastly, John was aged 24 when he was killed in the front, the same age as the author when he wrote his reflection of it. As he reflects on those facts, there’s unfairness in John’s premature death, but he also began to wonder if the peaceful nature of life in the twenty-first century also takes from him some chance to make his life remarkable and find his true calling.

I like the author’s reflections and find most of them relatable to me. There were occasions when I thought I was born in the wrong generation, as though living in the twenty-first century is boring. There is no war to make a hero out of myself, echoing the author’s thought. But at some point, I’ve also come to the realisation that perhaps the peace that we have now comes at the expense of the death in the previous generation. As in Churchill's speech in 1940, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” referring to the ongoing efforts of the Royal Air Force and allied fighter crews who were at the time fighting the Battle of Britain. Perhaps the thought only occurs to myself and the author’s mind as we live in this kind of situation when we have so many choices presented in front of us, unlike the boys who were forced to fight, sometimes against their wills, during the Second World War. And the war itself has not perished completely in human history, as the author takes note of the 2011 Arab Spring which in Syria culminated into a civil war, effectively preventing the author’s initial plan to retrace the steps of John during the War.

While the author’s writing is blatantly honest and creative, they also contain long sentences, something that I rarely notice in English literature. Perhaps this is some kind of characteristic or the author’s style from the original Welsh work. Albeit this book is short, it has a really slow tempo. There are occasions when the author would rewind his story, inserting missing details here and there, often in the middle of a story and then there will be the insertion of another story to form a complete picture. Sometimes, there are also accompanying photos from the author’s trips which I truly welcome, given my lack of experience to the places the author has visited such as Moscow, Warsaw, Krakow, Amsterdam, Dublin, London, Ljubljana, etc. In some ways, his reflections also show that even in places far away from a culture different from ours, there will also be something we could connect with or a recalling of some details that escape our imagination in quotidian situations.

Thanks to NetGalley and Parthian Books for providing the electronic advance reading copy.

Flowers of War
by LLYR Gwyn Lewis
Pub Date 03 Jan 2022 |
Parthian Books
Biographies & Memoirs | Nonfiction (Adult) | Travel



I am reviewing a copy of Flowers of War through Parthian Books and Netgalley:





Flowers of War is a translation Rhyw Flodau Rhyfel (Y Lolfa, 2014), which won the Creative Non-Fiction category in the 2015 Wales Book of the Year award.




After the author is given a small package containing letters and papers relating to his grandfather’s brother, who was killed in Syria during the Second World War. This leads him on an extended personal journey. This book is an exploration of history, imagination, and the process of memory, shifting imperceptibly from autobiography to travelogue, from letters and diaries to official records, from text to visual image.



I give Flowers of War five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

Llŷr Gwyn Lewis is a Welsh poet and writer. In this book, after being given a package of personal papers and letters by his grandfather, he goes on a journey of self-discovery and tries to connect himself to his great-uncle, who died in Syria during the Second World War.

I found Llŷr an engaging writer, especially in the passages where he is with and talking about his grandparents and their memories, but it took a while for me to get into this book. It is easy to see Llŷr's gifts as a writer, but it felt disconnected at times and there were a lot of long sentences that lost me somewhere in the middle. I liked the reminiscences of the trip he made as a younger man through Europe, stopping at places such as Prague and Krakow, but struggled to find an overarching sense of narrative so far as the wider journey was concerned.

In some ways, I think Llŷr struggled himself because of present-day Syria being inaccessible due to the ongoing conflict in the region so he couldn't visit the place where his great-uncle died. In that sense, he doesn't find the closure he was looking for.

The translation from Welsh is excellent; however, I imagine it must have been difficult translating such long sentences.

Although this isn't a book I will personally be adding to my collection, I would be happy to read some of Llŷr's poetry.

I was sent an advance review copy of this book by Parthian Books, in return for an honest appraisal.

Unfortunately this book wasn’t for me.
I couldn’t decide if it was fiction or non-fiction, and even after I found out it was semi-autobiographical, it still didn’t read as one or the other.
I felt it was a bit rambling, with sentences that went on for an entire page or more, which made it difficult to read. After doing some research, I can see this is Llyr’s first foray into prose writing as opposed to poetry and I think that’s quite clear. It’s full of description and you can tell there’s a kind of rhythm to the writing you would normally see in a poem, but I didn’t think it worked in this case. I felt some bits were really out of place with others and didn’t add anything to the overall story.
Sadly, this book just didn’t sit well with me.