Reviews

Violence and Devotion: A Review of Love Never Dies by Eka Kurniawan

October 20, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Ria Dhull

Kurniawan portrays heterosexual love at its patriarchal, misogynistic extreme.

Love Never Dies by Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker, Hanuman Editions, 2025

The Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan has been prolific in the novel form, having looked at the forces that negate death in Beauty is a Wound, translated by Annie Tucker, and the forces that create death in Man Tiger, translated by Labodalih Sembiring. However, while working on his third novel, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (also translated by Tucker), the gifted author published two collections of short stories—the second of which begins with the novella Love Never Dies. Stripped of its surrounding stories, this novella is now appearing in English as a standalone volume.

Perhaps the choice to publish Love Never Dies separately was a choice made by Tucker, Kurniawan’s long-time translator, or perhaps by the publisher, Hanuman Editions—but either way, the text now appears more important in its English edition, as a volume on par with Kurniawan’s novels and a distinct step in the author’s career. Indeed, Love Never Dies should be considered as such. It cleanly synthesizes the themes of Kurniawan’s first two novels, determining that the forces creating and negating death are the same thing, and names that force “love”—or specifically, a man’s love toward a woman. From the first pages, it will be clear to any reader familiar with Kurniawan’s work that Love Never Dies is in conversation with its predecessors; Mardio, the seventy-four year old protagonist, seems to recall Margio of Man Tiger, and although the characters are different, the association between their names hints at the former’s future, and the murder predestined to take place at the novella’s end.

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Magic in Dialect: A Review of The Magic Ring

October 15, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sophie Benbelaid

Shergin extolls the ordinary individual and honours the Pomorye dialect. . .

The Magic Ring, translated and adapted by Siân Valvis, illustrated by Dovilė Valvis, Fontanka, 2025

Enter Boris Viktorovich Shergin, Soviet Pomor writer, folklorist, and illustrator from Arkhangelsk, hailed as The Bard of the Russian North (Певец Русского Севера). Shergin was famous for his vivid storytelling for children, specifically regarding various facets of traditional Pomorye life, delivering his tales in a native Pomor/ White Sea dialect that was praised by some of his greatest admirers—including the sculptor and puppeteer Ivan Efimov, who stated that through him, we can hear the ‘undistorted voice of our ancestors’ («неискаженный голос предков»). Although originally penned in 1930s, many of Shergin’s stories, including ‘The Magic Ring’ (‘Волшебное кольцо’), did not appear in print until much later, with Russification standardising the Moscow dialect while suppressing minority and regional languages.

Shergin’s work was finally brought to us in English this past summer by publisher Fontanka and translator Siân Valvis in The Magic Ring, in which one of Shergin’s stories stands alone from its sibling folklore. The tale begins with Vanya, the protagonist sent to pick up his mother’s pension, only to be distracted by a muzhik mistreating various animals. The first time Vanya encounters the man, he saves a dog; the second, a cat; and the third, a snake. However, the latter is no ordinary serpent; she is Skarapeya, a magical snake queen prominent in Russian and Slavic folklore. In expressing gratitude, Skarapeya instructs Vanya to return her to her father and kingdom with some crucial advice: READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2025

October 13, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, Sofija Popovska, and Timothy Berge

New titles from Haiti, Argentina, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Mexico, Taiwan, Hungary, South Korea, and Latin America!

This month, we bring you thirteen reviews from thirteen countries: a poetry collection that reimagines friendships with long-gone revolutionaries, a tender and incisive rumination on disappearance, the latest novel on the inexplicability of love from a Nobel laureate, a story of Silicon Valley-fueled descent, a compilation of Latin American feminist thought, and much much more!

duels

Duels by Néhemy Dahomey, translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Timothy Berge

Néhémy Dahomey’s Duels is set in 1842, thirty-eight years after Haiti’s independence—a storied liberation that came through one of the largest slave uprisings in history. France withdrew, but issued an absurd debt of one hundred and fifty million francs. Paying off a debt while attempting to modernize a new country was a tough balancing act, so Haiti imposed high taxes on its citizens and forced them into unpaid labor.

Duels takes place in Böen, a small town in the Cul-de-Sac Plain that evaded a census for several years. As a result, no one in the town had fallen victim to the government’s schemes—until a local official decides that he needs laborers for a new project. From there on, in the context of freedom, economic entrapment, and postcolonial growing pains, the events of Duels unfold. Nathan H. Dize’s translation reads like a yarn spun out by an old relative with a deft deadpan humor, aptly navigating the tense shifts between past and present, and generating a sense of perpetuity for these characters and their stories. Here, the historical and the contemporary connect and blur.

At the center of the story is a wealthy notary named Ludovic Possible, who runs a school in Böen—primarily with the motive of getting close to his illegitimate daughter, Aida. When a two-week long rainstorm hits the region, Aida’s mother, Gracilia, dies, and Ludovic reveals himself as Aida’s father, taking over her care. Yet, what truly drives Dahomey’s narrative is the tenets of community and storytelling. Ludovic falls in love with Gracilia because of the way she tells stories, and she passes these tales to Aida; before the child was born, Gracilia “. . . placed a hand on her lower abdomen and told her fertile ovaries the very first story she’d learned from her own mother, who’d learned it from her grandmother, who’d learned it from her great-grandmother. . .”—and so on, all the way back to their first ancestors. Fittingly, the story itself is about a chantrèl who was admired by all: “When she spoke, things would happen. When she made demands, people got to work. With her voice, the rapture caused men to fear for their own sanity.”

Aida internalizes the story and, after her mother’s death, becomes the chantrèl. Armed with the tales passed down from her mother, the young girl builds and fortifies a circle of people who will come to care deeply about her, who will fight on her behalf. Building on the singular capacity of stories to bring people together, Duels captures their particular power within the historical context, demonstrating how the act of telling can frighten those in power and liberate those in captivity.

Whether against an elemental antagonist or a human one, the people in Böen unite to enact change through rebellion. As Duels connects the creation of such solidarities with storytelling, it also works to help the citizens of a tumultuous country imagine a future where violence, injustice, and exploitation no longer govern—necessary work for any nation undergoing immense transformation.

diving board

Diving Board by Tomás Downey, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses, Invisible Publishing, 2025

Review by Regan Mies READ MORE…

Desire and Possession: A Review of Jérôme Prieur’s Zombie Proust

October 9, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

Proust saw glittering Parisian dinners and costume balls as “great massacres.” His society models posed for him and were in turn “devoured” by him.

Zombie Proust by Jérôme Prieur, translated by Nancy Kline, Les Fugitives, 2025

 “Marcel Proust was never filmed at all,” asserts Jérôme Prieur in Proust fantôme, his 2001 French text rendered into English by Nancy Kline in 2025 as Zombie Proust. In 2017, however, a Canadian professor claimed that he had found Proust’s moving specter in the silent footage of Countess Élaine Greffulhe’s 1904 wedding to the Duke de Guiche. Entering the frame about 35 seconds in, Proust, or his mustached double, wearing a pearl-gray overcoat, black vest, and black bowler hat, looking somewhat less formal than the other guests and in a hurry, descends the stairs, overtakes some older folks, and exits the frame.

The discovery of this possible Proust, occuring in the interval between Prieur’s originally published text and its translation, seems to be especially meta. Whenever we talk about Proust and his seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time, there exists always a splintering tension between chronological and subjective recollections, motion and stillness, analogous to the temporal, spatial, and linguistic gaps between an original text and its translation. In short, there are many ways to interpret Prieur’s statement that Proust “was never filmed,” just as there are many ways to read Zombie Proust.  READ MORE…

Collateral Damage: A Review of Return by Raharimanana

October 6, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Shaiq Ali

What would the symbols of the new nation be? Its language, its idioms, its tribes? And more, importantly, who isn’t Malagasy?

Return by Raharimanana, translated from the French by Allison M. Charette, Seagull Books, 2025

A newly independent nation. The visions of building. The sacrifices, people, losses. If this invigorating spirit is unwaveringly intoxicating, its effects are as much generational as they manifest in the present. In his novel Return, Raharimanana knits together a young man’s memories of his father and the spirituous strides taken to uphold truth against power in the aftermath of colonialism—specifically when the nascent country of Madagascar erupted in revolution in 1972 after gaining independence from the French in 1960. Hira, around whom much of the story revolves, is hailed as an oscillatory reminder of the time since Madagascar’s freedom, forming an autobiographical arc in Raharimanana’s own reconciliation with his childhood. The author’s writing also carries the artfulness of music, an art that he engages in alongside being a novelist, poet, and playwright.

In an earlier book, Nour 1947 (2001), Raharimanana penned a closer engagement with the 1947 Malagasy Uprising, dealing with the deadly killings of 87,000 Malagasys by the French colonial rule. Return, which was first published in 2018 in French as Revenir, now puts on a vivid image of Hira’s life as a touring writer and his recollections of the transitioning state of Madagascar. As he travels, he is disturbingly reminded of his father’s torture and the price paid by his family, and these fragmented recollections do not let him collate a neat history. Hence, the sections of the present are reeling with the irredeemability of time, a fracturedness that also speaks to the inability to write of a violence that is both collective and overpowering. As the novel moves on, this position culminates into renewed impetus for his writing, rife with image and poetic terseness. Being born after independence, Hira is part of a nation attempting to blossom a life out of the ruins—and this is true for Hira’s own family as well as for the country. For him, it is tiring: “But also weariness. He’d had enough of all of that. Being confronted with his country’s violence.” READ MORE…

Growing, Growing, Gone: A Review of Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov

October 2, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Amber Ruth Paulen

[T]he fiction of Death and the Gardener is suggesting that the only way to get through both death—and life—is by transforming experiences.

Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Liveright, 2025

“What happens to the garden . . . when the gardener is gone?” asks the narrator of Georgi Gospodinov’s new novel, Death and the Gardner. After winning the International Booker Prize in 2023 for Time Shelter, the Bulgarian writer returns with a novel featuring a similarly famous Bulgarian writer—with the additional autobiographical detail of a father who has died from cancer, leaving his garden behind. Within this autofiction, the reader will not have to wait long for an answer to that primary, haunting question: “The garden will continue to flourish, even without its gardener, what he has planted will still grow, bear fruit, but wildness will also start to make inroads, after some time weeds and grasses will overtake everything.” The seasons will cycle the plants through life and death—and life again. In a garden, even without its gardener, there is still promise of spring; perhaps it’s this promise of revival that makes gardening an ideal outlet for grief.

I began my first garden three years ago as my dad lay dying of cancer in the living room. His friends—now my friends—had shown me how to hoe a straight line between two markers and brush in the seeds, then how to cover them with soil, going back down the lines. What they couldn’t do was prepare me for when the tilled dirt filled with weeds, for when my dad died and I inherited his house and its garden. That first summer, I ripped up endless roots, but the weeds kept on growing.

The narrator of Death and the Gardener does not work at his father’s garden after he dies, but he does use it as the central grounding image for the book that he writes. Though Death and the Gardener calls itself a novel on the cover, it reads with the intimacy of a memoir in Angela Rodel’s expert translation. Acknowledging this slippery approach to genre, the narrator admits, “This book has no obvious genre; it needs to create one for itself.” He too wonders “whether the kindling of those words cools [grief], or just inflame it all the more.” Writing, then, is taken to be like gardening after a death: a way to bargain for just a little more time with that person. This cathartic use of writing (and gardening) in grief is nothing new, but Gospodinov’s approach draws particular attention to the push and pull of the writing itself, and how this kind of detailed remembering both brings back his father and reproduces the trauma of witnessing him suffer and die. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić

September 29, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ellen Sprague

Vidaić’s novel calls out and works within irreconcilable contrasts: inside and outside, urban and rural, educated and less so. . .

In Bedbugs, both the environment and the individual are veering on the precipice of ruin. Pushing the frenetic and confessional potentials of the epistolary form, Martina Vidaić charts the psychological dissolution of her protagonist with the constant incursion of her disintegrating surroundings, resulting in an enthralling collision of misfortune, trauma, momentum, and one’s own instinct for survival. This sense of doom, balanced with acerbic wit and paced mystery, fuels the Croatian writer’s distinctive, absorbing investigation into our contemporary human conundrums of alienation and dread—but also our stubborn, headlong insistence of going onward. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Sandorf Passage, 2025

The structural overview or the room-by-room discovery: these are two basic ways to describe a living space. The first gives context, while the second demands patience—and some faith, especially if the space is messy. In Bedbugs (Stenjice, 2021), Croatian writer Martina Vidaić’s second novel, some faith is needed as the story ramps up. When the reader sees that the entire book is written without a single paragraph break, they will know that it might take some focus to follow along—even with the expert translation of Ellen Elias-Bursać, who is no stranger to Croatian language and literature. But this dense journey into the winner of the 2023 European Union Prize for Literature is worth taking for the entirety of the grounded story, and even more so for the inventive, fluid metaphors and descriptive passages that carry the reader to the conclusion, even if it’s not a tidy one.

From the first line, both sardonic humor and bemusing doom abound. “I am writing to you, Hladna, my cold friend, because I happen to know you’re the only person who won’t laugh when I say that the day the ants chewed holes in my underwear, I finally had to face up to the fact that my downfall was a certainty.” The narrator’s dramatics feel a little overdone, but they still make me chuckle—and this is even before the bedbugs, which according to her Googling: “once they get into an apartment, bedbugs are extremely difficult to get rid of.” Throughout the novel that amounts to a 180-page letter, Gorana Hrabrov’s downfall may be certain, but the course always feels like somehow it could trend upward. This woman is smart and, like a bedbug, extremely difficult to get rid of; will she make it?   READ MORE…

Deep Time Elegy: A Review of What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium by Kim Simonsen

September 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sayani Sarkar

[T]his is a book for readers who prefer elegy that is alert rather than ornamental.

What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium by Kim Simonsen, translated from the Faroese by Randi Ward, Deep Vellum, 2025

In seeking an entry into Faroese poetry, one should begin with Kim Simonsen, an award-winning writer and academic from the island of Eysturoy. Having been active for over two decades in conventional academia as well as in artistic circles, he is also the founder and managing editor of a Faroese press called Forlagið Eksil, and is the author of seven books as well as numerous academic papers. Hvat hjálpir einum menniskja at vakna ein morgun hesumegin hetta áratúsundið (What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium) won the M.A. Jacobsen Literature Award in 2014, and now, its translation by Randi Ward into English will be published by Deep Vellum in 2025. Written in free verse, the collection aspires to juxtapose the vast sweep of geology with the relative miniature of humanity, invoking the life cycles of organisms and landscapes whose timescales dwarf our own lives. Yet, the lyric centre of these poems is grief; the speaker has lost their loved one, and here measures their absence against the timelessness of eons. Divided into four parts, the book is also interspersed with illustrations from natural history texts such as Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705), Leopoldo Caldani and Floriano Caldani’s Icones Anatomicae (1801-1813), and Frederik Ruysch’s Thesaurus anatomicus primus (1701), among others.

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The Burden of History: A Review of Batool Abu Akleen’s 48kg

September 17, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou

48kg . . . does not hide the Zionist intention behind abstractions, but rather confronts us with the stark realities of a genocidal war.

48kg by Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Batool Abu Akleen, Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher, Palestine, Tenement Press, June 2025

Batool Abu Akleen’s bilingual collection of poems, 48kg, is not solely a powerful literary work; rather, it is a testimony of the genocide that has been wrought upon Gaza for the past two years, written in a poetic verse and style. Her writing is urgent, heart-breaking, honest, and brutal; every line lingers long after reading.

A blend between personal witness and poetic verse, the collection was translated from the Arabic by Akleen herself along with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher. The close collaboration ensured that the urgency of her voice was not lost in translation. Indeed, her first-hand experience of the genocidal war on Gaza is not hidden in gentle language, and the bilingual nature of the text puts the original Arabic side-by-side with its English counterparts. In translation, Akleen endeavors to convey her experience of genocide to a broader, non-Arabic speaking audience.

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What’s New in Translation: September 2025

September 15, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Alexander, Liliana Torpey, Mandy-Suzanne Wong, Regan Mies, and Xiao Yue Shan

New publications from Palestine, Afghanistan, Italy, Senegal, France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Poland, and Kyrgyzstan!

Ten titles, ten countries! This month, we’re presenting reviews of a wide-ranging text of image philosophy in the age of virtual reality; a Russian master’s memoirs of his infamous literary friends; poetry anthologies featuring testimonies from the genocide in Gaza and the bold voices of Afghan women; a delicate and revelatory Serbian novel parsing lineage and dementia; and so much more. . .

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From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, translated from the French by Dylan Temel, Other Press, 2025

Review by Xiao Yue Shan

Power is domination—at least, that’s how it’s been overarchingly conceived. Though the concept abstracts out to a vast array of actualities, from the centralized to the diffused, the individual to the plural, the Foucauldian and the Weberian, the most immediate and base display of human power is that of one subject being undermined by another. Translation, then, as an intersectional arena between two bodies that are as similar as they are different, is an optimal stage by which to study the varying dynamics of power; but especially within the postcolonial context, it has commonly begun with the premise that translation is a dominating act, with one more powerful language exercising its patterns, definitions, and cultural values over another. In From Language to Language, the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne wants to build his theories on a different foundation.

It may seem that the closer one looks at translation, the less feasible an equilibrium seems—at least, from the outside. For bilingual or multilingual persons, however, the idea of equal values for different languages is simply fact; the hosts of multiple languages are likely to regard them as equally essential components, regardless of any diglossic differences in fluency, utility, or geographical relevance. As a speaker of Wolof, French, and English, Diagne is in this camp, and opens this English edition of From Language to Language with a personal anecdote on his family’s migration, which ends with the determination that his children should “live out their different identities and the languages that expressed them with self-assurance as pride.” His own multilingualism therefore places him at a position more primed to think of translation less as a sequence of conquests, and more as a rendezvous of common goals, whether that be the making of a fully-fledged individual, or of a more varied and generous world. There is, he says, a “gratitude and equality within a shared humanity, which is at the very heart of translation.” READ MORE…

Grief and Knowledge in a Dying World: A Review of Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini

September 11, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Oonagh Stransky

Stability and instability. Throughout Inn of the Survivors, the theme of balance comes up time and again—literally and metaphorically.

Inn of the Survivors by Maico Morellini, translated from the Italian by Rose Facchini, Snuggly Books, 2025

Inn of the Survivors is Italian writer Maico Morellini’s debut in the English language, a haunting and eerily familiar work from a sophisticated voice in speculative fiction, arriving in Rose Facchini’s translation. Set in a dystopian future after an unspecified climate disaster, the novella tells the story of a seventeen-year-old girl’s arrival at the titular Inn of the Survivors, a haven on the Adriatic coast. Having taken off from her remote home in the mountains overlooking the Po River Valley, and following a three-year trek through Bologna, Forlì, and Cesena, she finally reaches the Inn and encounters others like her: people who have been on the run, trying to survive, living with trauma, grief, or shame. The price of staying? You must tell your story.

Lest you think my use of the second person is casual, it should be said that except for the backstory—which appears in the latter half—the novella is written entirely in the second person. While this narrative device appears often enough in English, it is far less common in Italian, with only two novels coming easily to mind: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore by Italo Calvino, and the most recent Strega Prize winner Come d’aria by Ada d’Adamo. This is likely due to the Italian third person impersonal (si + verb), which can mean anything from “you,” to the more formal-sounding “one,” to the most passive of voices. As such, choosing to write this tale in the second person was a bold and effective choice on the part of the author, with the new text sounding entirely natural (the ideal result for a work of cli-fi). Yet, thanks to specific geographic locations that are an integral part of the story and the protagonist’s desire to understand her country, it still retains a quality we can call “Italian.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Safe Corridor by Jan Dost

August 28, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Amidst Safe Corridor’s war, the child has become the historian, recording what adults try to forget.

“Children,” Jan Dost tells us, “grow up quickly in wars.” In his bold and unflinching Safe Corridor, the author demonstrates this brutal reality through the eyes of a young narrator caught within Syria’s civil conflict, resulting in a phantasmagorical, gripping account that not only captures the violent facts, but also the mind’s attempts to accept them. As Dost moves seamlessly between the surreal, the absurd, the tragic, and the enraging, the novel engages with the true consequences and aftermaths of loss: who—or what—one becomes after surviving the unthinkable.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Safe Corridor by Jan Dost, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, DarArab, 2025

“On the evening when young Kamiran began to realise that he was turning into a lump of chalk, rain was bucketing down.” With this devastatingly surreal image, Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor—gracefully translated by Marilyn Booth—immerses its readers in a scene that brings to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. A Syrian-Kurdish writer-translator based in Germany, Dost is one of Syria’s most important living authors with sixteen novels to his name, most of which center the realities and consequences of his home nation’s civil war. Safe Corridor, originally published in Arabic in 2019 as Mamar Āmin, entrusts this testimony of a devastated country to a voice least equipped—and yet most fated—to bear it. Told through a fragile, furious, and often surreal narration, the novel captures how war is not only fought on battlefields but also inscribed upon the bodies and imaginations of children. As the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish puts it in his poem “The War Will End”:

I don’t know who sold our homeland
But I saw who paid the price.

Roland Gary, in his introduction to Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, states that the Czech writer’s work “belongs unmistakably to the twentieth century . . . because his sense of man’s fate is deeply bound up with the atrocities and nightmares of the age.” Similar atrocities have persisted into our own century, ensuring that Kafka’s worlds remain an enduring source of inspiration for many writers worldwide—especially Arab novelists. They are the worlds of the absurd, marked by estrangement and fear, wherein one is perpetually hounded by unseen forces they cannot name, condemned to live within utter futility. READ MORE…

Nostalgia and Aesthetic Inertia: A Review of The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko

August 25, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Sonakshi Srivastava

The Last Soviet Artist compels readers to take note, to research, and to reflect. . .

The Last Soviet Artist by Victoria Lomasko, translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, n+1 Books, 2025

The title of this review is part borrowed from, and part inspired by a subsection of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia. A meditation that concerns itself with the capacious titular affect, Boym studies nostalgia through the revolutionary era of perestroika, the fall of the Soviet Union, and well into the present. While she categorizes two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective—the former more active, seeking to reconstruct the past, and the latter passive, dwelling in yearning—she caveats that these are only “tendencies, ways of giving shape and meaning to longing.” While reading Victoria Lomasko’s The Last Soviet Artist, a third degree of nostalgia emerges: the residual. Nostalgia’s escape from the decay of romanticization towards a productive politic of collective and self-exploration feeds the heart of the text. 

Translated from the Russian by Bela Shayevich, Lomasko’s latest—a graphic reportage that blends elements of memoir—was initially planned as a sequel to her Other Russias, which she mentions in her introduction. I hold a particular reverence for introductions; these precise portals often reveal more of the author’s motivations than is written on the surface, and Lomasko’s is particularly transparent. There is an urgency—we learn that Lomasko has self-exiled in response to Russia’s iron grip of heavy censorship and repression. In her home country, there is no room for imagination, no space for artists, and social activism has been systematically stifled. This realization dispels the awe Lomasko had held for “those fairytale pictures and stories” that she grew up reading about an everlasting friendship among the fifteen Soviet republics. Any remaining traces of nostalgia for “that period” soon erode away when Lomasko, seeking photocopies of her work clandestinely at a museum in Belarus, realizes that her body remembered what it “had really meant to be a Soviet person.” 

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Possibilities in Transformation: A Review of Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová

August 20, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Garrett Biggs

[Ceilings] and its setting dwell in a place where play and terror occur simultaneously. . .

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová, translated from the Czech by Tereza Novická, Twisted Spoon Press, 2025

In “The Aleph,” Jorge Luis Borges’s eponymous narrator attempts to describe the titular object—a point in space that contains all other points—but finally articulates that he cannot truly do so: “Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south . . . Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction.” Borges is far from the only writer to fear that fiction might distort truth or one’s simple lived experience. In the way of Barthes, who wrote that “incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order,” Borges’s attempt to translate the aleph functions as a useful thought experiment: How does one coherently translate an experience or text that is fundamentally incoherent? Should one even try?

Ceilings, Zuzana Brabcová’s second novel to be posthumously translated into English, represents an aleph of sorts. It is about a woman named Emička (or Ema) who has been committed to a psychiatric hospital, but it is also about Emička’s imaginary brother, Ash, who is committed to the same hospital—because he both is and is not Ema herself. As for the hospital, it’s certainly a hospital, but it also shapeshifts to become an aquarium, Ema’s childhood home, and an IKEA. Plenty of readers will take the easy route and try to interpret these inconsistencies as reflections of Ema’s unstable mental state, but Brabcová disrupts this reading by refusing to settle on a clear narrator. She shifts between the third person and Ema’s/Ash’s perspective, sometimes all within a single paragraph. Thus, while perhaps not as untranslatable as the aleph, Ceilings provides no shortage of challenges: its circuitous syntax, its treatment of time, its slippery subject matter. READ MORE…