In today’s post, Assistant Blog Editor Nina Perrotta reflects on the many books that accompanied her during a year abroad in Brazil, ranging from classic Japanese novels to contemporary fiction in translation.
Early in 2018, as I was preparing to move to Brazil, I picked up a faded old book from my parents’ bookshelf. Junichirō Tanizaki’s classic novel The Makioka Sisters, originally published in serial form in the mid-1940s, follows four sisters, two of whom are in need of husbands, as they navigate their own altered fortune and the clash between tradition and modernity in inter-war Japan. There’s nothing I love more than a really long novel, and this one, for me, was an ideal blend of familiar (the Jane Austen-style plot) and different (the specifics of Japanese society in that era, which I knew little about). In hindsight, it was probably my favorite of all the books I read this year.
As soon as I finished The Makioka Sisters, I started The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami (who, notably, was shortlisted for Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award this year). Though the two novels were written nearly a half-century apart and have little in common, I enjoyed reading them back-to-back, especially since one of Murakami’s characters, who would have been a contemporary of the Makioka sisters, tells war stories from his time in the Japanese army during World War II.
As my trip to Brazil drew nearer, I rushed through The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and, fortunately for my suitcase, managed to finish it just before I had to leave for the airport. Once at my gate, I got started on Charles Dickens’ massive Bleak House, which I had tried—and failed—to read once before. I promised myself that I would finish it this time, no matter how long it took. And so I spent the next two months carrying Bleak House around the streets of Curitiba, Brazil, reading it on the sunny couch in my apartment, and occasionally using it as a yoga block (it was about the right size).
In terms of plot, Bleak House had its ups and downs—I strongly object to the miraculous recoveries from mortal illness and/or blindness that seem to be a staple of Victorian novels (looking at you, Charlotte Brontë)—but the character development was impressive. Dickens’ portrait of charitable upper-class ladies, in particular, felt shockingly relevant; in my own life, I had acquaintances like Mrs. Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby, people whose charitable work was counteracted by their own self-involvement and lack of empathy for those they were supposedly helping. For me, though, the highlight of reading Dickens is always the linguistic and etymological gems scattered throughout his work: not just his whimsical neologisms, but also the Latin-derived words that we seldom use anymore in English, but whose cognates in Spanish and Portuguese (and presumably French, though I don’t speak it) are still going strong.
While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Bleak House (at over a thousand pages, it’s quite an undertaking), I found it to be the perfect complement to the next book on my list: Kafka’s The Trial, which I read in Breon Mitchell’s translation. In spite of their obvious differences, the two books shared the same central image: a legal system so enormous and obscure, so endlessly bureaucratic, that it was literally deadly to anyone who came into contact with it. This had special significance for me as a resident of Brazil, whose own bureaucracy is enough to rival either Kafka’s or Dickens’—the process required to get a bus card in my city was so complex that, in the ten months I lived there, I never even attempted it. I should also mention that Breon Mitchell’s translation is notable not only for its high quality, but also for its informative introduction and effort to restore the text as much as possible to its original structure.
Just by coincidence, all the books I mentioned above were written by men, but this is not representative of my year as a whole; in 2018, I made an active effort to read more books by women, especially women of color. Some of my favorites included Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (one of the few physical books I brought on my trip, lent to me by a good friend), Olga Tokarczuk’s strange and beautiful Flights, and The Possessed, Elif Batuman’s entertaining memoir about her obsession with Russian literature.
As a (temporary) resident of Brazil, I also made it a point to read books by Latin American women in their original languages. I started with Isabel Allende’s classic La casa de los espíritus [The House of the Spirits], whose approach to the Chilean dictatorship took me completely by surprise. No spoilers, but the book’s long, slow beginning lulls the reader into a false sense of security, a feeling that the characters’ lives will continue in a predictable way—and then everything comes to a startling and violent halt. I didn’t connect as deeply with Clarice Lispector’s Laços de Família [Family Ties], partly because Portuguese is more difficult for me than Spanish, and partly because Lispector’s writing style is quite abstract and often driven entirely by interior action. Nonetheless, I appreciated the opportunity to read one of the most influential—if not the most influential—Brazilian writers of the twentieth century while living in Curitiba.
As I was wrapping up my year abroad, I took on a book I’d been meaning to read for a long time: Mexican author Antonio Ruiz-Camacho’s self-translation of Barefoot Dogs, a short story collection that follows the various family members of a kidnapped patriarch as they flee Mexico for their own safety. A fascinating case study in self-translation, the Spanish version (and presumably the English original, which was a Kirkus Reviews “Best Books of 2015”) also stands on its own as a compelling and darkly funny read.
After ten months in Brazil, I returned home to the US, where I found a whole pile of unread books waiting for me. I don’t know what’s next for me in 2019, but I do know that I have quite a lot of reading to do.
Nina Perrotta is an Assistant Blog Editor at Asymptote. Since graduating from Brown University with a degree in literary translation, she has worked as a translator and ESL teacher. She recently completed a Fulbright scholarship in Curitiba, Brazil.
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