Book Club

Scream of Freedom: Samar Yazbek and Leri Price on Where the Wind Calls Home

March 21, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Alex Tan

I love the world in Arabic, so I started to write it as my personal space.

Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home is a poetic rumination that shifts through the land of the dead and of the living, between thinking and intuiting, and from the vast destructions of war to its intimate, embodied experience. In taking us to the “other” side—that of the military—in Syria’s unsparing civil war, Yazbek offers a method of understanding pain’s blind immensity, as well as the metaphysical phenomenon of life at the precipice of death. With the incredible work of translator Leri Price, whom Yazbek calls here her “voice in English”, Where the Wind Calls Home arrives to us with all the weight of contemporary tragedy, and all the light of a spiritual encounter. Here, Yazbek and Price speak to us on the recurring motifs of the text, the fluidity of the prose, and how writing can reveal to us our own secrets.

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. 

Alex Tan (AT): Samar, in your previous novel, Planet of Clay, we follow the perspective of a mute girl from Damascus, caught in the middle of the Syrian Civil War. For Where the Wind Calls Home, why did you select a dying soldier as your protagonist?

Samar Yazbek (SY): First of all, we’re not sure if he will die—what will happen to him, and with his life. Actually, it was a challenge in my own life, because I was in exile from myself, and I had stopped writing literature. I came back with Planet of Clay, to literature, but when I decided to write this novel, I started writing it as poetry. I tried something different. It’s a very personal thing.

Ten or twelve years ago, I decided for the first time to speak about the victims who are living on the other side of the Assad regime. It was a very difficult choice for me. There’s a perception that the soldiers on the side of the regime are not victims, but the problem is that this has been a long war, and everyone is a victim. And what we’ve got to remember is that there’s a class element; we have to remember the poor. A fundamental part of literature, in my opinion, is that we learn to look at things from an alternate point of view, and to have empathy with others. Without that, it’s absolutely certain that things won’t change.

AT: The figure of the tree plays such a central role in the novel—it becomes this recurring motif, with Ali crawling towards it in the narrative present, and thinking back to all the trees that have shielded him, including the one next to the maqam. Did you have any specific personal, religious, cultural, or literary motivations in opting for the tree as the essential anchor of the text?

SY: There are lots of reasons. First, every maqam in the mountains has trees. They’re all surrounded by trees, and these trees are huge and ancient, hundreds of years old. Second, the tree acts as refuge for Ali. It represents a shelter from daily violence—from the sort of physical violence that he encounters in the village.

The most important thing is that trees are silent. Trees die standing, silently, without speaking the language of humans—and in this death they have dignity. Ali is able to communicate with the tree, together in their silences. Silence is Ali’s language, his way of resisting against the violence in his society, so he invents a new language with the trees, with the sky, with the wind. It’s like he builds a bridge between himself and all the elements of nature. Trees are part of his world.

I’m also talking about myself and my vision; I believe we need to be like a tree sometimes.

AT: I want to pick up on what you said about the language of the trees being Ali’s language in the novel. I’m also thinking of what you said earlier, that the novel began as poetry. Could you tell us how it evolved from poetry into the novel, and whether you think the novel becomes a good channel for this silence? READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

February 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

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. 

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

Where the Change Comes From: Saskia Vogel on Translating Balsam Karam

February 22, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Here are the losses. Just listen this time. That directness is so wonderful.

In The Singularity, Swedish author Balsam Karam instills a startling and deeply profound gravity within the devastating fractures of life—mothers who lose children, migrants who lose countries, and the emotional maelstroms stirring at the precipice of disappearance. With an extraordinary style that exemplifies how poetics can search and unveil the most secret aspects of grief and longing, Karam’s fluid, genre-blurring prose is at once dreamlike and harrowingly vivid, with the remarkable sensitivity of translator Saskia Vogel carrying this richness through to the English translation. We were proud to select this novel as our January Book Club selection, and in this following interview, Vogel speaks to us about how Karam’s writing works to destabilize and shift majority presumptions, as well as how literature can echo, verify, and perhaps change the way we live.

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. 

Rachel Stanyon (RS): How did you come to Balsam Karam’s work?

Saskia Vogel (SV): I first encountered Balsam’s work through Sara Abdollahi, one of my favorite literary critics in Sweden—she’s full of integrity, and really cares about literature and its transformative potential. She had done a podcast with Balsam, and their conversation really struck me, especially Balsam’s extraordinary representation of solidarity. This is exemplified in her first novel, Event Horizon, which, as I understand, is connected to The Singularity like a kind of diptych; they’re of the same world, and written with the same sorts of strategies—for example, a lot of the details of place, location, and identity are unstated. I find this aesthetic really compelling.

Balsam assumes that she’s writing into Sweden and a majority white culture, and she doesn’t want to give people an easy out where they can say, “I’ve been to Beirut. It’s not exactly like that.” She instead strips away detail and, in The Singularity, focuses on loss and the effects of war on individuals, as well as on migration and racism.

Another extraordinary feature of her prose is that the white gaze is decentered, which works to shift how the presumed audience reads and perceives some of the most pressing and potent human experiences of our time. She moves us away from the particularities of politics, and tries to make us understand what it feels like to be in a certain position. In that way, she really encourages and facilitates a deep growth and compassion—if you’re open to it, I guess. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Singularity by Balsam Karam

January 31, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Karam stretches the limits of conventional narrative writing. . . the result is a work of true formal experimentation without . . . artifice.

With inimitable lyricism and an impeccable sense of balance, Balsam Karam’s The Singularity addresses some of the most complex elements of contemporary social reality. Yet, even as the thrilling narrative is intricately braided with the brutal realities of loss, displacement, motherhood, and migration, the novel’s innovative structure and bold, surprising style elevates it beyond story, revealing an author who is as precise with language as she is with illustrating our mental and physical landscapes. In starting off a new year of Asymptote Book Club, we are proud to announce this work of art as our first selection of 2024.

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.  

The Singularity by Balsam Karam, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Feminist Press/Fitzcarraldo, 2024

Meanwhile elsewhere—two women perched on the precipice in a tangential encounter, spun together by forces outside their control, as if in the singularity of a black hole. One woman is about to jump off the edge, bereft after the loss of her teenage daughter; the other will frame this moment as the beginning of the end for the child in her womb. No need for spoiler alerts here: what might feature as the climax in a more conventional narrative is laid bare in The Singularity’s prologue. That it nevertheless remains absorbing to its very end is a testament to the depth of feeling and dexterity with which the Swedish-Kurdish novelist Balsam Karam orchestrates the rest of this novel about grief, loss, migration, and motherhood.

Given this jarring beginning and its atypical (or absent) narrative arc, it is perhaps no wonder that as the rest of this novel unwinds, we are met with multiple displacements in time and perspective, echoing the geographical dislocation of the two central figures—both of whom are refugees—and the all-encompassing, omnipresent nature of the trauma they experience.

Before throwing herself off a tourist-thronged cliff in a bullet-ridden city, the first woman has been searching for The Missing One­: her seventeen-year-old daughter, who never came home from her cleaning job on the corniche a few months earlier. After fleeing from their home, receiving scant help from the relief organization that occasionally visits with a “hello and how are you all then here you go and we’ll be back soon, even if it’s not true,” and finding little sanctuary living in a tumble-down alleyway at the fringes of this unnamed city, the mother seems to experience the disappearance of her daughter as the final loss that makes her lose herself. “What mother doesn’t take her own life after a child disappears?” the first woman asks the universe, or “when a child dies?” the second woman asks her doctor. READ MORE…

The Intricacies of Human Experience: Natasha Lehrer on Translating On the Isle of Antioch

January 25, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

There's a collective responsibility in engaging with these stories, reflecting on our own roles, and finding meaning in the midst of uncertainty.

On the Isle of Antioch is lauded Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf’s philosophically rich take on the end-of-days novel. Told through the journals of Alexander, an artist living out his days on an island he shares with only one other person, this solitary existence is suddenly upended by a total communications blackout and power failure, followed by growing threats of global nuclear warfare. Through this narrative that builds on our contemporary forebodings, Maalouf weaves in the grand resonances of history and delicate moments of human connection to gather the touchpoints between consciousness and civilization, reality and belief. Skillfully taken into English by award-winning translator Natasha Lehrer, this modern myth was our final Book Club selection for 2023, and in the interview below, we speak to Lehrer about On the Isle of Antioch’s massive range, the novelist’s role, and the importance of ambiguity.

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.  

Ruwa Alhayek (RA): On the Isle of Antioch resonates strongly with contemporary events like the COVID pandemic or current geopolitical tensions; it’s intriguing how the novel captures such fears, then deviates from initial impressions. Did ongoing events have an impact on your process of translation?

Natasha Lehrer (NL): The narrative absolutely echoes real-world concerns like the Ukrainian invasion and geopolitical tensions between the U.S., Iran, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Sardar Sardarov initially appears as a Central Asian warlord, a nod to figures from the former Soviet Union. The theme of missing nuclear warheads also aligns with post-Soviet anxieties, cleverly naming and then subverting those fears.

But personally, translation is more of an intellectual exercise for me. I focus on achieving the right tone and voice for characters, especially when translating philosophical dialogues. For instance, translating an American character from French back into English is quite interesting, and Maalouf’s characters often speak in a philosophical manner rather than realistic dialogue. Reading the novel again after a year, I’m struck by the atmosphere of dread, fear, and eroticism. It’s exciting to realize that it works well, even though I wasn’t consciously conjuring specific atmospheres during translation. It’s more about accurately conveying Maalouf’s ideas. READ MORE…

You’re Invited: Join our 2024 Reading Challenge!

January 1, 2024  |  in Book Club  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Is reading adventurously one of your New Year’s resolutions? We can help with that!

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CLICK THROUGH FOR COUPON-DISCOUNTED RATES!

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf

December 29, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

[Maalouf] offers us a human way to experience cataclysm without masking the confusion and desperation that takes hold. . .

For our final title of 2023, we are proud to present the latest novel by acclaimed French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, whose extraordinary work weaves fantasy and history with a powerful reckoning of contemporary issues. In On the Isle of Antioch, Maalouf turns to dystopian narrative to explore the frailties and failures of human empires, drawing a surreal evolution of events that escalate from the very real threat of total global destruction. With a philosophical richness that finds footholds in Maalouf’s elegant, nebulous depictions of desire and connection, the novel is a beautiful, necessary rumination on what survival means on the precipices of so much devastation.

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.  

On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, World Editions, 2023

There is something eerie about reading Amin Maalouf’s On The Isle of Antioch during the same days described by its narrator’s journal entries. In four sections, or “notebooks”, that date from November 9 to December 9, Maalouf’s surreal, thrilling novel is told through the experiences of Alexander, an artist and one of two inhabitants on the titular island of Antioch, as he travels in this brief window of time through isolation, doom, communion, and the unexpected orders and disorders of a dying world.

Having inherited the land from his father, who had refused to sell the deed despite financial difficulties, Alexander decides, in the wake of his parents’ death, to change his life. He begins drawing, releasing work under the pseudonym Alec Zander, and moves to Antioch in a reprieve of his childhood fantasies, calling it his “ancestral island.” Believing himself to be the only inhabitant and sole owner, he’s surprised to find, while waiting for his house to be built, that a woman and writer by the name of Ève had long ago purchased the remaining portion of the island that he did not own, and, being “eager for solitude”, she too has made it her home. Ève’s been in a rut, having published one masterpiece—a novel titled The Future Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—before losing her job and retiring to Antioch, where she sleeps all day and is awake all night, trying to work.

What drives these two loners together, after months of avoiding each other’s company, is a sudden blackout. When all the lights and appliances in Alexander’s house turn off, and even the radio plays only an ominous whistling on every station, he goes to see Ève, suddenly overwhelmed by a solitude that now weighs more heavily on him than ever, and feeling “for the first time in twelve years, [that he] slightly regret[s] not living in a town or a village like an ordinary mortal.” Having previously thought of Ève only as a “silent, ghostly, almost nonexistent” presence, it is only after this incident—which turns out to be a full blackout of all communication systems—that Alexander and Ève are able to find themselves in one another’s company. READ MORE…

Leaving and Staying: Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure on Kinderland

December 21, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

I have the responsibility to go to the end with a good book.

Our penultimate Book Club selection for this year was Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland, an exquisitely lyrical narration of childhood amidst the instabilities of poverty, underlined by an unexpectedly penetrating look into economic migration in eastern Europe. Told in the mesmerizing voice of Cristina, whose mind slips flowingly from magic to sorrow, from urgency to tenderness, the novel traces the known and unknown forces that shape our lives, during that most delicate and mutable of times: youth. In the following interview, Corobca and translator Monica Cure discuss the political context of this work, as well as their exceptionally close and collaborative partnership.

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. 

Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): I wanted to ask about any autographical aspects of this novel. Liliana, are there moments here that were drawn from your own memory—or are there aspects of your experience that you wanted to include in Kinderland, but didn’t?

Liliana Corobca (LC): I’ve written nine novels, and none of them can be considered autobiographical. My first book translated into English, The Censor’s Notebook, was based on my research experience, which surrounds institutional censorship under communism. I had read about such a document (the notebook of a censor) in the archives, but I never found it, so I imagined it.

Therefore, there’s no single character with which I can identify and say: this is me. Cristina, the girl in Kinderland, is imaginary. Still, there are very special and concrete biographical elements—even if they verge more on the mystical. Kinderland is a novel about migration, a very common phenomenon in Romania and Moldova. I was born in a Moldovan village like the one in the book, and my parents were teachers who worked with children such as those in the book. They told me of many situations and stories which I used and adapted, and I also drew on my relationship with my own younger brother to write the relationship of the siblings.

Actually, I hesitated to write this novel because I have no children, and I was sure that if I wanted to write such a book, I would’ve needed to bring up children, to follow them, to observe them, and to study their reactions. But instead, I just imagined, drawing on my own experience. There are moments in the book that stem from my little village, which was by the biggest forest in Moldova; my father and I walked there a lot, and such memories are incorporated into the novel. Another source is related to the mystical experience of children. I was born in an atheist country where it was forbidden to have a Bible or to go to church, so I don’t have those more customary experiences of spirituality, but I think human beings are naturally mystical, so those scenes or passages of magic or mysticism in the book are my own. They are of my impulse. READ MORE…

The Best Gift This Holiday Season

December 16, 2023  |  in Book Club  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Who doesn’t love a year of adventurous reads—chosen from the latest in translation and delivered directly to their door?

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Share the gift of world literature today! 

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Kinderland by Liliana Corobca

November 29, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Michelle Chan Schmidt

Kinderland contains its call for kindness within concentric circles of humor, irony, and tragedy. . .

First published in 2013, Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland links modern Moldova to the metaphysics of magical thinking, bridging the chasm between socio-political reality and children’s play. The second novel to emerge from Corobca and Monica Cure’s writer-and-translator duo, Kinderland follows the acclaimed The Censor’s Notebook, which earned Cure the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; it colors in The Censor’s Notebook’s negatives of political repression, probing the social legacies proliferating in the long shadow of communism through the tangential prism of a young girl’s imagination.

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. 

Kinderland by Liliana Corobca, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure, Seven Stories, 2023

From the German, Kinderland: children’s land, land for children, the country of children, the children’s state. But also: winterland, wonderland, Alice, wanderland. Liliana Corobca’s original Romanian title for Kinderland refracts its light onto the novel’s substance, and Monica Cure’s English translation draws on an exquisite textual structure, sensitively conveying its narrator’s preternatural style of creative contemplation.

Beyond the third person opening sequence, no section of the novel is over six pages long; they follow the irreverently earnest voice of Cristina, a young girl caring for her two siblings in her parents’ absence, and is directly addressed to a shifting “you”. Throughout, page breaks are forfeited, constructing a visual configuration that reposes on Corobca’s and Cure’s craft as writers and sustaining an undialectical, seemingly uncontrolled style that recalls the meanderings—and moral certitude—of one’s own twelve-year-old introspections. These ruminations and recollections are a succession of light exposures, spanning the summer of Cristina’s thirteenth year, and each resembles a photograph, a vignette of latent action that flows into the memory or emotion at its blurred peripheries. Kinderland’s loose-limbedness articulates Cristina’s coming-of-age in limpid textuality, impressed on a textual emulsion milky with village childhood.

Kinderland’s omniscient “proemium” also preaches on speed, instructing the reader on how to plumb Cristina’s fragmented essence from the novel’s brevity: “Quickly, everything’s done quickly. Wash it quickly. . . if you wash the stain quickly, it comes out easily.” And Cristina, in particular, inhabits the same spiritual and wondrous landscape as Lady Macbeth (she and her brothers play in woods as otherworldly as Birnam Wood). From a cinematic, bird’s-eye view, Kinderland’s incipit glides the reader over the country of children. With her parents elsewhere, she looks after “two brothers, a dog, a cat, a pig, ten chickens, a scrappy rooster. . . the last thing I needed with this entire army was a bunch of goats.” She, Dan, and Marcel live in an atavistic, almost pre-technological village of wells and wool and walnuts, but beneath their daily corporeality flower a sensuous realm of fleawort, wounds, and witchcraft. READ MORE…

Casting the Spell: Damion Searls on Translating Jon Fosse’s A Shining

November 23, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

There is this very human, normal, everyday level, and at the same time there's this big, spiritual, complicated stuff.

Jon Fosse’s A Shining is both a luminous entryway for newcomers to the Norwegian author, and a fine distillation of Fosse’s long-running themes for familiar fans. We are proud to feature this latest English offering of the Nobel laureate as our October Book Club selection, and in this monthly interview with the translator, Damion Searls talks to Georgina Fooks about following rhythms, the translator as reader, and making his own rules. 

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.  

Georgina Fooks: To begin, congratulations on the Nobel Prize! I know the Swedish Academy likely would have been reading Fosse in Norwegian, but there’s no doubt that your translations of Fosse into English have been so important for the increased critical reception of his work.

Damion Searls: Thank you! Something that’s worth telling people who aren’t in the book business – I know Asymptote is well aware of this – is that for better or for worse (mainly for worse), English is the language that matters professionally for world literature. A German publisher told me a couple of years ago that if they have a book, they can get it translated into five or six languages, but it’s not until it gets a review in the Guardian UK or in the New Yorker that they can sell it to twenty or thirty languages—and they also told me that this is increasingly the case. English really is the gateway to bigger success for every other language; it’s not going to be a worldwide, translated-everywhere success unless it goes through English first.

The thing about Fosse—which Americans and English audiences don’t really know—is that he’s incredibly famous worldwide as a playwright. He is, from what I’ve read, the most produced playwright alive today. There have been productions of his plays in fifty languages all over the world, and it’s just never taken off in England or America. And there is a question asked about Fosse’s work: is it inaccessible? Well, if he’s the most produced playwright in the world, then by definition, it’s accessible. He was honoured with many prizes in Europe and in Norway before the English translations.

It’s not the case that the English publication raised him from obscurity, but it does seem to be a kind of stepping stone to things like the Nobel or to more translations. I know that now, Septology is being sold to dozens more languages than it had been before. READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: A Shining by Jon Fosse

October 30, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Fosse understands that this experience he recounts is beyond rational belief; it resists all efforts to restrain it into language.

The Nobel announcement this year came with particular delight to us at Asymptote, as it perfectly coincided with our Book Club partnership with Transit Books to bring you Jon Fosse’s latest offering in English, the surreal and contemplative A Shining. Written in the Norwegian author’s singular blend of contemplation and poetic prowess, the novella is a metaphysical tale of mystery given physicality, a masterful portrayal of what we’re wandering in—and what we’re wandering towards.

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. 

A Shining by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian, Transit, 2023

On October 5, 2023, the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the committee lauding ‘his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’. This preoccupation with the unsayable is ever present in Fosse’s work, and in A Shining, the latest title by the author to appear in Damion Searls’ translation, it takes the form of an entity, a shimmering outline of a being, appearing to the novella’s narrator in the forest. This spiritual encounter pulses at the bounds of language, at the threshold of the divine. Recounted in Fosse’s characteristic style—rhythmic, cyclical, flowing like a cascade—the slender volume offers an introduction to its author at the height of his powers.

Long before becoming a Nobel laureate, to speak of Fosse was (and perhaps still is) to speak in hushed and reverent tones. In a piece on the ‘incantatory power’ of Fosse’s work for The Atlantic, Damion Searls shares that, after encountering a German translation, he began learning Norwegian just so that he could translate the author’s Norwegian Nynorsk—in Fosse’s words a ‘rare language’, spoken in the west of the country by roughly a tenth of the population. In a similar note of awe, literary critic Merve Emre has described Fosse’s Septology, a seven-volume, three-tome masterwork written in one long sentence, as ‘the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine’. But for readers who may shy away from Septology’s many pages, A Shining is perhaps a welcome alternative, as a novella that reveals a glimpse of Fosse’s singular mystery—in condensed form. READ MORE…

Between Seeing and Listening: Dias Novita Wuri on Birth Canal

October 19, 2023  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

For me, it was important to talk about everyone's story and experience with the term “motherhood”.

 In Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri masterfully braids disparate storylines of women across various countries and time periods to track the shifting contexts of sexuality, femininity, family, and gender roles. What results is an alternative face of history, from the violence of wartime and colonialism to the contemporary dynamics of sex work and objectification. As our September Book Club selection, this subversive and unflinching text defies generalisation and presumption to consider the many ways a body can be used—and freed. In this interview, Novita Wuri speaks on how the women in her life inspired the novel, sexuality and politics in Indonesia, and the mental anguish that surrounded the writing and reading of this powerful text.

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. 

Thuy Dinh (TD): Could you explain the meaning behind the title Birth Canal?

Dias Novita Wuri (DNW): Birth Canal actually doesn’t have as much significance in English as it does in Indonesian—which you wrote about very well in your review. The term in Indonesian is jalan lahir; jalan means a road, or a way—something one has to go through, and lahir here means birth. You can see it doesn’t really translate very well to English, and my editor and I decided to go with “birth canal”. I wanted a short, impactful title because my first book’s title, Makramé, was very simple. Of course, the birth canal is part of the reproductive system, and I wanted to use a bodily word to symbolise the feminine struggle related to procreation. It’s hard not to talk about birth because it’s a woman’s “duty” to give birth, and I think this term nicely represents the stories of all the women in my story.

TD: Your book doesn’t seem to think there is a necessary connection between fertility and motherhood—as some characters in the book can’t have children but yearn to be mothers. Can you expound on this theme?

DNW: I wanted to talk about a lot of the women that I know in my life, some of which can’t have children, or struggle to have children but want to have children, and others who don’t want children at all. For me, it was important to talk about everyone’s story and experience with the term “motherhood”. I also knew people who got pregnant as teenagers outside of marriage, and that’s why I opened the book by talking about abortion, because abortion is illegal here in Indonesia. It’s very frowned upon—which doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.

Actually, when I open up to the women that I talk to in Indonesia—my friends and acquaintances—sometimes they would tell me that they have had abortions. It’s a shame that it’s illegal and not talked about, because it’s something that women need. It’s a basic healthcare right. To have such shame and stigma surrounding abortion can only be detrimental to women’s lives in Indonesia. Some of them might be mothers already, but they can’t handle another child or can’t afford another child. Yet, they can’t have an abortion. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

September 28, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion. . .

In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.

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. 

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023

Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.

Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.

The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:

Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.

READ MORE…