Book Club

Sculpting Words: An Interview with Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles and Paul Filev

August 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

In these conversations with characters, I build imaginary convictions.

In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ startling and tender work of speculative fiction, The Lisbon Syndrome, a comet has demolished the city of Lisbon to nothing, leaving people on the other side of the globe—in Caracas—to reconstitute the erupted world with only a strictly regulated stream of news, an overarching cloak of localized violence, and an unshakable faith in the potentials of storytelling. Translated expertly by Paul Filev, The Lisbon syndrome presents a powerful, telling perspective on the Venezuelan struggle against a repressive regime. In the following interview, Book Club manager Carol Khoury speaks to Sánchez Rugeles and Filev on the unique journey of this text, the learned method of its translation, and the courage and necessity of literature.  

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 USD15 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.

Carol Khoury (CK): Eduardo, how was the novel received when it came out in Spanish—in Venezuela and elsewhere?

Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (ESR): It’s strange—the novel wasn’t published in the usual way because the English translation came out before the Spanish edition. The Spanish edition will come out later this year, in October, with the independent publisher Suburbano.

I began writing the novel in 2019 and finished it in 2020, and I showed it to a few publishers here in Madrid. It was during the middle of the pandemic, things were really intense at the time, and they told me, “Well, we like the book, but we can’t publish it until 2025, or at the earliest in summer 2024 maybe. If we take it on, you’ll have to wait in line.”

And I was very impatient to have this book published, because the novel was very emotional for me, given that the events in the novel mirrored what was actually happening in Venezuela at the time. I can usually be more patient with my work, but I felt a little anxious to get this book out. A friend read the manuscript—a movie director—and he told me, “I want to turn this into a movie. What do you say—do you want to work on a script with me?”

And I said to him, “Yeah, we can write a script and turn it into a movie, but let me publish the novel first.” But with the pandemic going on, the whole process of getting the book published was very slow. I felt a little sad about having to wait so long to find a publisher, so I started talking with the director, Rodrigo Michelangeli, and one day I said to him, “You know what? I’ll self-publish the book with Amazon. Forget the traditional publishing route. Let’s make this happen.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles

July 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

[T]he past and present histories of Venezuela and Portugal intertwine in this moving story about art and human resilience.

In The Lisbon Syndrome, Venezuelan writer Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles movingly navigates the intricate conflux of tragedies both far away and close to home. Juxtapositioning the cities of Lisbon and Caracas as each is underlined by its own catastrophe, Rugeles positions a human perspective amidst events far beyond a single individual’s control, offering a glimpse at singular agency and narrative power behind greater systems of repression.

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 USD15 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 Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, translated from the Spanish by Paul Filev, Turtle Point Press, 2022

If a comet were to wipe away a major city, leading to the economic and political collapse of an entire continent, would it radically change how we live? It seems impossible to imagine a disaster of such proportions leaving us unaffected, but it depends on where you’re standing. After all, the apocalypse can take many forms; it’s not always as swift and ferocious as a comet. In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’s The Lisbon Syndrome, the eponymous catastrophe happens off-stage. The central locus of the story is Caracas, set in an alternative 2017 where the knowledge of Lisbon’s disappearance is scarcel the only wisps of information are those that manage to escape media and internet channels tightly controlled by the government. These crumbs, as well as a dark cloud enshrouding the sky over the Caribbean, are the only sure signs of a catastrophe big enough to arguably recalibrate how we think about human life and the universe. But if “discontent, hunger, and humiliation” is already part of the daily agenda in a world always at the brink of complete destruction, how can an apocalypse an ocean away be more pressing that that which is outside your door?

Nevertheless, the past and present histories of Venezuela and Portugal intertwine in this moving story about art and human resilience. The novel centers around Fernando, a high school teacher, and his benefactor Moreira, an elusive Portuguese immigrant. Alongside Moreira and his students’ involvement, Fernando has established a ramshackle theater company where—at the former’s explicit request—they perform only classics like Shakespeare and Brecht. The company sells tickets at a loss, and students, as they are disappeared one by one, replace each other in key roles. Fernando also brings his love for theater to the classroom, pushing his students to new, ever more daring heights—even when a particularly unorthodox take on Dante’s Divine Comedy (already dripping in political significance) lands them all in hot water with the government, setting the stage for future tragedies.

Both the preparation of performances and the theater space where they rehearse and dream (called La Sibila) come to be a sacred slice of space and time that anchors Fernando and his students against the rising tide of violence and repression sweeping Venezuela. As a literal war between the Venezuelan government and its citizens unfurls outside the walls of La Sibilia, inside the conversations are far more tender. Amid rehearsals, students drink and dream of becoming reggaeton superstars or classic ballerinas, but the discussion of dreams—a rehearsal in its own way—extends the students into a future so uncertain that Ferando feels guilty for even encouraging the possibility of such fantasies turning to reality. READ MORE…

“Vulnerable” Languages: An Interview with Jim Dingley and Petra Reid

July 20, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

The journey of working on this text has led me to look at the whole field of literary translation much more widely than I ever had before.

The translators of Alindarka’s Children, our May Book Club selection, had good reason to think of the text as an enormous challenge. Alherd Bacharevič’s subversive take on Hansel and Gretel is written in a musical tangle of two languages: Russian and Belarusian, addressing the conflict of Belarus’ languages in a powerful tale of intimidation, suppression, and  postcolonial linguistics. Now released in a brilliant medley of English and Scots, the Anglophone edition adds new dynamism to the politics and cultures at work, immersing the reader in the complexities of what language tells and what it holds back. In the following transcription of a live interview, translators Jim Dingley and Petra Reid discuss their process, the pitfalls of classifying a language as “vulnerable”, and the creative potentials of dissonance.

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 USD15 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. 

Daljinder Johal (DJ): What were your first impressions of Alindarka’s Children? And what did you consider when making your respective decisions to work on its translation? 

Jim Dingley (JD): Alindarka’s Children was published in 2014, I first read it in 2015, and my immediate reaction was: how on earth could anybody even begin to translate this? Then, when I was in Edinburgh with Petra, another Belarusian author began talking about this book with great enthusiasm. It suddenly occurred to me then that there is much being said about Scots being a language—distinct from English—and therefore a source of real national identity. With Scotland’s movement towards independence, it seemed to me that we could try to do something by contrasting English with Scots. I found working with Petra very rewarding as well, because she had an innate feeling for what we were trying to do, putting Scots up against “standard” English.

I think this adds a whole new dimension to the book, which is what any translator does when the process is not purely technical. You’re trying to get the sense of something. When you’re translating a book written in two languages, you can only get to the dynamic between them by introducing some realia from a country where another two languages are spoken. That’s why, in Alindarka’s Children, you feel as though you’re both in Scotland and Belarus at times.

Actually, I hope people experience some confusion with this book. It sounds very strange to say, but I think a lot of language is about dissimulation, confusion, leaving the reader to work it out at every stage.

Petra Reid (PR): Jim and I had very different experiences, because he speaks and writes Belarusian, while I have no knowledge of that language. So when I was reading the novel, I was reading Jim’s translation—that was the first time I’d heard of the novel or the author. In a way, I was reading it through Jim’s filter, and in that, it gained the context of a relationship between the English and the Belarusian.

I also came to it as a third party, as a Scot who doesn’t speak Scots—I was frank with everybody from the beginning, I warned them! I’ve got a strong accent, but I don’t speak Scots. The translation, and my work on it, is a personal explanation of my attitude towards Scots.

DJ: Could you expand on how that exploration went and what you got from it?

PR: What I like to do when I’m reading a translation is to try and imagine how the original sounds in my head, so even if you don’t have the exact vocabulary, you can approach the rhythm of it, and different nuances become available.

That’s what I found interesting about Jim’s translation; I was beginning to feel the Belarusian nuances through Jim. It was a two-way mirror, because Jim and I have our own dynamics in terms of how we speak English, and Jim has his own dynamic in terms of how he speaks Belarusian. It was a multidisciplinary, 3-D process, holding all these nuances in your head and trying to find a way to express that on the page. READ MORE…

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: Alindarka’s Children by Alherd Bacharevič

June 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Alindarka’s Children is a striking example of a writer’s role as witness and archivist. . .

A contemporary fable for the linguistic and cultural conflicts of post-Soviet Belarus, wherein the Belarusian language is at risk of being overwhelmed by the dominant Russian, Alherd Bakharevich’s Alindarka’s Children is a poignant and disturbing look into the myriad consequences of language suppression. Translated into both English and Scots, this multilingual novel is a vital testament to both the necessities and moral ambiguities of preservation, and a fascinating investigation of the intricate networks between expression and communication, adulthood and childhood, the public and the private. 

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 USD15 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. 

Alindarka’s Children by Alherd Bacharevič, translated from the Belarusian by Petra Reid and Jim Dingley, New Directions, 2022

Alindarka’s Children is Alherd Bakharevich’s clever reworking of a classic parable, using a simple Hansel and Gretel-like premise to grapple with real-life tensions between language and power in Belarus. Despite being written from the perspective of children, the novel plumbs deeply into the subtle darknesses and psychologies of Belarusian society. The novel begins with Alicia and her brother Avi, interned in a forested camp where children are trained to forget their language through a malefic system. The two are rescued by their proud and defiant father, but eventually slip away on an adventure of their own. As they explore the woods, encountering a series of memorable characters—interpreted from the original fairy tale and its confectionary-packet house—we are led to explore a world of anxiety and obsession, within which the duo must fend for themselves to survive.

Set in Belarus, the novel’s original Belarusian and Russian is brilliantly translated into both Scots and English, with colloquial Belarusian rendered into the former, and the main body of the book written in the latter. The dominant state-approved language, of which the camp is desperately trying to instill, is ‘the Lingo’—one can presume that it stands for Russian. ‘The Leid,’ or the Belarusian language, is left to slowly slip from collective memory, with Father attempting to impede its eradication by secretly speaking it to Alicia—or really ‘Sia.’ As a result, she remains silent at school, having been taught at home that the Lingo, too, is a forbidden language. READ MORE…

Finding Salvation: An Interview with Najwa Barakat

June 27, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Reem Joudi

I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence, long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses.

In turns spellbinding and labyrinthine, psychological and philosophical, tragic and bright, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N marks the triumphant return of the Lebanese author to writing. Through the story of an aging author who wanders the streets in shifting boundaries and realms, Barakat paints a painful, fearless portrait of contemporary Beirut. We were honored to present this powerful novel as our Book Club selection for May, and in the following interview, Reem Joudi speaks with Barakat about her fifteen-year hiatus, the ghosts and pariahs of Lebanon, and the “beautiful dream” of Beirut.

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 USD15 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.

Reem Joudi (RJ): You wrote Mister N following a fifteen-year break from writing. Could you describe your journey back, and why you chose to return with the story of Mister N?

Najwa Barakat (NB): I cannot say that I was completely cut off from writing during these fifteen years, but my literary activity was suspended for a short while of my own volition—and not because I was struggling with writer’s block. I had reached a certain juncture in my narrative journey and in my writings, which had materialized in the publication of three novels (The Bus, Oh Salaam!, and The Secret Language). These works addressed themes of violence, cruelty, and the ordinary human being’s capacity to commit evil in specific moments or contexts. I wanted to take a “break” to think about my next steps, what the title of my forthcoming literary chapter should be, as well as to focus on my permanent writing workshop, which is dedicated to helping young Arab writers develop their storytelling projects. Thanks to the workshop, twenty-three novels have been published thus far by renowned Arab publishing houses, and some of these works have received distinguished literary awards.

To tell you the truth, I felt an aversion to what was being published, consumed, and promoted as literary works of a high caliber—works which, in reality, are lacking the minimum standards for quality writing. Add to that the horrific changes that my home country, Lebanon, was experiencing, as well as the many wars, tragedies, and revolutions that countries of the Arab region were facing, all of it produced and propagated a dreadful cosmic chaos. Together, these factors presented silence as the best option during turbulent times: choosing silence, observing [what is around me], and attempting to find the meaning and purpose of literature amid all this destruction. Mister N encapsulates this experience in all its dimensions. It describes the labor of writing and the difficulty of belonging to a reality that resembles quicksand, capable of swallowing you whole at any moment. The novel also mends my relationship with Beirut, a city I returned to in 2010 following a long absence in Paris. Since then, I’ve witnessed the transformations and defeats that foreshadowed the city’s current state of collapse and decay.

RJ: There are many ghosts that haunt Mister N’s memory—Luqman, the former warlord and protagonist from one of your earlier novels Oh Salaam!; his mother and father. . . What do these multiple, multifaceted ghosts signify, and which of them do you think has the strongest pull on Mister N’s mind and spirit?

NB: Mister N is a writer with a heavy past and a troubled present. He is battling the ghosts of his childhood and the ghosts of his current tragic reality, where parts of Beirut—namely the neighborhoods he stumbles upon and begins exploring by chance—have transformed into the gutters of society. Luqman’s ghost, as you mentioned, is a person who committed atrocities during the Lebanese civil war; Oh Salaam! takes places in Beirut, in the wake of the war and at the beginning of the so-called transition to peace, and Luqman is killed by his friend’s mother after she discovers the horrors that both men committed against innocent lives. The same Luqman will reappear twenty years after the events of Oh Salaam!, very much alive and running an Internet cafe in one of Beirut’s working-class neighborhoods. A manhunt thereby ensues between him and Mister N, who, while he fears Luqman and seeks to escape him, is also drawn to him by a mysterious and obscure thread.

All this is to say that the people who committed the horrors of war are not dead, but living peacefully among us, a situation that Mister N—a writer who treads the thin line separating reality from fiction and truth from illusion—can neither tolerate nor comprehend. For Mister N, reality turned out to be more tragic than he could have ever imagined—harsher, darker, and more cruel. What could literature do in circumstances such as these, and where does a writer, worn down and defeated by reality, find their salvation? In fact, Mister N’s suffering captures my own struggle vis-à-vis all that was unfolding around me. I was among the first authors to tackle the theme of cruelty and violence [in my novels], long before the Arab world witnessed its various collapses. I intuited them, so to speak, then was terrified to face a reality which shook me to the core—one that heralded even harsher, darker, and more violent truths.  READ MORE…

A Descriptive Novel of Mysteries: Luke Leafgren on Translating Najwa Barakat’s Mister N

June 23, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

It’s less about changing or influencing the English language, and more about what can be said in language at all.

In silhouettes, clouds, mist, and partially veiled names, this novel by Najwa Barakat speaks of the underbelly of Beirut through a cloud-shrouded figure dwelled by demons of his own writings. As our Book Club selection for May, Mister N is a story of what writing can and cannot do to us, how it resonates through individuals and communities, moving through borders both physical and psychological.

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 USD15 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.

Carol Khoury (CK): Since 2014, you have translated six ‎Arabic novels into English, three of which are by Muhsin al-Ramli, and two by Najwa ‎Barakat (the sixth by Shahad al-Rawi). Barakat is Lebanese, while al-Ramli and al-Rawi ‎are Iraqi. One obvious theme between these writers is their coming of age during various wartimes, and furthermore, all of the novels are to an extent shadowed ‎by, if not immersed in, themes relating to war.‎ How do you choose the novels you want to translate?‎

Luke Leafgren (LL): The first few novels that I translated were all very random—things that came my way. I started translating when I was about thirty, about twelve years ago; I was finishing my dissertation, and I needed something more enjoyable to do—some kind of creative outlet. When I expressed an interest in translation, one of my Arabic teachers at Harvard, Khaled al-Masri said, said: “I’ve got a friend, Muhsin al-Ramli, looking for a translator for his second book. If you like it, I can introduce you.” I read it, and, you know, I could hear how it might sound in English, and I felt like I related in some ways to the protagonist. That was how I translated my first novel. After that, Khaled introduced me to Najwa.

It’s only been after receiving The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize that I’ve been able to think more about projects that I would choose and which directions to go. Thinking about novels that I would choose, I feel a certain loyalty to authors I’ve translated already; I feel gratitude to them, and I believe in them, so I could imagine translating more novels by writers I have worked with in the past.

CK: Was Najwa Barakat involved directly in the process of translating this book?

LL: We have an email connection, so she was ‘involved’ in the sense that I could send her questions. As I translate, I make a very quick rough draft, highlighting in the Arabic text passages or words that I want to come back and focus on. Then I make lists of queries, and those lists I often prioritise, because I can’t ask everything; I’ll send them my top questions, and then that might resolve some other questions, then if necessary, I’ll come back with maybe another set. Najwa was very encouraging and supportive, but I think she had a certain amount of trust in my translation as well.

CK: Your BA degree is in English and theology, and in Mister N., Barakat employs several religious symbols, mainly from Christianity, but also Islam. What is your take on the numerous biblical connections in the text—Lazarus, in particular? It seems to me that the real function of this tale within Mister N. is not the awakening after death (resurrection), but rather Lazarus’ disapproval of it.  

LL: For my whole life I’ve been taken by the power of stories, and I think one aspect I especially appreciated was the way literature and religion interact—how religious ideas can shape literature or how texts can be used to communicate questions or beliefs. And that attracts me to this novel as well. I was very interested in the figure of Lazarus and how that figure is being used, and I think you’re right—it’s not so much about the resurrection. It’s asking a question I hadn’t come across in other contexts: of whether or not Lazarus really wanted it, of his impression after being called back to this world, his reactions and accounts. Mister N somehow sees this tale as a symbol, a representation of himself. The dirt in Lazarus’ mouth is being compared to the way words are getting tangled in Mister N.’s mouth, as a symbol for madness or writer’s block. The utility of that religious imagery is an excellent example of how a writer can tap into biblical narrative power and drama, while also kind of subverting it and challenging it. It’s a very effective technique. READ MORE…

Today Only: Take Part in our Book Club Giveaway Contest!

June 15, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Our giveaway ends 7pm EST, today, so seize the day!

This month, we’ve teamed up with our friends at And Other Stories and are pleased to host a giveaway of our Book Club’s May 2022 title, Mister N. by Najwa Barakat, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren.

Mister N. takes place in modern-day Beirut, where Mister N. has checked himself into a hotel to get his writing–and his thoughts–in order.

To enter:

  • Follow the Instagram Pages of Asymptote Book Club and And Other Stories
  • Like this post
  • Tag 2 bookish friends in the comments
  • Share this post in your stories (don’t forget to tag us!)
  • Competition closes at 7pm EST on 15th June 2022. Entrants must be based in the USA. Winners will be selected at random and announced the next day. Must be 18 years old or have parents’ permission to enter. The giveaway is not affiliated with Instagram.

Good luck to everyone who enters!

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: Mister N by Najwa Barakat

May 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

A poetic and intricate labyrinth of a book that subtly explores trauma, mental illness, language, and the art of writing.

Dissipating the border between fiction and reality, Najwa Barakat’s Mister N is as much a traversal through the cartography of Beirut as it is one wandering the avenues of the mind. We are proud to present this the Lebanese author’s most recent release as our Book Club selection for the month of May, a singular and genre-defying look into where histories, memories, narratives, and psychologies coincide.

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 USD15 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.

Mister N by Najwa Barakat, translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren, And Other Stories, 2022

Najwa Barakat’s Mister N, translated by Luke Leafgren, is a poetic and intricate labyrinth of a book that subtly explores trauma, mental illness, language, and the art of writing. Traveling through the streets and modern history of Beirut, Barakat’s psychological metafiction still manages to maintain a tone both light and entertaining, enthralling the reader in its twists and turns and propelling them through its pages.

As the novel opens, our protagonist, the titular Mr. N, is writing a story about Lazarus, who has just been awoken from death. As the book progresses, however, we discover that the main narrative being written by Mr. N actually concerns his attempts to resurrect his authorial self by unpicking and then piecing together fragments of his memories, following a period of writer’s block that has lasted fifteen years. The novel regularly shifts in time, mood, and even self-referentially in its narrative point of view, but it quickly becomes clear that everything we are shown is through Mr. N’s very subjective lens. As his behaviour becomes more erratic, the reader must decide how much what he writes can be trusted and whether they should suspend their disbelief to the point where it would be possible for a character from one of his novels to appear in flesh and blood.

Much of the power and pleasure in Mister N is in its meditations on language and the act of writing, as well as the poetry within its pages. The novel is full of rich metaphor and simile, and Najwa Barakat’s study of cinema is evident in the detailed and evocative scenes she paints: the garden beneath his hotel window with its “three beautiful sisters clothed in green leaves”, which later, in the cover of pitch black night, becomes the stage for a macabre performance by his neighbours; the dirty and overcrowded streets of the refugee and migrant-filled districts where Mr. N “navigated high, dilapidated buildings, haphazardly placed, pushing against one another, tottering together, like man-made cumulus clouds locked in combat as they floated along with scents of decay from the slaughterhouses and the mountains of trash”. The potent combination of Mr. N’s poetic imagination and his illness allows the narration to glide seamlessly from the serious to the slight in the span of a sentence and then back again, reflecting a state of trauma in which the relative significance of things can be inverted, and a numbness to death and loss that can put the trivial on equal footing with the terrible. Midway through witnessing his neighbour’s suicide, for example, he becomes distracted by a mosquito and begins meditating on the best ways to get rid of it. On the one hand, such shifts and tangents contribute to the novel’s grim humour; on the other, as the novel progresses, and Mr. N grows less confident in his fiction of a comfortable hotel life and increasingly paranoid and delusional, they also reflect his inability to piece together a coherent narrative that might reveal the supposed truth of his life’s history. As he explains to one of his psychologists, “the malady lies in my fatal recalling of every detail and my brain’s refusal to take in the full picture. So here I am, not grasping realities except through successive glimpses of the horizon, momentary flashes that reveal disparate, disjointed things, before putting them back together again.”

READ MORE…

Everything is Permitted in Dreams: Corinne Hoex and Caitlin O’Neil on Gentlemen Callers

May 26, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

This book is more about feminine desire than erotic consummation, so it’s not pornographic at all.

Diving without abandon into the realms of sexual fantasy and desire, Corinne Hoex’s Gentlemen Callers is a series of vignettes that follows the erotic as it traverses into the pleasurable, the humorous, and the absurd. As our Book Club selection for the month of April, Laurel Taylor described Hoex’s text as “a truly astonishing outlier.” In the following interview, Taylor speaks to Hoex and her translator, Caitlin O’Neil, about the multi-layered operations of the epigraph, the difficult of translating wordplay and idioms, and writing with joy.

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 USD15 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.

Laurel Taylor (LT): The construction of Gentlemen Callers was really interesting—can you tell us a little bit about what your inspiration was for the novel?

Corinne Hoex (CH): Each time, it’s the situation—of the dreaming woman—that drives the inspiration. It always begins with the concrete, and from there on it’s a mixture of fantasy and reality; something comes from reality and introduces a rupture, an entry into dreams. Whenever the vignette was too realistic, or didn’t abandon reality through some kind of glitch or unexpected detour, I didn’t keep it.

There were texts with characters who were much too banal—a pizza delivery man, a doctor. . . There wasn’t that sparkle, that possible transformation, so I didn’t continue with those dreams. So even more than inspiration, it was an exercise in the material, in the writing process.

But a lot of the dreams, of course, correspond to anecdotes from my own life. For “The Astrologer,” for example, I had taken some astrology classes, and all of it—the books, the Ephemeris, all of those calculations—I found horrid, boring. I imagined this situation where she [the dreaming woman] is seated across from an astrologer, and this astrologer is trying to seduce her, but he’s tactless, he’s insufferable. He says: “My Mars is on your Venus,” and all that, but he isn’t pleasing her, so she waits and tries to find a way to escape. There have often been times in my life—at school, at conferences—when I would like to escape; in this fantasy, since we’re dealing with the stars, the comet comes in through the window and takes the woman away. It’s not the man who seduces the dreaming woman, but the comet.

Similarly, when the narrator’s with the geographer and he bores her, she sees a beautiful polar bear that’s much more pleasing to her. There are sometimes elements which are not human; everything is permitted in dreams. 

LT: Caitlin, how did you first encounter this text? And what made you want to translate it?

Caitlin O’Neil (CO): This is my debut book-length translation, so it was very much my own choice of what text to pursue. When I started, I got some very good advice, which was: for your first translation, make sure that it is a work that you love wholeheartedly. Because you’re going to be working more closely with this text than you have ever worked with any text before in your life, and you are going to work very hard for this text as well. There may be rejections, and you need to love this text so much that you are willing to work through all the rejections that come your way. When I first started, I was coming from an academic background, so this was really a chance for me to dive deep into the world of Francophone literature, and hunt down a book that wasn’t known in the US yet. READ MORE…

Announcing Our April Book Club Selection: Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex

April 28, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Hoex’s playful romp through the transformative powers of female sensuality . . . toes the line of taste and teases the reader.

In the world of letters, sex is too often strangled with extremes. Whether entrenched in symbolism, proliferate with diverse politics, or avoided altogether, this pervasive element of human experience is too often deprived of its more irreverent, mirthful, and pleasurable evocations. In our Book Club selection for April, award-winning Belgian writer Corinne Hoex presents a series of sexual dreams and fantasies in Gentlemen Callers, a collection that astounds, subverts, and engages with physical pleasure in joy, levity, and dreaminess. Unabashedly funny and fiercely sensual, Hoex’s journey through the erotic is a breathless delight.  

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 USD15 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.

Gentlemen Callers by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, Dalkey Archive Press, 2022

Literature has—particularly in the last century or so—become a Serious Business. I’m not speaking here of economics or occupations, but rather the affect of seriousness. Very often, the more tragical, gritty, and dark a tale is, the more lauded its reception becomes. For whatever reason, we have decided that comedy is not as worthy of critical attention or canonization, in spite of the fact that, in my estimation at least, comedy is infinitely harder to pull off. Humor is culturally specific, temporally tied, and situationally contextual, and all of these facets are amplified in the context of translation, where puns and plays become tangled in tongues. This is what makes Gentlemen Callers, by Corinne Hoex, translated from the French by Caitlin O’Neil, a truly astonishing outlier. While French literature enjoys a fairly prolific publication rate in English, the kinds of literature chosen for publication are often cerebral, philosophical, and introspective. Hoex’s series of vignettes, too, are interiorized, in that they are dreamworlds, but they are also fleshy, sensuous, and gilded with a teasing tone firmly rooted (pun intended) in sexual exploration and fulfillment.

Gentlemen Callers is somewhere between a novel and a short story collection; a first-person narrator delivers each brief tale, and her power to call men (and other more fantastical lovers) into her dreams perennially returns, but nearly every chapter is self-contained, and the narrator shapeshifts as she sees fit, all the better to become the tool with which her lovers might exercise their expertise. Each vignette is titled after an occupation, some of which happily gesture to the realm of tried and true pornographic tropes (like The Mailman or The Schoolteacher) while others are more oblique: The Butcher, The Furrier, The Beekeeper. Following each chapter title comes an epigraph, all taken from some of Europe’s most famous canonical authors: Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Émile Zola. As one might expect, all the referenced authors are men, and all the epigraphs gesture to the occupation under examination, albeit some more obliquely than others. The narratorial play here is not only to reference the heights of physical joy one can achieve with a skilled workman, but also to reference the heights of intellectual joy one can achieve when toying with the phantom canon, with the master’s ghost.

Take, for example, the epigraph from “The Young Priest 2,” one of only three vignette continuations in the book. It’s from Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, perhaps one of the most widely read Christian works after the Bible itself. The quote: “How pleasant and sweet to behold brethren fervent and devout, well-mannered and disciplined!” This earnest, chaste sentiment takes on a new and sensually playful valence when paired with the priest’s vignettes, in which a handsome man of the cloth visits the narrator in her dreams and delivers an intercession upon which, “the Holy Spirit enters me. God clasps me in His arms, possesses me with His mouth, radiates His light by waking the wild urges of his servant’s potent sap.” No doubt Kemis himself, who in his teachings stressed silence, solitude, resisting temptation, and purging fleshly pleasures, would be outraged at the implication that actions “fervent and devout” might be found in the narrator’s oblique allusion to fellatio, “kneel[ing] on [her] white cloud, back arched, face upturned, lips parted, surrendering [her] flesh to the Redeemer.” READ MORE…

Listening to Syntax: Eugene Ostashevsky on Lucky Breaks

April 20, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

[Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian

Reviewing Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks, Shawn Hoo writes, “The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon.” Still, as one reads Belorusets’s text of stories from the fringes of wartime, the role of writing within conflict—even if varied and not always discernible—emerges as vital, urgent. Our Book Club selection for the month of March, Lucky Breaks provides a doorway by which the voices and images of Ukrainian women, and their ordinary lives, emerge and connect in unexpected, miraculous ways. In the following interview with Eugene Ostashevsky, whose expert and precise translation of Lucky Breaks has given this title a formidable presence in English, Hoo and Ostashevky discuss the rejections of typical narratives, transitions of impossible grammars, and translating as a pursuit of poetics.

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 USD15 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.

Shawn Hoo (SH): You have translated mostly Russian avant-garde and absurdist poetry. Were the things that drew you to these poets the same things that drew you to Yevgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks?

Eugene Ostashevsky (EO): I translate as a poet, if that makes sense, which means that translation is vital to my poetic work (which foregrounds translation, which problematises translation) but, more importantly, that my poetics help me make translation choices. I started translating the OBERIU, the so-called absurdists, an avant-garde group in the ’20s and an underground group in the 1930s. The way their work formed me as a reader and a poet, even before I started translating, was their absurdisation of language: the way they took classical poetics and projected avant-garde poetics on them, breaking up classical poetics to build these very beautiful linguistic structures which questioned rather than affirmed language. They questioned rather than affirmed reference or the veracity of statements, and greatly relativised linguistic truth. So here’s the important point: I think maybe what drew me to them was the fact that I’m an immigrant. It was the fact that—I don’t want to say I don’t write in my native language, but—I don’t write in my native language, technically speaking.

With Belorusets, you read Lucky Breaks and there is a lot of Daniil Kharms, member of OBERIU, for the reason that Kharms really reflects on and deconstructs narrative. When Belorusets takes her stories about war and cuts out authorial omniscience, writing about the fog of war, and about interacting with people whom you don’t know much about, she describes these people in this kind of glancing way, often slipping into these Kharmsian rejections of classical narrative.

The second thing is that, like virtually all Ukrainians, she is bilingual. But she writes in Russian because that’s what they speak in her family. Now the Russian language is associated with the Russian state, but there basically used to be, in the twentieth century, two forms of Russian: an émigré Russian and a Soviet Russian. After the Soviet Union collapsed and the émigrés started publishing in Russia—because that’s where the readers were—it turned out that the compromise, the attaching of the language to the political unit of the Russian Federation (even though nobody did it consciously) turned out to be very harmful for the language. [Belorusets] writes in this beautiful, off-kilter, very non-state, non-Russian Russian which has (it sounds like I’m talking about wine) tinges of Austro-Hungarian syntax. Also, she is trained as a translator from German, so that’s also there; beyond that Central Europeanness of her Russian, there is Gogol. You feel that in the ironies, in the way the words and the clauses are not lined up one after another but rub up against each other, the way they are defamiliarised. I just love that.

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Announcing Our March Book Club Selection: Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets

March 31, 2022  |  in Book Club  |  by Shawn Hoo

Belorusets is the peerless documentarian of her times, a meticulous stitcher of the incongruities that beset contemporary Ukrainian life.

As war cruelly rages on in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one searches for elucidation amidst madness from the country’s writers. As pivotal statements of witness, hope, persistence, and humanity, such texts will undoubtedly go down in history as bright sparks of intelligence and endurance in the dark obfuscations of violence. In Lucky Breaks, Yevgenia Belorusets’s stunning documentation of daily life in eastern Ukraine, the author expertly renders stories of women struggling to reconcile their existence with the broken infrastructure of their country, weaving oratory and textuality with an expert balance of surrealism and sobriety. Testifying simultaneously to Ukraine’s tumultuous history and its uncertain present, Belorusets’s timely work speaks, necessarily, to what survival means, as it is happening.

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 USD15 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. 

Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky, New Directions, 2022

More than a month now since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the crisis for Ukrainians continues to have no end in sight. For those of us spectating from afar, the internet has burst into a deluge of breaking news: images of aerial attacks, fleeing citizens, and pulverised buildings circulate and refresh, drawing us into the eye of the conflict. As for the heart, how much of this goes into cultivating real empathy and solidarity, and how much into encouraging a lethargy towards the bits of violence we witness daily through the screen? Literature and translation have risen up almost instinctively to defy this impersonal onslaught: from readings organised by The Guardian to Odessa-born poet Ilya Kaminsky’s advocacy of Ukrainian poetry. Asymptote, too, has launched a new column in support of Ukraine, and as Translation Tuesdays editor, I published Oksana Rosenblum’s translation of Yevhen Pluzhnyk’s “Galileo,” which, while published a week before the invasion, eerily voiced the fate of small states: “I am quiet as grass, even quieter still,/ I am so easily unnoticed.”

The question of what photographs and literature can do in war, I suspect, will not be resolved anytime soon. Amidst this media torrent, however, the daily war diary of Ukrainian photographer and writer Yevgenia Belorusets stands apart for her ability to document the war in both its pedestrian and surreal registers. On the third day, for example, Belorusets writes about meeting a woman in the park who, while carrying two huge shopping bags, admits happily to her: “When there are two of us, I’m less afraid of the artillery.” Two weeks later, she hears two students speak outdoors about what it means to teach as air raid alarms sound. Occasionally, she includes photographs: friends walking their dogs after curfew; a woman holding two bouquets of flowers. Often, the moments she records are ordinary, allowing the mingling of fragile, contradictory truths—that of people living in a simultaneously exceptional and quotidian time and place. Receiving these daily dispatches in my inbox, they come across as disciplined, tender, and urgent.

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Towards Empathy: Meg Matich on Translating Auður Jónsdóttir’s Quake

March 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Barbara Halla

It's important to try to read without an agenda.

Auður Jónsdóttir’s critically acclaimed Quake is a novel of a woman in fragments. Recovering from an amnesia-inducing seizure, Saga is made to walk through her life based on hints, illusions, and the capricious words of others. Translated into a haunting, lyrical English by Meg Matich, Quake traverses and trespasses across the demarcations of a single life to mark the entrancing dialogues between the self and other, fact and fiction, and a woman and her selves. In the following interview, Barbara Halla speaks to Matich about the trauma within the text, Icelandic women writers, and the interrogations of motherhood.

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 USD15 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.   

Barbara Halla (BH): Before we do a deep dive on the actual themes of the book and the story, I like to get a sense of how translators work and how they find their projects. How did you get interested in Iceland, in Icelandic, and how did you come across the book? And perhaps, why did you choose to translate it?

Meg Matich (MM): I had gotten a fellowship from Columbia to go to Slovakia for a tandem translation and along the way, I had to stop off in Berlin to visit a German poet I had been translating for class. The classmates suggested to me I do a layover in Iceland; flights were inexpensive, the hotels were relatively inexpensive. This was 2012, I believe.

I felt this very strong and immediate pull, especially because I was surrounded by ocean and a cold coast, both things that I like. I found out about Icelandic grammar just by asking about it in bookshops and it fascinated me—I like complex grammars as well. And I like strange things. Icelandic, I still think it sounds like cicadas, so I became very attached to it immediately. And soon I found my voice in someone else’s, which is something I hadn’t felt before— translation had always been a very sort of practical exercise to me, or a way to think about language. And it certainly caused me to write poetry differently than I had previously.

I came across Quake by invitation. Jennifer Baumgardner of Dottir Press had done some research on me, and we just started a relationship from there. I found Auður strange and chaotic and fascinating. And she is spellbinding when she talks. You don’t want to do anything else but listen to her. I guess that’s kind of what happened to the book. I was more engaged with her as a person than with the text at first, but that’s how I understood why it was meandering, and tangential.

BH: You also recently translated Magma by Þóra Hjörleifsdóttir and I find it a fascinating text to compare Quake to. In the English-speaking market, there’s been a push to hear more stories from women; do you find that something similar is happening in Iceland? What would you say the place that women’s writing takes in Icelandic literature?

MM: I can’t make general sweeping statements—that it has always been one way or another. In Icelandic sagas, and they’re always troublemakers, seekers, they cause misfortune. But in recent history, I would say yes, there has been a continued trend that more women’s stories are being told. And I want to pin this to one author: a woman called Ásta Sigurðardóttir. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Quake by Auður Jónsdóttir

February 28, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

Jónsdóttir presents a compelling theory about selfhood that has a post-humanist flair.

In Auður Jónsdóttir’s award-winning Quake, there is no such thing as absolute clarity. Depicting the aftermath of memory loss, this novel of mystery and recovery is a subversion of certainties, a blurring of the demarcations between fact and fiction, self and other, past and present. By blowing the pieces of identity apart, Jónsdóttir is asking the ever-pervasive and urgent questions: where does one start, where does one end, and what happens amidst it all, in the in-between?

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 USD15 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.   

Quake by Auður Jónsdóttir, translated from the Icelandic by Meg Matich, Dottir Press, 2022

“Let me be frank . . . There’s something to be gained from having another person look at your life.” So goes the advice that Saga, the narrator of Auður Jónsdóttir’s Quake, receives from her older sister Jóhanna as the former contemplates the reasons behind her divorce. But are other people—and the narratives they create about you—always reliable? Are they always useful? And what if, faced with the prospect of rebuilding your identity, all you had to go on was what other people remember, or think they know about you?

Saga, a thirty-something divorced woman and mother to a three-year-old boy, is attempting to piece together her life story following a set of violent seizures. The condition has left her mind fractured, and though the gaps newly carved into her memory are few, they make it hard for her to establish a cohesive narrative about her life and her sense of self. “I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’m an alien who woke up on the kitchen floor of my family’s house one day and convinced them I was one of them,” Saga says, attempting to position herself within her seemingly normal nuclear family. Such themes of alienation and identity are at the core of Quake, which tackles these questions with scalpel precision but also a sense of tenderness, singing through Meg Matich’s translation.

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