Posts by Chinmay Rastogi

Hope and Money Unites Us All: On The Hand That Feeds You by Mercedes Rosende

February 9, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Chinmay Rastogi

. . .the visceral, gripping event only serves as backdrop—like the mentions of unusual weather—never bursting to take centre stage.

The Hand That Feeds You by Mercedes Rosende, translated from the Uruguayan Spanish by Tim Gutteridge, Bitter Lemon Press, 2023 

The Hand That Feeds You is Uruguayan author Mercedes Rosende’s sequel to Crocodile Tears, the thriller that won her the prestigious German literary award LiBeraturpreis in 2019, and it continues the author’s track record of bringing powerful, darkly comic crime novels to her readers. The duo of Rosende and translator Tim Gutteridge work together to fill these pages with characters both strong and deeply flawed—none more so than the protagonist Ursula López—living in the Old Town of Montevideo which, similar to its inhabitants, hides more than it shows. 

The high octane beginning nails the reader into their seat in Rosende’s theatre; the narrative feels cinematic throughout, with the author always adept in choosing what to spotlight, what to lampshade, when to pan out, and when to zoom in. The narrator is all-knowing, telling us what is happening and what will happen in the same sentence, but also proves adept at knowing when to let the characters speak for themselves for the benefit of the reader—a mark of Rosende’s command over her prose’s flow. There are many places where the focus shifts from the action to the characters, integral in showing the individual states of mind: 

We see her face in close-up: she is flushed, and perspiration is starting to accumulate around her open, smiling mouth. She is lightly made up, just enough to accentuate her beauty. She has taken great care over her clothes, loose black garments that suit her, even if many people, slaves to ideals of beauty imposed by some mysterious criterion, would say she is a few pounds overweight.

The people of The Hand That Feeds You are involved in a bank heist gone wrong, and by writing such vivid personal presences, Rosende allows readers time to catch breath between tense moments, all playing out amidst the backdrop of commentary on society and life in Montevideo—the author’s own hometown. In the crime’s aftermath, the robbers, the cop, and the lawyer who is behind the whole thing become engaged in a game of cat and mouse with Ursula—who drops in at an opportune moment to make away with the money.

The language does not try to override the plot in importance and impact (there isn’t much need for ornate style in a page-turner that has one holding one’s sides and breath in equal measure) but it has peculiarities that again, draw the eye to certain elements that Rosende and Gutteridge want us to focus on. For instance, there is something off about most of the characters that populate the novel. Ursula’s companion Diego, always at the mercy of the people around him and his own fears, “opens his eyes like a ventriloquist’s dummy”; his lawyer, Antinucci, has an unnatural smile and eyes like hard-boiled eggs. Our protagonist Ursula has schizophrenic conversations with her dead father. All these elements lend their characters something unnatural, broken. A touch of the preternatural also hangs over them, be it a haunting, a religion, or a reversion to superstition and a desperation for signs to aid decision-making in moments of stress.  READ MORE…

Words Like Gunpowder: An Interview with Najwa Bin Shatwan

November 21, 2022  |  in Interviews  |  by Chinmay Rastogi

What you consider unreasonable, logically fallic, or absurd is our ordinary reality. . .

Najwa Bin Shatwan is a Libyan academic and novelist—or so you will find written across the pages of many journals’ and publishers’ websites, alongside her stories in Arabic and their English translations. But she is so much more, as anyone who has had the pleasure of reading her works can attest to. Born in a land continually reeling with political unrest, she has been denied the privilege of free learning—such as of foreign languages—and suppressed and prosecuted for shedding light on the suffering of people past and present. Still, she weaves magic with words, painting vivid scenes with surreal imagery, and draws you into dialogue and contemplation by first making you smile. 

The imagery used in her pieces is enchanting, which is perhaps not a surprise given how images drive her. Her novel The Slave Yards, which made her the first Libyan writer to be shortlisted for the International Award for Arab Fiction, was catalyzed from an incident wherein she saw a photograph of Benghazi at a friend’s place; the photograph compelled her to show the reality and horrors of the slave trade in Libya. While there have been attempts to shut her down—which have succeeded in making her emigrate to Italy—her oppressors have failed to silence a voice that incorporates the many people, dialects, values, and thoughts she embodies. 

Her latest publication, Catalogue of a Private Life, is a collection of short stories translated form Arabic by Sawad Hussain, and it is a tapestry that incorporates many dualities of a people and their identity: their quirks and rigidity, their ready acceptance of bizarre circumstances and tunnel vision in regular circumstances, their warm humour and the dread of their situations. It won the 2019 English PEN Translates award, and I had the pleasure to talk to her about her life as well as the stories in this collection.

Chinmay Rastogi (CR): Your work has been a guiding light towards the suffering of people in Libya, but it also unveils the atrocities conducted by people of the region in the past, as in The Slave Yards. How difficult is it to stand on middle ground, to give both accounts through your writing?

Najwa Bin Shatwan (NBS): Writing in culturally thorny areas such as the Arab region is not easy, especially if the writer dismantles topics of social or political sensitivity—whether from the past or the present. It is easy for a book’s subject to incite conflict or escalate into a declaration of hostility. Our writing, which focuses on real matters, creates enemies, and such antagonism does not stop at a point of view that differs from what the writer’s. Rather, it may escalate into bloodshed or physical assault, simply because the writer presents a proposal that is different from the society’s vision, and is not in line with the prevailing ideology.

I felt the ferocity of this difference in my writing in terms of its social and political orientation, and with the spread of freedom of expression—which reached a chaotic peak with the emergence of social media—it became possible for those who disagree with a writer to inflame or incite public opinion against them.

Words are like gunpowder—they can ignite at any moment, and the type of writing that touches open wounds is not welcome; people prefer to proceed with their lives in denial, and believe that adopting a false mental attitude regarding many issues is better than getting into trouble.

As a writer, I work honestly and impartially, without complacency, and I feel the danger to my life, to my chances and fortunes in general. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2022

November 14, 2022  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Chinmay Rastogi, Laurel Taylor, and Samantha Siefert

New work from Danish, Chinese, and Russian!

In this month’s of newly released translations, we are featuring works that traverse across landscapes of psychology, politics, perspectives, and coastal enclaves. From a travelogue that corporealizes a vision into reality, a fragmented ghost story that equally interrogates readership with writership, and a psychically dense political fiction that follows the twists of truths into fictions, these works are full of metamorphoses, imaginations, and materializations—all that possible within the realm of the text.

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A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Caroline Waight, Graywolf Press, 2022

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A line extends from Skagen, Denmark to Den Helder, Holland—a complex, jagged, six hundred mile stretch of coast. On a map, it is a fixed mark, something definite and present, representing a real place that exists today: the division between land and sea, a place of dunes and marshes, sweeping tides, surging storms, wind farms, gulls, and people. In A Line in the World, A Year on the North Sea Coast, celebrated Danish author Dorthe Nors asserts her dream for this line to be less static and more flexible, persistently animated, always moving, ever changing, evolving with its points marked in time just as much in time as they are in space. Her line reverberates heritage and memory, holidays, tragedy, Vikings, shipwrecks, disco ferries, and local gossip. In this first work of nonfiction, Nors brings Denmark’s western coast to life in fourteen essays, now available in a beautiful translation by Caroline Waight.

Each essay offers an exquisite, layered exploration of a different stretch of that wild North Sea coast, and the first one begins at the top. Nors is from west Jutland, but she has found herself living in Copenhagen, with a noisy neighbor next door and a hash dealer below, and she comforts herself there with sounds of the sea played through an app on her phone. She did not plan to write a book of essays (she was supposed to be working on a novel), but her publisher was insistent. They asked, and then they asked again.

I said, ‘I’ll have to think it over,’ and I did. Or I dreamt. In the dream, I was setting off across the landscape in my little Toyota. I saw myself escaping several years of pressure from the media by driving up and down the coast. Me, my notebook and my love of the wild and desolate. I wanted to do the opposite of what was expected of me. It’s a recurring pattern in my life. An instinct.

READ MORE…