Reviews

Announcing Our December Book Club Selection: In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali

December 30, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

In Case of Emergency displays a gift for description and a masterful knack for challenging the expectations of structure.

What’s more pressing than a natural disaster? An opium addiction. The titular “emergency” in Mahsa Mohebali’s award-winning novel refers simultaneously to shuddering Tehran and the pressing urge of its protagonist, Shadi. In vernacular as electric as it is poetic, In Case of Emergency paints a mad portrait of Iran and its electrifying counterculture, as we follow the brilliantly acerbic Shadi on dissolving boundaries of need and want, of gender, of revolution. The Asymptote Book Club is proud to select this defining text as our last selection of 2021.

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.  

In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali, translated from the Farsi by Mariam Rahmani, The Feminist Press, 2021

Shadi wakes up to a brutal comedown in her family’s Tehran home. The earth’s been “dancing Bandari”—shimmying, stamping, and shaking, all night, which she actually wouldn’t have minded so much if it weren’t for her mother’s screaming “ten times for each tremor: How many screams does that make?” After a night of earthquakes that show no sign of stopping, her family is preparing for an exodus, but Shadi only has two opium balls left, and that won’t do in the middle of a crisis—or any other day. So she, the well-off daughter of a philandering university professor and a revolutionary-turned-housewife who absentmindedly clicks digital prayer beads, dons masculine clothing, setting off through the upended streets of Tehran to find her next fix.

Shadi, like many of her peers who grew up in post-revolutionary Iran—the majority of the population—is well-educated, jobless, and disillusioned with the repressive regime that hasn’t delivered on its promises. Mahsa Mohebali’s In Case of Emergency (“Don’t Worry” is closer to the Farsi title) was released just one year before the thirtieth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, and its fictional earthquake, as well as the ensuing chaos and the repeated refrain of the city’s hardened youth—“Everybody relax. This city is ours”—was said to have foreshadowed the real-life Green Movement protests soon to come. Shadi herself, however, is a far cry from either the revolutionaries of her mother’s generation or the protestors of her own: “Arash’s dumb-ass logic is spreading like a breed of Barbapapa,” she laments. “Was the earth fractured or just these idiots’ skulls? This city is ours—I’d really like to know what that actually means.”

Though her profile—including the opium addiction—matches many of her country’s youth, it isn’t often represented in Irani literature. This is due, on one hand, to political censorship. The original version of the novel made it to press with only limited edits, and won the prestigious Houshang Golshiri Award—before being banned on and off. Mohebali is also, as of this writing, prohibited from public speaking. However, social censorship is also at play; Shadi speaks the crass, cosmopolitan slang of the streets, not the lyrical Farsi of the page. Globally, in all four cardinal directions, the expansion of a literary establishment to include vernacular languages and subculture has been characterized by both resistance and fascination; this would be one such catalytic work.  READ MORE…

Afternoons—A Case Study: On Teodora Lalova’s Afternoons like these

December 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

Lalova’s poetry confirms that regardless of the Other’s differences, we could always try and reach them by explaining . . . the unfamiliar details.

Afternoons like these by Teodora Lalova, translated from the Bulgarian by Jason H. Spinks, Kalin Petkov, and Gabriela Manova, Ars and Scribens Publishing, 2021

The Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov writes in one of his books that “August is the afternoon of the year.” With this subtle line, he takes his rightful place next to other insatiable thinkers who have dwelled on the special character of this particular time of day, either attempting a convincing explanation for its beguiling qualities or giving up once and for all their efforts to figure it out. So, even if we choose to ignore the all too famous quote by Henry James about the aesthetic pleasure he derives from the phrase “summer afternoon,” we should at least pay attention to what Jorge Luis Borges had to say on the matter. In one of his short stories, “The End,” he notes that “There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music.”

While I was reading Teodora Lalova’s debut collection of poems, united under the title Afternoons like these, I similarly found myself on the brink of grasping a curious feeling, too elusive for me to fully comprehend. From my perspective, the text appeared to be very close to capturing that crucial essence of the hours preceding twilight that so often escapes our miserable efforts to express it in words. Each poem, as is to be expected, achieves this in its own way. Some prefer the ironic twist of fate, while others choose to shed light on the more delicate nuances of existence. There is also a third kind that tackles complex philosophical questions in an “unbearably light” manner. Nevertheless, once the piece has located the throbbing heart of the unique afternoon, it offers a single or several lines that are certain to remain with the reader:

On afternoons like these I want to write poems about the smell of chimney smoke,
about the unread books and about first loves.
Of course, on afternoons like these
I don’t have my notebook with me.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2021

December 13, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Jacqueline Leung, and Maddy Robinson

Czech women's writing, German autofiction, and Japanese mystery!

This month, our selections of the best in global literature present a bevy of questions to be answered—rectifying the neglect of Czech women’s writing at the end of the twentieth century, solving murders, and chasing that ever-wandering place of home. Read on for these pivotal texts that are taking place amidst the most sustaining inquiries of our time: of secrets, of memory, and of desire.

a world apart

A World Apart and Other Stories by Various Authors, translated from the Czech by Kathleen Hayes, University of Chicago Press, 2021 

Review by Maddy Robinson, Social Media Manager

Kathleen Hayes’s collection of fin-de-siècle Czech women’s writing, A World Apart and Other Stories, is to be granted a second edition—twenty years after its initial publication, and around a century after the heyday of its writers. As Hayes informs us in her introduction, despite the proliferation of women’s writing in Czech literary magazines and anthologies at the time, or the academic attention the period has received, there continues to be a distinct lack of English translations for feminine texts from the turn of the century. In an effort to combat this dearth of material, Hayes carefully selected and translated eight short stories written before the First World War, to offer English language readers entry into a literary movement that might otherwise have remained solely within the domain of Central European Studies academics. We are presented with invaluable insight into the societal and individual concerns which accompanied this turbulent period in history, especially viewed in the context of a people struggling with “the woman question.”

The book opens with Božena Benešová’s “Friends,” an evocative tale of childhood sensitivity to perceived social hierarchies, and a frank condemnation of anti-Semitism. Hayes remarks that this is rather unusual, given that “at the time it was written, negative references to the Jews were still the norm in Czech literature.” The story also constitutes an anomaly in this anthology, as from this point on, there is but one central theme around which each story revolves: passion, forbidden or otherwise.

She was a strange woman, but perhaps, after all, strange only from my point of view. I was totally incapable of getting close to her soul.

The titular story, “A World Apart,” was published in an anthology of the same name in 1909 by Růžena Jesenská and is perhaps the most striking and complex of the collection. Travelling by train, the protagonist Marta recounts the story of a friendship she once had with a Miss Teresa Elinson, an intense woman whom she also met on a train, and who convinces her to visit her manor house “A World Apart.” Miss Elinson’s attempts to seduce Marta are not initally met with outright rejection—however, there is a foreboding, Du Maurier-like sense that if she were to remain at A World Apart, she might suffer the same fate as her deceased predecessor, Berta. Though Hayes puts the unlikely subject matter of lesbian desire more down to “literary convention than psychological realism,” Jesenská’s depiction of the risks of breaking worldly norms, as well as her portrait of the passionate, Dandy-esque figure of Teresa Elinson, make for a fascinating contribution to any study of turn-of-the-century queer desire and its manifestations. READ MORE…

That Elusive Concept—Home: On Birgit Weyhe’s Graphic Novel of Mozambican Migrant Workers

December 8, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

The reader is left with the sensation that home is not a fixed thing, but something that must be made and remade.

Madgermanes by Birgit Weyhe, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, V&Q Books, 2021

The story of the Madgermanes, like that of so many displaced communities, is one likely to disappear into the footnotes of a war’s grand narrative. Having achieved independence from Portugal following the Carnation Revolution, the People’s Republic of Mozambique found itself once again thrown into armed civil conflict during the late 70s. Around the same time, in 1978, the German Democratic Republic sought to combat widespread labour shortages by reaching an agreement with the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO), which enabled them to contract workers from their heavily indebted socialist sister state. Spurred on by the spirit of independence and tempted by the education and employment opportunities which were so lacking in their war-ravaged homeland, around 20,000 young Mozambican volunteers left East Africa for East Germany. These volunteers would later be labelled the Madgermanes—a concatenated form of “Made in Germany,” used to taunt and belittle those who later returned to Mozambique after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Memory is a dog in heat . . . there’s no counting on it.

Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes is a book of memories. Translated from the original German by Katy Derbyshire, it is infused with all the homesickness, adventure, and exploitation that economic migration entails, hypnotically rendered in black, white, and burnished gold illustrations. Divided into three sections, the graphic novel follows three fictional members of this dislocated community who each recount their experiences, offering a multifaceted perspective on the intricacies of their particular situation, as well as the life-changing repercussions of geopolitics and civil war for the individual. José, quiet and bookish, wants nothing more than to play by the rules of his new German bosses and learn as much as he can, while his roommate, fun-loving Basilio, is more intent on having a good time. Pragmatic Annabella arrives in East Germany three years later than her co-volunteers, driven by the prospect of an education and of sending money home to what remains of her family. She soon becomes aware of the true nature of the volunteer programme when she is assigned a role on the production line of a hot water bottle factory, a far cry from the kind of jobs they were promised.

José, Basilio, and Annabella’s memories are as similar as they are different. Upon reaching Europe, they are all faced with racial exclusion, little agency over their place of work, and economic hardship. The latter remains a direct result of the ‘agreement,’ which saw 60% of the workers’ wages retained—wages which are still yet to be received. Each character is painted, textually and graphically, with their own private passions and motivations for migration, as well as the deep sorrows of bereavement and loss. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, each person reacts to increasing hostility and racial discrimination in their own way—faced with the decision of returning to a home they no longer recognise, or attempting to struggle on in hopes of a brighter future in the new Europe. Commendably, Weyhe seems especially committed to underscoring the intersectional nature of the trauma faced by Annabella; hers is the last of the three stories, and it is arguably the most harrowing, visually portraying the entwined struggles of racism, misogyny, and gendered violence with horror-splashed drawings and unflinching honesty. One is reminded of The Unwomanly Face of War, Svetlana Alexievich’s polyphonic masterpiece in which she collects the memories of hundreds of Soviet women who participated in the second world war. Where Alexievich chose to create many voices, Weyhe has chosen to condense the variant struggles into one, though the effect is no less striking. Through Annabella, we can hear echoes of the voices of many other migrant women—forced to choose between their own agency and bodily autonomy in order to protect their own future and their closest kin.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito

December 2, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s rare for a novel to so deftly balance character and plot. It’s even rarer for a complex plot to sprout from such unlikely sources . . .

A winner of Mexico’s prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Award, Fabio Morábito’s El lector a domicilio is the first of his works to appear in English—and having read it, we can only hope there’s more to come. It’s hard to think of recent novels as well-rounded as this, which is why we’re delighted to announce it as our November Book Club pick: in just over two hundred pages, it delivers rich characters and riveting plots; it balances heart with humor; it sets us up only to shake our assumptions. More importantly, though, it finds value in lives that are often neglected, prompting us to fully see, hear, and touch those around us—an especially timely reminder as we continue to emerge from our pandemic solitudes.

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.  

Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer, Other Press, 2021

If ever a novel was deviously set up for stasis, it’s Fabio Morábito’s latest. Its protagonist, thirty-four-year-old Eduardo Valverde, is “stuck in second gear” after a case of reckless driving costs him his license, part of his job, and much of his time. Already living at home with an ailing father, he must now serve as a home reader to some of the other “elderly and infirm” in Cuernavaca—many of whom spend their days alone or half-silently with others, in dim rooms at the end of long passageways. Meanwhile, Eduardo has either cut or strained all ties with friends and family, and doesn’t seem keen on forming new ones; he, too, lives in “his own little world,” and while his court-mandated gig beats scrubbing public toilets, his heart just isn’t in it.

This is apparent to several of his listeners. “You come to our house,” one berates him, “sit on our sofa, open your briefcase, and with that magnificent voice of yours you read without understanding anything, as if we weren’t worthy of your attention.” To be fair, though, he’s not exactly dealing with a rapt audience. The Jiménez brothers are more eager to taunt him with vocal antics than take in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; the Vigils lose focus on Verne’s The Mysterious Island when they can’t read his lips (they appear to be deaf), and they don’t bother to mention it until he brings it up; Coronel Atarriaga drifts off like clockwork after two or three pages of Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.

The characters’ mix of decrepitude, distance, and detachment sprouts from their broader environment. Once worthy of its nickname as the “City of Eternal Spring,” Cuernavaca has long since been “expelling young people and keeping only the old-timers around, like any godforsaken town of emigrants”—even “the bougainvillea on the fences are rotting.” The remaining population lives “closed up in houses and yards surrounded by high walls,” and these walls have “infected” them: “everyone walk[s] around stone-faced.” It is the product of “unchecked danger” at the hands of drug lords and mobsters, one of whom routinely visits the Valverde furniture store to collect a “protection fee.” But even this rattling occurrence is mentioned almost in passing, thus avoiding the immediate strike of conflict. The novel’s context in its first few dozen pages, then, seems hardly ripe for character or plot development. READ MORE…

Melancholic Leftover(s): Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City

November 24, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Ka Man Chung

It is a timeless work of watching life flow past.

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City tells the deceptively simple story of a young man drifting through life, searching for romance and success amidst the urban swelter. Newly employed at a medical-literary magazine, narrator Leo Gazzara moves from Milan to Rome—only to be fired a year later due to the publication’s imminent bankruptcy. As he bounces around various jobs and other heartless endeavors, brooding resignation and lethargy permeate Leo’s world; his life, utterly devoid of excitement, becomes simply a series of events to be accepted and passed through in their procession. For the most part, he is a drifter—a flâneur without the poetic possibilities of transcendence. Unambitious and apathetic as he might appear to be, however, the story of Leo is nevertheless one of delicate beauty that imparts the prevalent, existential angst that defined a generation of young men amidst the Italy of the 70s.

In the vein of postwar Italian neorealism, Calligarich spends much of the text on bringing texture and illustration to the humble details of everyday life, and the resulting cinematic effect can likely be referred back to the author’s experience as a screenwriter. Leo’s story counteracts the adulation of glamour and happiness in Fascist propaganda, which holds little to no concern for the personal difficulties of everyday life—boredom, failure, or grief. Instead of telling the simple, customary story of a powerful and desirable man amidst a cosmopolitan enchantment, Last Summer in the City presents a marginalized individual’s quotidian, melancholic tale in a provincial setting. The quiet, understated prose emanates an almost diaristic intimacy into the narrator’s mind, providing an avenue to access his inner vacuum of emptiness, and the terrible simplicity of his apathy.

READ MORE…

Divine and Earthly Pleasures: On Ion Cristofor’s Somewhere a Blind Child

November 22, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Marina Dora Martino

The poems follow a coherent design, with themes and characters growing organically, coalescing in a cohesive atmosphere and view of the world.

Somewhere a Blind Child by Ion Cristofor, translated from the Romanian by Andreea Iulia Scridon, Naked Eye Publishing, 2021

Oh, what a sinister story, what bothersome spectres
my bedstead is creaking.
We will have to move in the night
to other rooms to other countries to other life-stories.

Spirituality, references to the Scriptures, and direct calls from God—Romanian poet Ion Cristofor is known as a “modern Christian poet,” but Somewhere a Blind Child exemplifies his idiosyncratic approach to faith. Drawn from nearly forty years of work, these selected poems are translated into English for the first time by Andreea Iulia Scridon, a translator and poet herself. They are spiritual, but also ridden by spirits; they frequently allude to the scriptures with reverence, but also do not refrain from ridiculing them at leisure—God calls in, but he himself “gets no erotic phonecalls.” Cristofor’s numbingly clear awareness around the contradictions of the modern world—in realms of religion, history, science, and death—keeps the reader from being lulled into any false sense of comfort, whether by confidence in faith’s power or excessive hope in reason. When earthly pleasures do barge in, however, their offer to distract from pain and worry is accepted with abandonment and sensual relish, no matter how ephemeral their soothing effect.

When she undresses on the couch
the blossom-laden trees all move into my bedroom
their love-sick leaves becoming delirious.

It’s autumn, Lord, it’s so late in heaven
and love is a blue orange in your hand

In this unusual meeting place between the chilly high planes of the spirit and the dirty warm ground of the senses, visions flourish. It feels oddly logical; wracked with doubt, a mind can become overattentive to extemporary signs—the shape of a cloud or the temperature in a room, taking them for premonitions or glimpses of the truth that lies behind the real, as they appear and disappear in the surreal and overheated atmosphere. The senses, if capable of guiding reason, can also distort it, making room for the incredible, the strange, and the eerie.

a white phantom passes through the rooms
reminding you of an hour of love
that once passed over you like a galloping herd of horses,
like a reckless ocean wave.
And now flocks of starlings proclaim you governor of the
province
and towards evening the clouds send you dark ambassadors.

READ MORE…

Irreconcilable Truths of Our Evolution: On Stanisław Lem’s The Truth and Other Stories

November 18, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

Successful science fiction, [Lem] believed, must treat problems and their solutions in a different, more earnest way.

The Truth and Other Stories by Stanisław Lem, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, MIT Press, 2021

One cannot overstate how profoundly our relationship with computers has changed since the mid-twentieth century. Once upon a time, the notion of a mechanical brain was as alien as the notion of, well, an alien. Similar to research of extraterrestrial life, there were then a few elite scientists, sequestered in institutions, who were better informed to predict what an encounter with a mechanical brain might entail than the general population, for whom such a concept was nothing more than fantasy.

Stanisław Lem was of that class. Son of a doctor, he studied medicine until his transition to literature. As a newcomer to Lem’s copious body of work, what surprised me most about this collection of previously untranslated stories was how, with very little attention to character development, he manages to render this scientific class with as much fidelity as their fields of inquiry. I expected their curiosity and ambition, even obsession, but not their yearning, inquietude, or melancholy. How disappointing that, when confronted with the other, we might not be able to communicate. But how utterly devastating that, when confronted with one of our own, we never are able to truly communicate. In The Truth and Other Stories, it is often this precise pathos that catalyzes action.

There’s inherent value in the defamiliarization of technology that comes from reading literature—especially speculative fiction—from a previous era. Lem luxuriates in the weight and texture of his machines. His favorites occupy rooms and require trips to many types of stores to build. Gels, wires, soldering . . . they are so tactile, until the moment—signaling the beginning of the end—they become more than the sum of their parts. In “The Friend,” a young member of a Short-Wave Radio Club gets caught up in the mysterious mission of a rather haunted man, Harden, who is driven to complete it for a highly secretive friend. While building the electrical structure called “the conjugator,” the boy’s affection for Harden grows as he tries to solve the mystery of the project, yet simultaneously begins to doubt the terms of Harden’s relationship with the absent friend. “The word ‘conjugator’ had come back to mind, which was what Harden had called the apparatus. Coniugo, coniugare—to join, to connect—but what did it mean? What did he want to join, and to what?” he wonders. The real possibility of friendship with Harden is constantly frustrated, ironically, by the bizarre circumstances of this connecting machine. What the technology promises of connection gets in the way of intimacy’s reality.

Harden pressed my hand to his chest with his eyes closed. In any other person it would have looked theatrical, but he really was like that. The more I cared about him—as I was fully aware by now—the more he exasperated me, most of all because of his lethargy and the cult of the ‘friend’ he nurtured. READ MORE…

Something is Rotten—But What?: On The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius

November 10, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Sabrina Parker Greene

“The Dolls” leaves you with a simple, haunting feeling—what is enough for a life?

The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, Lolli Editions, 2021

Ursula Scavenius has created an inexplicable environment in The Dolls, a collection of four stories that render the common traditions of narrative into cerebral mystery. Perhaps our characters are in Denmark, but what iteration of Denmark is it? She does not seem to call upon any particular reality or time period in which to place her characters; even the mention of actual years or eras, be they 1888 or 1999, don’t seem to hold much meaning. Amidst this ambiguity, you might say something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The epigraph of the text, deftly translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, reads: “I’ll tell the story, even if no one is listening.” While not necessarily a unique sentiment, it aptly sets up a book that comes to us in English translation, which has found itself a new set of readers who are ready to listen.

Fittingly, this book is part of Lolli’s New Scandinavian Literature series—and it does seem to live within that hint of reinvention, avoiding any stereotypically Danish or Scandinavian elements. There’s no hygge—that adulated brand of upper-middle-class coziness—here: everyone is decidedly uncomfortable. Nor can they be categorized under the beloved genre of Nordic noir—no outright crime exists in these stories. Instead, we have paranoia, dread, perhaps some doomsday prep, but no hardboiled investigation or detective work. Although Scavenius may not explicitly belong to the traditions of Scandinavian literature, you could thread her particular type of psychological penetration and sense of displacement with the likes of Clarice Lispector, Wuthering Heights, perhaps Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss or Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest and Other Stories (translated by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris), taking part in a global narrativization of women who find themselves in archaic or alternative lifestyles, or otherwise alone—either by their own accord or against their will. A timeless situation.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2021

November 8, 2021  |  in In This Together, New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun, Georgina Fooks, Shawn Hoo, and Suhasini Patni

New titles this month from the Philippines, Indonesia, Syria, and Slovakia!

This month, our selection of translated titles traverse the battlefield and the surfaces of paintings, lonely post-Communist apartment blocs and conservative spaces housing queer, radical instances of love. In language described by our editors and reviewers as potent, provocative, capacious, and full of longing, these four titles present an excellent pathway into the writers who are bringing the immediacies of experience into powerful socio-cultural commentary on our reality: Martin Hacla, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Ramy Al-Asheq, and Monika Kompaníková. 

angels

There Are Angels Walking the Fields by Marlon Hacla, translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim, Broken Sleep Books, 2021

Review by Shawn Hoo, Assistant Editor

Words happened. Cow became
Cow. The word milk gushed in every throat.

From this seemingly deflationary announcement that opens one of Marlon Hacla’s poems—“Words happened.”—an entire landscape is animated and given breath at the very juncture of utterance. Not only do ears of corn and a crown of birds begin to stir, so too does the speaker, finding himself transported by the magical properties of language: “I uttered the word joy / And I was once again playing a game / As a child with my friends.” Read as the collection’s ars poetica, we might say that in Hacla’s debut poetry collection, words do not simply refer to things. They move things, and each marks an occasion in the world; they sing the world into movement.

There Are Angels Walking the Fields—first published in 2010 under the Ubod New Authors Series by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in the Philippines—opens with a lilting “Invocation,” its unbroken anaphora incanting the world of inanimate things (“In the name of the rock. In the name of the lily blossom”), of unarticulated desires (“In the name of burned / Letters from a concubine”) and of those who have been cast into the margins (“In the name of wives / Abandoned by their husbands. In the name of gay fathers”). Who could believe more in language’s ability to intervene in the world than the one who uses them in supplication? In opening the collection with this list, Hacla immediately throws his lot with the downtrodden and the forgotten—those who may not have the ability to speak—and soothes them with the divine balm of words. In her translator’s note, past contributor Kristine Ong Muslim justifies her sharpening of the poem’s decisiveness in order to heighten the quality of invocation. Thus, a line more literally translated as “In the name of hands / Not touched” becomes “In the name of hands / Never held.” Might we also consider the translator as one who practices the art of invocation—except rather than calling out in prayer, the translator calls inward, to be possessed by both languages? Where, in order for words to perform the magic of the original—for cow to become cow—something first has to happen to them? In Muslim’s translation, Hacla’s lines are screwed tight; each enjambment turns brutally, and every line sweats with a potent lyricism, as how this opening poem rollicks to an epiphany by the end:

[. . .] In the name of faces hidden.
By a black veil. In the names of ears
That had not known the sound of a violin. In the name of a flower
That bloomed in the morning and wilted by nightfall.
In your name, you who would someday die and fade away.

READ MORE…

Manaschi, A Modernist Novel Inspired by Central Asia’s Oldest Epic, the Manas

November 3, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Manaschi is a powerful book that lies at the nexus between the individual and the culture they are born into.

Manaschi by Hamid Ismailov, translated from the Uzbek by Donald Rayfield, Tilted Axis, 2021

Despite being home to incredibly rich and ancient traditions of both spoken and written word, little of Central Asian literatures is known to English-language readers. Such is what is being spectacularly rectified in Hamid Ismailov’s latest novel to appear in English—Manaschi. The text, artfully translated from Uzbek to English by the meticulous Donald Rayfield, is an ode to the deeply rooted tradition of storytelling that crosses boundaries of ethnicity, gender, age, and time, taking truly epic proportions in Ismailov’s riveting prose.

A manaschi, in Kyrgyz tradition, is the person—usually a man, young or old—who performs the recitation of the epic poetry Manas, a body of narratives that contains up to 900,000 verses, and transmitted only orally before given a written form in the late nineteenth century. Reciting the Manas is an act of shamanism; it involves phenomenal memory, years of training, musical talent, and inspiration kin to a trance state. For some, the act even enables in the performer the ability to interpret dreams or foretell the future. Learning and performing the Manas embodies a lifetime’s dedication to one of the longest oral texts known to humanity, and the sacred practice prevails to this day, as new generations—now including women—continue to be trained.

The story takes place on the contemporary Kyrgyz-Tajik border in Chekbel, a mountainous village inhabited by mixed populations of nomadic Kyrgyz and sedentary Tajiks. Bekesh, the main character, is a radio journalist who lives in an urban part of Kyrgyzstan. Upon receiving the news that his uncle Baisal—a reputed manaschi—has died, he returns to his ancestral village to attend the funeral. This visit, initially conceived as a temporary break from his modern routine, turns into a life-changing experience, opening formidable questions regarding his familial and cultural duties, his unequivocal choices on identity, and his moral responsibilities to his call as a manaschi.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout

November 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The novel lends itself to debates on more universal themes such as power, corruption, the idealism of youth, gender equality, and abuse.

In his seminal work on colonialism and subjugation, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon asks: “how do we get from the atmosphere of violence to setting violence in motion?” Shukri Mabkhout liberates this idea into story gracefully in his debut novel, The Italian. Delineating the fermenting revolutions in late twentieth century Tunisia through the scope of one young man, Mabkhout paints a vivid reproduction of the oppressive conflicts between nationalism and religion, love and lust, ideology and action. We are proud to present this vivid text, and its detailed contours of individual life in the wider contexts of country, as our Book Club selection for the month of October.

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 Italian by Shukri Mabkhout, translated from the Arabic by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil, Europa Editions, 2021

Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, winner of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, was first published in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Perhaps with some suggestion of history repeating itself, it is set during another period of political upheaval in Tunisia—the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a ‘bloodless coup’ led by Ben Ali, the leader who was to be deposed in 2011. Intricate and detailed, heavy with politics, philosophy, food, and sex, the novel is an insight into Tunisian history and society, human relationships, and the often politically motivated and self-interested inner workings of institutional power.

The novel opens with its own violent outbreak and fallen patriarch. At his father’s funeral, the protagonist, Abdel Nasser—nicknamed el-Talyani (the titular Italian) for his Mediterranean good looks—attacks the local imam. The family and wider community are shocked and shamed, but also perplexed; as the narrator, one of el-Talyani’s childhood friends, tells the reader, grief over his father’s death “didn’t fully explain it.” Abdel Nasser’s family members offer various explanations—the “corrupt books” he read as a child, his university classmates, the personal circumstances of his divorce, or the “deep-rooted corruption” of his morals. While the broader community simply consider him the black sheep of the family, none of these explanations seems to satisfy the narrator. Jumping back in time, the novel thus sets out to unpack what might have motivated Abdel Nasser’s outburst, and, along the way, also details much of the political history of Tunisia during these tumultuous decades.

Abdel Nasser has a complex and somewhat distant relationship with his family, and in particular with his brother, Salah Eddine. Salah Eddine left Tunisia as a young man, and is now an “esteemed academic and international finance expert” living in Switzerland—in other words, he is the epitome of cosmopolitanism and institutional economic liberalism. When Salah Eddine leaves Tunisia, Abdel Nasser assumes the throne as the de-facto eldest son—which Mabkhout explains endows a special status and freedom within the Tunisian family. He also takes up residence in his elder brother’s room, which provides him with an intellectual awakening through books and records, and in which he also experiences a sexual awakening: he is groomed by the family’s significantly older neighbour, who—by no means coincidentally—is his brother’s ex-lover. The room eventually also becomes a political hotbed where Abdel Nasser discusses philosophy, politics, and Marxist economics with select classmates, for he is set apart from others not only by his good looks, but also his astute mind and leadership skills. He goes on to study law at university, where he acts as a leader and recruiter in an activist student organization. READ MORE…

“Now You Fly and Sing”: Alice Paalen Rahon’s Shapeshifter in Review

October 14, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Paalen Rahon embodied the far-ranging imaginations of surrealist pursuit: a shapeshifter.

Shapeshifter by Alice Paalen Rahon, translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws, New York Review Books, 2021

Surrealism has left an indelible mark on our cultural imagination, a defining umbrella term for the experimental and the dreamlike, from poetry to imagery. Though a litany of artists come to mind when we think of surrealism—from its founder figures André Breton and Philippe Soupault to visual exponents such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, or René Magritte—the legacy, albeit impressive, remains overwhelmingly, and perhaps erroneously, masculine.

Some work has been done in recent years to revise that history—such as through new translations and a number of exhibitions for British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington. Now, translator and professor Mary Ann Caws has curated and translated the works of poet and painter Alice Paalen Rahon to further our reach towards the women of surrealism, in the volume Shapeshifter.

The visual arts have long dominated the conversation around surrealism, despite its origins as a literary term—coined first by poet and theorist Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, then used in two manifestos in 1924, of which Breton’s has stood the longest and is now seen as definitive. Breton described Surrealism as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” Though first staked in terms of the “written word,” the paintings of Dalí or Magritte may now serve, for many, as the first introduction to Surrealism. This domination of visuality in Surrealism has also affected Paalen Rahon’s legacy. Her artwork has long been appreciated in her adopted home of Mexico, celebrated with a large retrospective in 2009 at the country’s Museum of Modern Art. However, with the arrival of Shapeshifter, we can gain valuable insight into this remarkable poet who was one of the best of the Surrealists, despite the lack of wider recognition.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2021

October 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel, Kent Kosack, and Thuy Dinh

New works in translation from Poland, Croatia, and the Netherlands!

This month, our selections of the best in world literature are unified by their writers’ undeniable strength of voice and masterful control of the narrative form. From the Netherlands, a collection of A.L. Snijder’s very short stories—a genre invented by their author—revels in the unreal natures of our reality. From Croatia, the dark humorist stylings of Robert Perišić masterfully delineate the unrealiable boundaries of nations and psychologies. And from Poland, reporter and writer Margo Rejmer brings us a rare and intimate glimpse at Communist Albania under the fractious rule of Enver Hoxha, from the people who lived through it. 

night train

Night Train by A.L. Snijders, translated from the Dutch by Lydia Davis, New Directions, 2021

Review by Thuy Dinh, Editor-at-Large for the Vietnamese Diaspora

            “For more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel. This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality—stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”

—A.L. Snijders, “Baalbek” from Night Train

The key to understanding A.L. Snijders’s very short stories (dubbed zkv—zeer korte verhalen) lies inside “Baalbek,” where the Dutch author connects his desire to visit Lebanon’s ancient Roman outpost with creating stories that depict “reality without reality.” The Stone of the Pregnant Woman, a megalith found in Baalbek and enshrouded with otherworldly presence, represents the perfectly magnified symbol for Snijders’s miniature approach. His Night Train—a collection of ninety-one zkv translated by Lydia Davis—is a shapeshifting amalgam of fable, zen koan, commentary, lyrical essay, and autobiography. As an immersive foray into the unknown, the instability of Snijders’s narrative form produces a trompe-l’oeil effect “indistinguishable from the truth,” giving the reader a sensation of being at once disoriented and illuminated.

Born Peter Cornelis Müller in 1937 in Amsterdam, Snijders came from a large, bourgeois Catholic family. The dual forces of freedom and order constitute the main themes of his life and work. Artistic and cosmopolitan, Snijders nevertheless chose a stable career teaching at a police academy and led a placid life as a gentleman farmer in rural Achterhoek, Holland’s eastern region. Even after being awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 2010—one of the three most prestigious literary honors in Holland—Snijders did not, for years, deviate from the low-key routine of reading his work on an early morning radio show and circulating his steady flow of zkv among an email list of loyal readers. Ever industrious, he passed away this past June while working on new material.

The commonplace in Snijders’s oeuvre is imbued with mystery. In “Minor Characters,” Snijders’s alter-ego wonders if his compressed fiction may actually be “unpsychological novel[s] for people who understand nothing about psychology.” If reality resembles an unseen but anarchic mole emerging each night to turn Snijders’s garden into a surrealist landscape (“Mole”), then the author’s aesthetic philosophy suggests holistic means to affirm “what can never be understood.” This notion of reality as unknowable, or “unpsychological,” represents the trademark of Snijders’s fiction, allowing his narrative—as both burrowing animal and spy—to elude conventional expectations and assume an enigmatic depth, despite its compact form. READ MORE…