Reviews

An Occupied Literature: On Julián Fuks’s Occupation

September 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Fuks has “put something more than pain, something more than misfortune” in his novel, making “something worth writing.”

Occupation by Julián Fuks, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, Charco Press, 2021

I’m writing a book about fatherhood without being able to become a father—and probing motherhood as if I didn’t know that I will never learn it. I’m writing a book about death without ever having felt it switch off a body, in a speculation of feelings that one day will seem laughable, when I do encounter the pain. I’m writing a book about the pain of the world, the poverty, exile, despair, rage, tragedy, ludicrousness, a book about this interminable ruin surrounding us, which so often goes unnoticed, but as I write it I am protected by solid walls.

Occupation, Julián Fuks’ latest novel to appear in English translation by Daniel Hahn, is a quiet masterpiece. Touching on family and relationships, birth and death, colonialism, the refugee crisis, political activism, the Holocaust, our (in)ability to identify with one another, and how to find hope in a world of ruin, this novel is sweepingly ambitious in its themes, yet the measured, self-critical voice of the narrator and the calm, understated prose prevents it from veering into sensationalism or sentimentality.

The novel’s chapters alternate between the different preoccupations of our narrator, Sebastián: his father, who is occupying a hospital bed; his wife’s decision to have a child, which will occupy her body and shift the dynamics of their relationship; a group of migrants occupying a dilapidated building, many of whom exiles from lands that have been occupied, now seeking refuge in Brazil, a country with its own history of occupation; and his own attempts to understand what all of this means for his occupation as a writer.

Small jumps in time, along with chapters that begin mid-conversation, can at times create a sense of dislocation, but Fuks weaves the strands together so gently and dexterously that when they coalesce, it does not feel like the technique has been a pretext for creating suspense; rather, it is as though the narrative has been constructed this way so that the narrator might himself work through and better understand the components—as if each narrative thread must be understood on its own to bring the whole into relief. Nevertheless, the technical mastery of this construction should not be downplayed, and throughout the book, the reader will notice explicit motifs along with subtle echoes and patterns in the language. All this adds to a sense that the novel’s threads are both connected and discreet, amplifying the plurality of the voices and experiences which ultimately merge with the voice of the narrator, who “allow[s] them to occupy [him], to occupy [his] writing: an occupied literature.” READ MORE…

State of Emergency: Helene Bukowski’s Milk Teeth in Review

September 13, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Anna Rumsby

Milk Teeth is a novel with a lingering taste, one that weighs on the soul.

Milk Teeth by Helene Bukowski, translated from the German by Jen Calleja, Unnamed Press, 2021

You can’t expect the world to be exactly the same as it is in books.

Milk Teeth is claustrophobic. The silent world of Skalde and her mother Edith is cut off from everything else by fog and a collapsed bridge; civilization has also crumbled, and they reside in its remnants on the edge of a small, loosely-knit group in a so-called ‘territory.’ Edith has arrived in this place as an outsider, so though they are treated with tolerance, still disdain and suspicion dominate their relationships with most of the few people they have any contact with. In this fearful landscape, Skalde loses herself in books—until the day she starts losing her milk teeth, and finds a girl in the forest called Meisis. Thereafter, she slowly finds the strength to rebel against her mother’s neglect, and to question the rules of the society she finds herself in.

As a child, Skalde rarely leaves her house and garden, bringing it to close relevance with our era, and the all-too-familiar confinement common to all of us. The world beyond the river is depicted as a scary, dangerous place that presses at the edges of their small existence, serving as a further reminder that we are living in an increasingly atomised age—an era of isolationism between nations sparked by telltale international shifts to the political right, along with increasingly popular feelings amongst world leaders that their ‘country is an island’—catalysed by COVID.

In the ‘territory,’ the suspicion of outsiders is overarching, echoing the eagerness of some to designate certain groups as responsible for their hardships. Half-truths and disinformation are rife; neighbours judge neighbours, and people are cast out for reasons as trivial as having red hair or failing to lose their milk teeth. The setting—dense fog followed by blazing heat in an indiscernible survivalist purgatory—only adds to the novel’s cloying nature. Reading this during quarantine felt akin to falling through the looking glass into a world only slightly more absurd than our own. READ MORE…

Personal History and Italian History Intertwine in The Year of Our Love

September 6, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andriana Hamas

[Bonvicini] gradually expands the world surrounding the most intimate human emotions, then reminds the reader of inevitably missed opportunities.

The Year of Our Love by Caterina Bonvicini, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar, Other Press, 2021

“Life is a combination of magic and pasta,” the celebrated Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini once observed, and who can know this better than the boot-shaped Repubblica famous for an inimitable cuisine that has influenced the course of humanity? It doesn’t come as a surprise that The Year of Our Love was at least partly inspired, as explained in the author’s note, by a local osteria (a simple or inexpensive restaurant) and tales told over aromatic wine and a hot bowl of spaghetti.

Born in the picturesque city of Florence in 1974, the writer Caterina Bonvicini holds a degree in modern literature from the University of Bologna and has written more than ten novels, some of which have won prestigious prizes, among them Premio Frignano in Italy and the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro in France. Critics often highlight the way her texts expose the bourgeois lifestyle, while placing women, with their conflicting worldviews, internal dilemmas, and well-hidden feelings, at the center of the story.

The facts of her life reveal similarities between Bonvicini and the novel’s protagonists. The journey starts in 1979, only five years after she was born, at the height of the so-called Years of Lead, when Italy is locked in the firm grip of warring right- and left-wing factions. The first pages are filled with markers of the recent past: terrorist attacks, including the infamous Italicus Express bombing; numerous brigades and gangs; brutal kidnappings. Immersed in a world of turbulent clashes and savage confrontations, we meet Valerio Carnevale and Olivia Morganti—raised together even though their families are separated by a social divide that could hardly be bridged under ordinary circumstances. The passing seasons of childhood in the Emilia-Romagna region, home to the picturesque Bologna and the place where Valerio eventually studies to become a magistrate, overflow with stories about guns, hiding places, and bodyguards, exquisitely recounted by the girl’s grandmother, Manon, whose notions about beauty and truth exert a great influence on the children. But after Valerio’s mother begins an affair with a handsome swindler, the family is forced to move to one of Rome’s least prestigious neighborhoods, and the interaction between the two changes profoundly. Finally, it comes to a halt. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: After the Sun by Jonas Eika

August 30, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Eika has convinced the cacophony and sensory exhilaration of dreams into the accounts of narration.

In the last act of summer, the Asymptote Book Club is proud to present an award-winning collection of short stories by Danish writer Jonas Eika. In five deeply immersive studies of sensation and cognition, After the Sun is an introduction to a stunning new voice in descriptive prose, establishing a new narrative tradition with non-linear dreamscapes and astounding evocations of the physical body as a site of storytelling. As our own world continues to evolve ever more into the intangible, Eika is a writer that makes corporeal the unreal realities of our times. 

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.

After the Sun by Jonas Eika, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, Lolli Editions, 2021

To throw things into relief, I’ll play an old trick and say there are two kinds of people—those who seek to understand their dreams, and those who prefer that they remain in the inscrutable realm from where they came. The deciding quality—which also contributes to one’s ability to endure an intensive retelling of another’s dreams—is perhaps having to do with one’s own understandings of a life’s compartments; if within the rationale of time’s chronology, strangeness and encryption can occasionally take on the roles of logic and comprehension. Whether one sees a life’s events as a series of why-questions seeking the compatibility of answers, or if what we perceive as happenings are innocent to their order, oblivious of our insistence on purpose, and the phenomenon of them all fitting into the elapse of a life is simply an incredible feat of human storytelling.

It is incredible: that what baffles us about our own lives—mysteries, coincidences, appearances, and disappearances—is given such distinct clarity when organised into the perpetuity of sentences and pages. They move the world, they provide instruction, they are understood. A gun never appears to not go off. Fiction gives dreams a language that we also speak, ascribing to their impossible nature the subtle conviction of a greater design. In the reassuring procession of language’s patterns, we read life, with all the pieces fit somehow in place.

The stories in Jonas Eika’s collection, After the Sun, move firmly against this reassurance of knowledge; instead they insist forward with all the strangenesses of reality. Time is liquid, settings shift like cards in a deck, the present arrives as if already in memory. The logic of dreams dominate the prose in a determination that thwarts simple comprehension, and as such, Eika has convinced the cacophony and sensory exhilaration of dreams into the accounts of narration. In these five stories, the interruptions of the world—antithetical to our egocentric perceptions of individual purpose—is what drives the reading forward. We are led not by the simple fact of our choices and pathways, but by the world as it happens in experience. Before the discerning objectives of order intervene, we are allowed to luxuriate awhile in the immediate poetry of sensation—consciousness amidst the inexpressible moments of a new encounter.

Eika is especially interested in those dreaming moments where one is estranged from our lives and our bodies. “Alvin,” the story that begins the collection, establishes its opening shot in the aftermath of an “extremely fictional flight.” Then, nothing goes quite according to plan. The bank he’s meant to work at has burned to the ground, his savings and accommodations along with it. Eventually, he falls into the company (and the apartment) of a man he meets on the street. In confrontation with the dissonance between world and interiority, language serves to confirms the singularity of experience; in the wide landscape of world-events, we speak of what is happening to us as a confirmation of being. But where this iteration of feeling and knowing is so often a seeking of solidarity and mutual recognition, these stories instead maintain the volatility of selfhood: life as easily mutated by us as we are by it. The domino-effect of Eika’s narratives then signal a thrilling ceaselessness of possibility, speaking to the world as we know it now, boundless in abstraction. The speed by which we travel, the phantasmagoric architecture of financial markets, the way temporality collapses between reality and virtuality, After the Sun molds these accustomed surrealisms of our everyday into established reality. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2021

August 16, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan and Fairuza Hanun

New work this month from Lebanon and India!

The speed by which text travels is both a great fortune and a conundrum of our present days. As information and knowledge are transmitted in unthinkable immediacy, our capacity for receiving and comprehending worldly events is continuously challenged and reconstituted. It is, then, a great privilege to be able to sit down with a book that coherently and absorbingly sorts through the things that have happened. This month, we bring you two works that deal with the events of history with both clarity and intimacy. One a compelling, diaristic account of the devastating Beirut explosion of last year, and one a sensitive, sensual novel that delves into a woman’s life as she carries the trauma of Indian Partition. Read on to find out more.

beirut

Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse by Charif Majdalani, translated from French by Ruth Diver, Other Press, 2021

Review by Alex Tan, Assistant Editor

There’s a peculiar whiplash that comes from seeing the words “social distancing” in a newly published book, even if—as in the case of Charif Majdalani’s Beirut 2020: Diary of the Collapse—the reader is primed from the outset to anticipate an account of the pandemic’s devastations. For anyone to claim the discernment of hindsight feels all too premature—wrong, even, when there isn’t yet an aftermath to speak from.

But Majdalani’s testimony of disintegration, a compelling mélange of memoir and historical reckoning in Ruth Diver’s clear-eyed English translation, contains no such pretension. In the collective memory of 2020 as experienced by those in Beirut, Lebanon, the COVID-19 pandemic serves merely as stage lighting. It casts its eerie glow on the far deeper fractures within a country riven by “untrammelled liberalism” and “the endemic corruption of the ruling classes.”

Majdalani is great at conjuring an atmosphere of unease, the sense that something is about to give. And something, indeed, does; on August 4, 2020, a massive explosion of ammonium nitrate at the Port of Beirut shattered the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A whole city collapsed, Majdalani repeatedly emphasises, in all of five seconds.

That cataclysmic event structures the diary’s chronology. Regardless of how much one knows of Lebanon’s troubled past, the succession of dates gathers an ominous velocity, hurtling toward its doomed end. Yet the text’s desultory form, delivering in poignant fragments day by elastic day, hour by ordinary hour, preserves an essential uncertainty—perhaps even a hope that the future might yet be otherwise.

Like the diary-writer, we intimate that the centre cannot hold, but cannot pinpoint exactly where or how. It is customary, in Lebanon, for things to be falling apart. Majdalani directs paranoia at opaque machinations first designated as mechanisms of “chance,” and later diagnosed as the “excessive factionalism” of a “caste of oligarchs in power.” Elsewhere, he christens them “warlords.” The two are practically synonymous in the book’s moral universe. Indeed, Beirut 2020’s lexicon frequently relies, for figures of powerlessness and governmental conspiracy, on a pantheon of supernatural beings. Soothsayers, Homeric gods, djinn, and ghosts make cameos in its metaphorical phantasmagoria. In the face of the indifferent quasi-divine, Lebanon’s lesser inhabitants can only speculate endlessly about the “shameless lies and pantomimes” produced with impunity. READ MORE…

Focusing Back on Smallness: On Defne Suman’s The Silence of Scheherazade

August 9, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

Suman’s tale is at its heart about those small people living their daily lives within the city, loving each other and loving the land beneath them.

The Silence of Scheherazade by Defne Suman, translated from the Turkish by Betsy Göksel, Head of Zeus, 2021

In the unfathomable numbers of our current reality, big players—political, economic, scientific—very often overshadow everyday mundanities, the smallness of ordinary people’s lives. In this case, smallness is not meant as an insult, but rather as an important facet that we all lose track of when inundated with the major headlines numbering pandemic casualties. Similarly, the lives of the many characters in Defne Suman’s epic and entangled The Silence of Scheherazade are also eventually dwarfed by the backdrop that consumes them—the fallout of World War I and the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

Part Victorian Gothic, part cosmopolitan modernist, and part metatextual experiment, The Silence of Scheherazade traces the lives of a massive cast of characters from the late 1800s to the early 2000s. Jumping across decades and points of view with ease, moving forward and backward in time, the novel weaves a tangled tapestry over the city of Smyrna. Scheherazade sometimes narrates her life in the first person, but more often draws on the ghosts of the past to let other players come forward and speak. “My birth,” the novel opens, “on a sweet, orange-tinted evening, coincided with the arrival of Avinash Pillai in Smyrna.” A few pages later, Scheherazade recedes and we shift to Pillai himself, with his first encounter of a new home. “The young Indian man, fed up with the smell of coal and cold iron which had permeated the days-long sea voyage, was inhaling the pleasant aroma of flowers and grass. Rose, lemon, magnolia, jasmine and deep down a touch of amber.” In and out Scheherazade leads us, from the Armenian quarter of the city to British spies in the consulate, from wealthier Levantine suburbs to humble Greek grocers.

The focus falls especially to the women of this world, women who are constrained by all those huge players above them to live their lives in accordance with the expectations of their classes, their religions, their families, their countries, and who are forced to extraordinary measures when they fail to comply. Whether the flighty Juliette, the willful Edith, the skillful Meline, the daydreaming Panagiota, or the madwoman Sumbul, each woman is faced with terrible personal tragedies which are locked away behind walls of claustrophobic cultural silences. Edith, for her part, becomes addicted to hashish in order to endure the agony of each day. “That day had come around again. No matter how much hashish she smoked or how many secret ingredients Gypsy Yasemin added to it, whenever this date came around, that long-ago memory returned, like the sun shining through fog.” Panagiota, undergoing a different struggle, agrees to a distasteful marriage in order to protect her family. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2021

July 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Barbara Halla, Ruwa Alhayek, Suhasini Patni, and Thuy Dinh

New texts from Italy, Brazil, Korea, Morocco, and Spain!

In this month’s selection of excellent literature in translation, there’s something for everyone. From a dreamy and architecturally expressive graphic novel that speaks to fates and futures, to a collection of strange and visceral short stories delineating the network between bodies and their definitions. And if science fiction or unsettling tales aren’t your thing, there’s also the powerful narrative on a prodigal son who returns to navigate the pathos-filled landscape of past tragedies, loneliness, and isolation; the masterfully told history of Catalonia as it plays out through the life of a woman embroiled in the tumult of her time; or a cunning satire of contemporary Morocco that traverses territory of both physical and virtual landscapes. Read on for reviews on each of these remarkable works; hope you enjoy the trip!

celestia

Celestia by Manuele Fior, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Fantagraphics, 2021

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

“. . . from above, this island is in the shape of two hands intertwined.”

                                                           —Dr. Vivaldi, from Manuele Fior’s Celestia

Such is how Dr. Vivaldi alludes to Venice—curved strips of land yearning to touch and engulf each other in blue space. Ambitiously realized by Manuele Fior and eloquently translated by Jamie Richards, Celestia—Venice’s oneiric double—is a visual poem and modernist dance in graphic novel form, encompassing diaphanous terrains and gothic undertow, exuberantly tumescent with allusions to literature, art, and architecture.

Born in 1975 in Cesena, Italy, Fior currently lives in Paris, France. Drawing from his studies at Venice’s University of Architecture (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, or IUAV), he has, over time, developed a dynamic visual language with narrative elements drawn from both Western and Eastern aesthetic traditions. Several of his acclaimed graphic novels have been translated into English and published by U.S.-based Fantagraphics, and Celestia marks his fifth collaboration with Richards—a scholar and translator of Italian literature.

Deeply influenced by John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poem “Profezia” (“Prophecy”)—Fior depicts Celestia as a fusion of dualities that exist both in the history of Venice as well as in the fictional universe of his work: Gothic and Renaissance, spiritual and secular, traditional and modern, rational and organic, freedom and oppression, community and exile. While in Fior’s earlier work—such as The Interview—telepathy is depicted as an extraterrestial gift, in Celestia this ability has existed from time immemorial among certain people, possibly as an evolutionary process. When the story opens, the island of Celestia is home to a group of telepathic refugees, who long ago fled from a horrific invasion that had devastated the mainland. One of them, Pierrot—cloaked in his commedia dell’arte persona—now wishes to renounce his telepathic power, which he perceives as a tragic link to his childhood. After delivering vigilante justice to a member of the demonic syndicate that controls the island’s murky depths, Pierrot escapes Celestia with Dora—a seer also burdened by her gift, as well as the oppressive intimacy enforced by her mind-melding circle of elites, led by Dr. Vivaldi.

Beset by this innate ability that has become a form of enslavement, Pierrot and Dora set off—hoping their journey would both resolve the past and guide them toward a new future. The couple’s subsequent arrival on the mainland brings them into contact with an omniscient child, or Child—who embodies both the future of mankind and its messiah. READ MORE…

Memory in Present Tense: On Haruki Murakami’s First Person Singular

July 1, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Darren Huang

Murakami's latest collection returns to his perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals.

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel, Knopf, 2021

In Haruki Murakami’s short story, “On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning” (from his 1993 collection The Elephant Vanishes), the archetypal Murakami protagonist—an unreliable, doubtful man—fleetingly encounters an unfamiliar girl on the street and suddenly realizes she is the 100% perfect girl for him, though he has never spoken to her, nor finds her particularly beautiful. Instead, this melancholic, gently absurdist piece concerns itself with what the narrator would have said had he approached the girl. After dismissing a number of ridiculous ideas, the narrator decides on a long fabulist story, in which a young girl and young boy meet, discover they are one hundred percent perfect for each other, and separate to test their feelings. While apart, however, both lose their memories, and when they eventually encounter each other again, both only briefly acknowledge that they are perfect counterparts, but still go on to forever disappear from one another’s lives.

The story, which later served as inspiration for Murakami’s novel 1Q84, employs the author’s recurring narrative device of intermingling reality and unreality in the minds of his narrators, largely applied to the fleeting but transformative romantic encounters between men and women—most famously evident in his early bestselling novel, Norwegian Wood. It also reflects Murakami’s longstanding thematic concerns of loss, estrangement, doomed love, and loneliness. Notably, the young girl and boy not only become estranged from each other, but also from themselves in the loss of their memories; this theme of disconnection unites the stories in the author’s latest release, First Person Singular, fluidly translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel. The collection is his first since the English publication of Men Without Women in 2017, and returns to Murakami’s perennial fixations with jazz music, baseball, and mysterious meetings with women and animals. They are all narrated by an aged writer—resembling Murakami himself—who wistfully reflects on loosely chronological formative experiences. In this way, the stories blur not only dream and reality but also author and narrator, playfully employing the lens of memory to grapple with how we transcend—or fail to transcend— the disconnections that occur between others and ourselves.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our June Book Club Selection: FEM by Magda Cârneci

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

Cârneci's protagonist is a modern Scheherazade—or is she?

The persuasive potentials of storytelling don’t always hold the life-or-death thrill that they did for the mythical Scheherazade, who spun her narratives to stay alive, but as the profundities of Magda Cârneci’s FEM prove, there is always an enchantment in speaking one’s own experiences to another. Exalted with Cârneci’s celebrated poetics and visceral in its discernment of gendered bodies, our Book Club selection for June is a novel that speaks to our evolving understandings of physicality, sexuality, and selfhood as refracted in societal prisms of sex, femininity, and myth.

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 Q&As with the author or the translator of each title!

FEM by Magda Cârneci, translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter, Deep Vellum, 2021

In the very first lines of FEM, the protagonist—a fictionalized version of author Magda Cârneci—compares herself to the mythical heroine Scheherazade, then immediately troubles the comparison: “A little, everyday Scheherazade in an ordinary neigh­borhood, in a provincial city; your personal Scheherazade, even if you won’t cut my head off in the morning, when I fail to keep you awake all night with extraordinary stories.”

How, then, is she like Scheherazade? She will indeed attempt to enchant her listener, a lover, with a string of stories—but are all women who tell stories like Scheherazade? It is not a simple affinity between the two women that gives meaning to the comparison, but, more fruitfully, the symmetry’s imprecision. Like the north ends of two magnets, the two storytellers’ refusal to meet tantalizes, inviting the reader into the no-man’s land, in which they may question—or even participate in this exchange of identities. Cârneci’s own active approach to living in a body, in fact, is exactly what she begs her listener/reader to adopt, and her appeal is so breathtaking, it’s a wonder anyone could refuse:

We are seeds sown into the brown-black loam of a terrestrial existence, and we must germinate and rise slowly from our fragile burgeoning, our green sprouting, through lay­ers of clay and stone, through bacteria, worms, and insects that wish to devour us, we must pierce through sheets of underground water and enemy root systems, our germi­nations are deviated by contrary forces, deceived by grav­itations and visions, by temptations and traps, but pulled upward by an atavistic, core instinct, along a fragile thread of light, pulled by an inverted, celestial gravity, we are tractable, attracted toward growth at any price . . .

READ MORE…

One’s Own Desire: Arab Women Writers Speak for Themselves in We Wrote in Symbols

June 23, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Mariam Diefallah

This anthology provides a glimpse into a world that has been constantly made invisible or policed within systems of domestication and abuse.

We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, edited by Selma Dabbagh, Saqi Books, 2021

As an Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim woman, love and lust have largely occupied two separate worlds in my life. While I yearned for the elusive idea of love in my youth and pursued it in relationships, I had also deeply internalized that it had to end in heartbreak; I believed that love, like many ideas, could never be fully comprehended. But lust was different. Lust was an action—an action to avoid and repress, because it leads to sex, and sex is dangerous. When I started reading We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, I thought of my upbringing, of the two separate worlds I have built for love and lust, and the difficulties of reconciling them in my adult life. This anthology, edited by the British-Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh and published by Saqi books, includes one hundred and one pieces by seventy-five different women from the Middle East and North Africa region, as well as from the diaspora. Most of the pieces are translated from Arabic, many are originally written in English, and the minority are translated from French.

In the book’s introduction, Dabbagh explains that translating works about love and lust is difficult, though we do not learn about the ways in which the various translations could have impacted the anthology. This is especially pertinent in the cases of translations from Arabic to English, which represent the majority of the works in the text; Arabic can be seen as a unifying language, but the subtleties and differences between the dialects dictate different cultural specificities and reflect a stark diversity in both place and community. In other words, unless the place of origin is clear, the readers lose a sense of place with the absence of dialect, and different geographies and contexts start feeling neutral.

In the introduction, Dabbagh contextualizes the largely overlooked history of erotic female writers in Arabic literature. Although names of ancient goddesses of love and fertility in the Arab region—such as Isis and Ishtar—are well known, the topic of female Arab sexuality still comes as a novelty for many. Similarly, despite the fame of certain Abbasid poets such as Abu Nawas, female poets in elite Abbasid literary salons are not famous, if known at all. This lack of awareness is further complicated by the total disappearance of women erotic writings during the fall of Andalusia in 1492; Dabbagh clarifies that women writing on love and lust faced a blackout for almost half a millennia, reappearing only in the late nineteenth century. By then, authors and novelists—like Zaynab Fawwaz—began challenging common misogynistic practices such as arranged marriages, and therein paved the way for many women Arab writers to discuss sexuality in various literary forms today. Ranging over three millennia, the long span this anthology covers is indicative of the two interests of my review: what lies beyond the celebratory—especially in relation to difficult and/or painful lust—and the limitations of the narrative linking love and lust as two sides of the same coin.  READ MORE…

Selfhood is a Queer Fiction: On The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei

June 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Shawn Hoo

Writing the self into being from a hodgepodge of cultural texts—that is what’s elemental to queer life

The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei, translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich, Columbia University Press, 2021

Dwelling on a female classmate’s romantic advances in her youth, and belatedly cognisant of her learned aversion towards all forms of intimacy, the thirty-year-old Momo realises the incongruence of the one self-guided decision she had made in her life—to become a dermal care technician: “She could just as easily have chosen a more solitary profession, like a novelist. Why did she have to choose a job reliant on intimacy?” It is the year 2100 and humanity, terrified of the ultraviolet rays seeping through the depleted ozone layer, has evacuated from land en masse to settle on the seabed. Amidst the residual trauma of the sun’s lethal rays, the dermal care trade booms and Momo climbs the profession steadily, eventually becoming the owner of Salon Canary and something of a celebrity in T City. As Momo spends her days massaging her wealthy clients with M skin—a technology that gives her access to their private lives—what she cannot shake off is the feeling that “there was at least one layer of membrane between her and the world.”

In The Membranes, Chi Ta-wei, renowned Taiwanese novelist (and past Asymptote contributor), tackles a central problem of existentialism: how do we account for the estrangement between ourselves and the world? The thrilling sci-fi classic (originally published in 1995) then proceeds to compellingly insist on exploring the question’s social dimensions, getting under the skin of its queer, inscrutable protagonist. A slim, intelligent novella that ambitiously projects a militarised and corporate new world order in the rubble of environmental collapse, Chi’s brand of world-building is equally invested in envisioning new global formations as it is in attesting to emerging sexual subjectivities. It bristles with the emancipatory energy that characterises the novels coming out of post-martial-law Taiwan. Read together with works such as Chu T’ien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man or Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Last Words from Montmartre, English readers can now appreciate a fuller scope of the queer efflorescence unleashed in the experimental fiction of Taiwan’s nineties and the internal heterogeneity of its cultural moment. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation of Chi’s award-winning work comes a quarter of a century after its Chinese publication, but contemporary readers will relish going back to the future in a work that ventriloquises our present, its conjectures at once anachronistic and prophetic. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: June 2021

June 14, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by David Boyd, Eva Wissting, and Julia Sherwood

The best and latest from Mexico, Sweden, and Poland!

This month, our selections of excellent works from around the world are manifold with mystery: some historical, some psychological, and some linguistic. From Poland, philosopher Remigiusz Ryziński attempts to figure out the sexual politics behind Michel Foucault’s hasty departure from Warsaw. The newest autobiographical novel from Linda Boström Knausgård contends with the author’s own experiences with electroshock therapy, and its impact on her memories. Lastly, in an essay collection by Mariana Oliver explores the act of moving between the various territories of cities and languages, between familiarity and curiosity. Read on to find out more!

foucault

Foucault in Warsaw by Remigiusz Ryziński, translated from the Polish by Sean Gasper Bye, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Julia Sherwood, Editor-at-Large for Slovakia

“Michel Foucault came to Poland in October 1958. He took a position as the first director of the newly founded Center for French Culture at the University of Warsaw. It was in Warsaw that he finished his doctoral thesis, later published as History of Madness. Yet in mid-1959, he was forced to leave Poland. The reason was a certain boy, Jurek. No one ever figured out who this boy really was.” With the mystery laid out, Remigiusz Ryziński opens his exploration of this little-known episode in the life of the philosopher as a young man, and his attempt to find out what led to Foucault’s expulsion from Warsaw.

Foucault in Warsaw is the first non-academic book by Remigiusz Ryziński—a Polish philosopher and cultural critic who studied at the Sorbonne—and another addition to Sean Gasper Bye’s impressive portfolio of translations. Combining the techniques of literary reportage with the analytical tools of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, Ryziński has unearthed secret police dossiers and trawled through hundreds of pages of reports filed by undercover cops and snitches: “Stories typed or handwritten, full of dates and places, names and connections, meetings, relationships, breakups, love, and suffering. Reading them felt like flipping through someone’s family photo album.” He immersed himself in the press and newsreels from the period, incorporating details, such as the price of everyday goods and statistical information, to conjure up the flavours, textures, and colours of Warsaw—the city that is as much a hero of this book as the philosopher himself, along with “the boys whose company Foucault enjoyed most.”

For those familiar with recent works of Polish literature, Ryziński’s reconstruction of the life of the gay community in Warsaw in the late 1950s will bring to mind Lubiewo, Michał Witkowski’s groundbreaking 2004 novel depicting gay life on Poland’s Baltic coast, before and after the end of communism. While Witkowski’s book presents fictionalised versions of real stories and characters, Ryziński has tracked down the actual people who knew Foucault during his time in Warsaw (including some who were romantically linked to him) or were active on the gay scene at the time. He retraced the places Foucault did—or was likely to—frequent, recreating a detailed topography of Warsaw’s cruising spots: an assortment of cafés and bars from the seedy to the sophisticated, steam baths both ornate and functional, public squares and monuments ideally suited for pulling soldiers, and public toilets such as the French-style urinals known as “mushrooms,” to the bathrooms at the Palace of Culture, considered “the height of luxury.” READ MORE…

Meeting in Positano: The Late Modernist Fiction of Goliarda Sapienza

June 9, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Matt Hanson

The novel is easy to read, but it is not an easy read.

Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore, Other Press, 2021

Meeting in Positano was the very last novel that Goliarda Sapienza wrote before she fell to her death in 1996 at her home in Gaeta. Frustrated by many failed attempts to publish her writing throughout her life, Sapienza’s ultimate book was fraught with the existentialist neuroses of modernism as she searched for ways through and out of its sprawling, vicious embrace. Between its fragile subjectivity and ambivalent subject, Meeting in Positano traces the psychology of its protagonist, caught between film production in the Italian capital and the pacifying lure of the titular out-of-the-way town—wherein a fading daughter of the old aristocracy has also come to shed her qualms with the pace, pressure, and emptiness of materialism, money, and men.

The daughter of Sicilian socialists—who, among many plaudits, published Antonio Gramsci—Sapienza lived along that drift in which sensitive artists become hardened intellectuals before succumbing to outright revolution. Despite the environment of ardent intellectualism, the wayward, postwar Sapienza children were afloat in an Italy which resembled a rudderless raft in the Mediterranean—a country that had gone slack in its attempted confrontation of the country’s unresolved tendencies to fascism. In its quest for spiritual emigration, the literary work of Goliarda Sapienza details the inner lives of her fellow Italians, challenged by the trials of collective renewal following years of unspeakable despair during and after the years of World War II—even if the traces of those years are only seen, or merely felt, after the fact.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young

May 31, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alexandra Irimia

Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.

As pandemic literature carves out a space of its own in contemporary letters, such writings unveil what is seemingly opaque or inscrutable about the presumed normalcy of “the before times.” In our Book Club selection for May, To the Warm Horizon, Choi Jin-young sketches a fragmentary, kaleidoscopic tale of survival and longing in the aftermath of a global catastrophe triggered by illness. The focus, however, is not on contagion itself. Instead, it falls on the variety of ways in which human interactions unfold within a more general dynamic of contrasting forces: fear and hope, reason and unreason, cruelty and love. 

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 Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young, translated from the Korean by Soje, Honford Star, 2021

Among the many side effects of the pandemic, we have witnessed a global reawakening of the taste for narratives of contagion, (post-)apocalyptic scenarios, and disaster fiction. If in March 2020, readers rushed to revisit the classics (Boccaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, or Camus’s The Plague), the public quickly moved to explore newer works as the pandemic stretched on, such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). The early months of 2021 came with an entirely new crop of contemporary writing, whose publication in English translation was likely encouraged—if not sped up—by the timeliness of their subject matter. Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon, published originally in Korean in 2017 and in Soje’s translation in 2021, is an example of the newly acquired popularity of these viral themes.

An unnamed virus serves only as a distant background for the five first-person narrators whose voices echo one another in this book, wherein the disastrous toll of hundreds of thousands of victims a day has decimated the population of the globe in a matter of days, setting in motion massive flows of refugees headed for an ever-distant promise of warmth and safety lurking on the horizon. Not much is disclosed about the disease itself, except that it provokes a rapid death; Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.

Countering the entropy of a world in dissolution, the narrative stitches together twenty kaleidoscopic chapters, in which five nomadic voices each offer their own experience of the events. The fragments are titled after their narrators and read like curated journal entries, varying in length and intensity. Amongst the speakers, Dori and Jina are given the most depth and contour; they speak for themselves as queer women, and their burgeoning romantic relationship is at the core of the novel. Ryu is the spokesperson for her family’s story, while Joy and Gunji are episodic storytellers whose accounts center on their own desires. READ MORE…