Reviews

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.

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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. 

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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…

How the Light Hides Us: On Cuíer: Queer Brazil

October 4, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Cuíer gives us pause and proclaims its own foreignness—only on its terms are we invited into its gambit.

Cuíer: Queer Brazil, translated from the Portuguese, Two Lines Press, 2021

Can we translate “queer”?

Cuíer: Queer Brazil—a brand-new anthology of queer/cuíer Brazilian poetry, fiction, and non-fiction translated from Portuguese into English—wants us to grapple with this conundrum. Uniting voices across generations, genders, and mediums, the latest offering from Two Lines Press’ chic Calico series is, like all its predecessors, expansively and thoughtfully curated.

A vibrant portrait by Igor Furtado graces the cover; in it, we glimpse a masc-identified person lying in prone position—one could say amphibiously—on what appears to be the earth of a river bank. His lime-green skin-tight top accentuates the exposure of his body’s lower half, boldly visible in the background through spangles of rippling water. The tattoo on his arm, the earring basking in shadow, the painted nails of his splayed fingers. His direct gaze at the camera mingles enticement and challenge in equal measure.

Like the photograph, Cuíer gives us pause and proclaims its own foreignness—only on its terms are we invited into its gambit. As the only Calico title so far with a non-English word as its name, “Cuíer” demands to be sounded, savoured on the tongue—it audibly carries the phonetic ghost of “queer,” but must be shaped differently in the mouth. The word ostensibly stems from Tatiana Nascimento’s avant-garde “cuíer paradiso,” a poem in Cuíer wherein parentheses, wordplay, and dialect wreath around a yearning for the simple pleasures of quotidian love. What unfolds is an enumeration of possible “less than”s: “less bureaucratic than / marriage equality regulated by the state,” “less surveilled than e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y / asking if it is (non-)exclusive,” “less of all that makes us listless.”

In the absence of utopia, one can only imagine it in terms of what it is not (yet). Nascimento’s Afro-futurist linguistic experiments—near the book’s centerpiece—perhaps gesture to the impulse behind Cuíer’s formation: to know another “with no need for armor, / anticipating no answer, / no need to learn how to punch nor / map the space before entering.” A place of silence beyond translation. READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Kaya Days by Carl de Souza

September 29, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

De Souza’s densely packed novel is a disorienting one, purposefully so.

Carl de Souza began writing Kaya Days in the tumultuous throes of the very event it depicts—the 1999 riots in the East African island of Mauritius, following the death of popular singer Kaya. From the description of those frenzied days comes a work that renders the electric immediacy of sensation with vividness, kinetics, and a musician’s aptness for rhythm. We are proud to announce this singular work as our Book Club selection for the month of September—a formidable voice in Mauritian literature and an unforgettable novel of revolution, poetry, and becoming.

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.

Kaya Days by Carl de Souza, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman, Two Lines Press, 2021

If war is a matter of hurry up and wait, then the rest of life is often the opposite. As Hemingway says, “Gradually, then suddenly.” So it is with Santee Bissoonlall and her mystical journey in Carl de Souza’s Kaya Days, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman—“. . . all this had happened gradually, with the quiet of a new beginning.” For many years, Santee is a child. Then suddenly, over the course of a violent and chaotic few days, she is a woman, a queen, a figure receding. De Souza’s intricate novel propels her on the journey of becoming, as she traverses the tumultuous 1999 Mauritian riots.

The riots were an uprising of Mauritian Creoles following the death of Joseph Réginald Topize—better known by his stage name, Kaya—in police custody under suspect circumstances. The word kaya is a reference to Bob Marley’s 1978 album of the same name, and Kaya, as a musician, was a pivotal figure in the blending of Mauritian sega and reggae into a genre that would come to be known as seggae. He was also an activist for Creole rights and the decriminalization of marijuana, among other things. Yet this political-historical thread is not the primary melody of de Souza’s novel; rather, it serves as the thrumming pedal note to Santee’s journey through the burning streets.

We follow her as she quests for her lost brother, Ramesh—younger than her yet seemingly so much worldlier, as he has been permitted to attend school and traverse the outside world, while Santee has been kept at home, condemned to household drudgery by her sex and her family’s poverty. For Santee, the confusion of the riots is a distant rumble; it is the more immediate problem of a missing sibling which drives her on through the ruined streets.

It was getting dark under the mango trees. She had no hope of understanding, but that wasn’t what she needed to do, that wasn’t her job, she was just here because Ma couldn’t be. What she needed to do was find Ram; one of these alleys would lead to him, but which one?

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2021

September 27, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel and Sarah Moore

New work this week from Mexico and Algeria!

This month, our editors dive into two powerful works that look into the dominating subjects of human life: sex and war. An erotically subversive collection of stories by award-winning author Mónica Lavín moves to the darkest and most questioning arenas of desire, and a memoir by Algerian Freedom fighter Mokhtar Mokhtefi stands as a cogent and compelling text of witness of his nation’s struggle against French colonialism.

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Meaty Pleasures by Mónica Lavín, translated from the Spanish by Dorothy Potter Snyder, Katakana Editores, 2021

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

There is catharsis in transgression, and pleasure—especially the centering of one’s own pleasure—is all too often transgressive. The twelve short stories in Mónica Lavín’s collection, Meaty Pleasures, thoughtfully curated and translated by Dorothy Potter Snyder, capitalizes on this subversive desire, exploding the tranquil veneer of domestic life by compelling our complicity in the deeply uncomfortable and socially taboo.

It all begins and ends with the flesh. “Postprandial,” the decadent opening story, foregoes grounding details about setting and character in order to focalize an aphrodisiac tasting menu, offered from a hotel restaurant manager to a passerby, and the explicit sex that follows. It readies the reader for Lavín’s challenging approach to realism, intimacy, and power imbalance which pervades the rest of the collection. The final story, “Meaty Pleasures,” also emphasizes the sensual relationship between food and sex—but in a completely different way. Told from the perspective of an adult daughter who has watched her parents’ Saturday afternoon artisanal butchering hobby grow into an obsession that echoes over the course of their lives, the sex is left entirely to the implicit, straining in constant tension with the parental web of familial obligations. The daughter and her sister reflect: “Sometimes we’d ask each other, have you tried calling Papá and Mamá on Saturday afternoons? Because on that day of week, they never answered the phone to either one of us.”

In between, we meet many a troubled family. As is common in stories of nonconformity, various characters rebel against the numbing effect of matrimony, but their resistance does not lead them to any predictable conclusion—or perhaps any predictability is heightened to a manic extreme. In “What’s there to come back to,” a husband leaves his repentant wife on their doorstep for a whole winter’s night before he, begrudgingly, allows her back into their home. Snyder’s translation captures a certain languor and resentment in his stream of consciousness that induces anxiety when set against the excruciating awareness of her waiting, building a rawness that painfully and coldly leads to his reflection upon waking up in the morning: “Fried eggs again for breakfast, the TV news. I think she’s gone. Maybe she froze to death. Maybe we both froze to death.” In “You Never Know,” a son tires of the demons left to him by his mother’s abandonment. “Then, you kiss and hug them in the shadows of a movie theater, and you masturbate thinking about them, and when you start to want something more than their bodies, like their companionship and tenderness, you leave without saying goodbye.” Innocent—righteous, even—though his anger seems, his journey darkens with an incestual turn. “Roberto’s Mouth” finds a disgruntled housewife disappointed yet again when her own plans to leave her family are thwarted by her naughty-mouthed chat-room lover’s lazy approach to cuckholding. In such narratives that continually unpack and distort the concepts of familial intimacy, images of transgressively penetrated flesh dominate the collection, inviting the reader to reflect on the discomfort they inspire. READ MORE…

To Love God and Women: On The Last One by Fatima Daas

September 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

The Last One . . . challenges what constitutes faith and its validity, between society’s shared meaning and love in all its variant forms.

The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, Other Press, 2021

Of the human world, love is both conflict and destination. Our understanding of love—what it is, how to do it—is immensely varied, and its dominating presence rules our formative years. To be deprived of, or shamed from, an open expression of love can be a numbing experience, one that rearranges the nucleus of our social interactions and emotional familiarities into a sinister puzzle. Still, no matter in estrangement or intimacy, our lives revolve around our need, or lack thereof, for closeness; the life of The Last One’s narrator, Fatima, is no different. For Fatima, the precariousness of love applies to her human relationships, but are further compared and contrasted with the relationship she nurtures with God.

The novel, comprised of vignettes and fragmented memories, is coalesced by Fatima’s attempt to comprehend, or perhaps mend, the conflicting multiplicity of her self—queer, Muslim, Algerian-French, woman. Each scene opens in a diary-like manner: “My name is Fatima,” followed by a personal fact—sometimes trivial, such as the consequence of her naming or her like/dislike for commuting—and other times, a profound reflective statement: “I regret that no one taught me how to love”. The entire book charts her pilgrimage of probing about in the study of love, of creating and maintaining meaningful and intimate relationships with other people, with God, or with herself. All of this is interlaced with disparate interpretations of cultures and languages, often governed by paternalistic attitudes.

From the beginning, we learn the precious nature of her name—that it “mustn’t be soiled,” or “wassekh”: to “soil, stir shit up, blacken.” The origin and meaning of her name is sacred, derived from the Prophet Muhammad’s beloved daughter Fatima—which means “little weaned she-camel.” She analyses the different definitions of “fatm”—the Arabic for “to wean”—compiling all three in the same paragraph as if to correlate them with one another: “Stop the nursing of a child or a young animal to transition it to a new mode of feeding; feel frustration; separate someone from something or something from someone or someone from someone.” In the same scene, she compares and contrasts her strained familial circumstances with the other Fatima’s:

Like Fatima, I should have had three sisters. […]

Fatima’s father deems her the noblest woman in heaven.

The prophet Mohammed—may God’s peace and blessings be upon him—said one day: “Fatima is a part of me. Any who harm her harm me.”

My father would never say such a thing.

My father doesn’t say much to me anymore. READ MORE…

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…