Reviews

An Existential Gangster Novel: On Un-su Kim’s The Plotters

October 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Darren Huang

Kim’s novel joins recent [work] that offer[s] critiques of South Korean capitalist society and class—most notably Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite.

Prize-winning South Korean writer Un-su Kim was first introduced to English readers in 2019 via The Plotters, a hitman thriller that follows protagonist Reseng, a man raised by his mentor, Old Raccoon, to be an assassin. Comparisons have been made to numerous other gangster works, such as films by Quentin Tarantino and the John Wick series, yet Kim’s take on the genre is compelling and unique. After the death of a close fellow assassin, Reseng begins to question his place in this lucrative yet nihilistic industry, as the novel takes a more existential turn. In this review—the first of four in a series spotlighting Korean fiction in partnership with Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)—Asymptote editor-at-large Darren Huang explores The Plotters as a political critique of Korean capitalism and considers whether it succeeds in subverting the gangster genre.

The soldierly heroes of literary and cinematic works in the gangster genre are often absorbed and then trapped within rigid political and cultural structures defined by their underworlds. In the 2019 Martin Scorsese film, The Irishman, Frank Sheeran, the hitman protagonist, played by a typically reticent and unsmiling Robert De Niro with his curled lower lip, is initially an outsider but assimilates into the Bufalino crime family by adopting the mobster ethos—cold-bloodedness, discreteness, and above all, unswerving loyalty to his superiors. He never seriously questions the instructions of his boss, even when they involve the killing of a longtime friend and mentor. In Mario Puzo’s crime novel, The Godfather, the tragic hero Michael Corleone at first renounces his family business of organized crime and detaches himself by escaping New York to settle in Italy. A number of incidents (including a car bomb explosion that inadvertently kills his wife and an assassination attempt on his father) compel him to return to New York, where he succeeds his father as head of the family organization. He expands his father’s dynastic empire and rises through ruthlessness and cunning to become the most powerful don in the country. READ MORE…

Announcing our September Book Club Selection: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui

October 1, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

By immersing us in Jmiaa’s world, Alaoui successfully avoids stereotype.

Humour and courage infuse debut author Meryem Alaoui’s Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, a brazen and lucid portrait of a sex worker who moves through her city of Casablanca with a scrupulous gaze and an aptitude for colourful description. As our Book Club selection for September 2020, the novel enchants with its surprising and exacting prose as equally as with its deft navigation of human experience and emotional spectrums, building a fully populated world that seems to have always been there, waiting for one to visit.  

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Other Press, 2020

The title of Meryem Alaoui’s debut novel, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, suggests a direct, candid style—and that’s exactly what we get. Alaoui’s charming and at times profane protagonist, Jmiaa Bent Larbi, shares her harrowing story with unflinching clarity: after being pressured into an early marriage, Jmiaa and her new husband Hamid move to Casablanca, where their lusty honeymoon phase soon gives way to a much more sinister relationship. Hamid sees start-up capital in his young wife’s body and pimps her out to fund his get-rich-quick schemes. The only plot that ends up working out, however, is a passage to Spain, where he finds a new wife and a raft of financial troubles. Jmiaa tells us all about the turns her life takes from there, and Alaoui infuses the seemingly casual narration with careful observations of Moroccan life, tracing the fault lines where the country’s social classes collide.

In Casa, as Jmiaa calls the seaside city, she builds a life among a rich milieu: her fellow sex workers, who tease and joke and squabble like sisters; her young daughter, Samia, who Jmiaa fears will soon unravel the true nature of her work; and her mother, who must grapple with various aspects of her daughter’s unusual life. The women here aren’t sketches or stereotypes, but fully drawn characters with a complex set of motivations and relationships. The men vary in their own way. In one haunting passage, Jmiaa describes those who seek her services:

You straddle all of them. The loser, the frustrated guy, the lonely guy, the son of a whore, the one just passing through.

The one who blames the warmth of your hand for his weak, sterile joy.

And the one for whom no hole satisfies his hatred. Who is not appeased until he hears the ripping sound of a brown and bloody stain.

And the one who pumps his useless sweat into your stomach. He has been cursed never to eat his fill, so he bites your flesh. So that his teeth—today at least—serve some purpose. And in the wheeze of his sulfur breath, he spurts his bitterness onto your cheek and your tangled hair.

It’s no wonder, then, that Jmiaa often loses herself in television. Whether they’re set in Morocco or Mexico, the stories that unfold onscreen offer an escape from the familiar pattern of her days. Like Jmiaa’s drinking habits, her TV binges initially provoke concern, but as the novel progresses, those movies and shows unexpectedly offer a path to a different kind of escape. (At the risk of spoiling the plot, I won’t elaborate.) READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2020

September 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal and Filip Noubel

New work from Taiwan's Amang and Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck!

This month’s selected new translations from around the world cross more than geographic boundaries: the first combines deliciously feral Taiwanese poetry with exclusive, first-hand conversations on the process of writing and translating it; the second features a series of stylistically varied but equally poignant essays on an acclaimed German author’s personal and political journey. Both titles prompt us to peek into their subjects’ fascinating lives and work, and we’re all too happy to indulge.

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Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations by Amang, translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, Deep Vellum, 2020

Review by Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large for Uzbekistan

When I agreed to review Raised by Wolves, I thought I had signed up to read a translation of contemporary Taiwanese poetry. I very quickly realized my mistake: Raised by Wolves is much more than that; it is an invitation to partake in a feast of words that agree to disagree, that clash and dissolve to reemerge in another language. It is also an act of transgressive eavesdropping, as the poet and her translator let readers in on their intimate discussions about their craft (the book’s subtitle is “poems and conversations”).

Amang has published several collections, including On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002 (2003), No Daddy (2008), Chariots of Women (2016), and As We Embrace Thousands Are Dying (2016). In addition, she is a filmmaker and blogger, and her eclectic interests are clearly reflected in this new translation of her work. A couple of themes, however, seem to be especially prevalent throughout.

First, as the poet discloses (incidentally explaining her collection’s English title), she was raised mostly by her grandmother, who “was quite a character. She was very powerful and courageous. A she-wolf. She would do or say whatever she wanted. None of th[at] Confucian nonsense for her.” In line with this almost feral sentiment, many poems include raw images celebrating nature or the vibrance of the human body. In one, for instance, Amang writes: “Thrusting your hand down a tiger’s throat / to tear out his heart  / so, too, I / cut from a book a sheet of / ice.” And elsewhere: “I can give you anything / . . . / except that puny little stick / they call a prick / and is that worth making a fuss about?” READ MORE…

Of Loneliness and Disillusion: Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying

September 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

While each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. [The novel] draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories, 2020

A Country for Dying is more about atmosphere than plot. It is a brief, taut work that digs deep into the margins of society to demonstrate the many ways in which colonialism pollutes our notions of love and self. Over the course of three parts and six chapters, Abdellah Taïa introduces us to the inner lives of four immigrants in Paris, as they contend with their present realities, the pasts they are trying to flee, and the dreams they still hope to indulge.

Their stories read like monologues, and talk toward each other more than they ever intersect. In this they mimic the characters, who are largely confined to their individual apartments; even the city that holds them all is, in a way, isolating—a refuge that can never quite be home (as a Moroccan living in Paris, Taïa himself writes from a place of exile). Thus, while each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. A Country for Dying draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

If there’s anything like a connective tissue between the stories, it is Zahira: a forty-year-old Moroccan sex worker who has moved to Paris to escape the trauma of her father’s suicide when she was a girl. She struggles with the guilt of having “abandoned” him when he fell ill and was confined to the second floor of their house. “I didn’t think my father was going to die,” she reflects, “[b]ut I accepted, just like everyone else, that I wouldn’t see him again . . . The weight of his heavy footsteps echoes in my ear.” Grief-stricken, Zahira struggles to rewrite his story and heal her pain. Much of the chapter devoted to it is written in the second person as she addresses her father directly, updating him on his family’s lives after his death; in practice, however, it feels like she is addressing the reader, telling us her story on her own terms, to great emotional effect.

There is a direct through line between Zahira’s trauma and her instinct to take care of Mojtaba, a gay Iranian exile, when she finds him collapsed on the street. Looking after him over Ramadan helps her cope with her father’s death: “He was also tender, sweet, melancholic. That was obvious immediately. Something in him was similar to me, familiar.” For a moment, the quiet intimacy that forms between them brings them the peace they so badly deserve. Their bond never ceases to feel fragile, though, and it is clear that it will not last. READ MORE…

What it Takes to Come Home Again: Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts in Review

September 9, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar

Terranova [. . .] foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism.

Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Seven Stories, 2020

Nadia Terranova’s sophomore novel—her first to be published in English—is a carefully crafted meditation on familial ties and the pernicious effects of unprocessed trauma on a woman’s sentimental education. Originally published in 2018, Farewell, Ghosts tells the story of Ida, a thirty-six-year-old woman who lives in Rome and makes a living by writing stories for the radio. One morning in September, she receives a call from her mother, asking her to come home to Messina—a city that Ida has ceased to think of as hers—to help prepare their house for sale. In sorting through the objects of her childhood, Ida will be forced to revisit the trauma that defined her life: the sudden departure of her father when she was thirteen.

Although we are told that Ida’s father, Sebastiano, suffered from severe depression, his disappearance is never explained, nor is it clear if he is still alive. His fate, however, is of little consequence to the novel, which instead lingers with the living—those left behind in the wake of abandonment. Years after the event, Ida’s emotional growth has been stunted by the failure to come to terms with her pain, a failure exacerbated by the lack of a body to mourn, or even the certainty of death. As a result, Ida has grown into a woman who meticulously and egregiously avoids emotion, preferring to reroute her suffering via the “fake true stories” that she writes. She carries herself—and her relationships—with a composure that betrays a tumultuous undercurrent of repressed feelings, acquired through years of conscious disassociation.

There is, for instance, her marriage—described as a “lame creature”—to the dependable-if-too-bland Pietro, perfectly named for his rock-like reliability and immutability. As Ida remarks at some point, “our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.” Progressively, the novel reveals that this extreme reserve comes from Ida’s adolescent years, in which her mother entrusted her with the care of her father while she went—or, as Ida saw it, escaped—to work. The pain of these years and the culminating abandonment drove a wedge between the two women. “If there was an art in which my mother and I had become expert during my adolescence,” Ida says, “that art was silence.” Even decades later, their relationship is entirely modulated by her father’s absence, governed more by the things left unsaid than those they are able to utter.

It is to Terranova’s great merit that she is able to capture trauma’s potential to stop time in such a limpid manner. Among the novel’s many metaphorical figures (the house and its crumbling foundations, for one) is the alarm clock that belonged to Ida’s father, frozen at 6:16 a.m. on the day he left. “The alarm clock said six-sixteen,” Ida muses, “[and] would say six-sixteen forever.” Victorianists and fans of Dickens will sense a reference to Great Expectations, specifically to the morbidity of Satis House, where all the clocks had been stopped at twenty to nine, the exact time when Miss Havisham realized she’d been abandoned by her lover. Conjuring the specter of Miss Havisham makes abundantly clear just how high the stakes are for Ida, and the extent to which she risks being trapped in the prison of trauma. And while Dickens’s depiction of a woman ravaged by abandonment was inflected by his extraordinary gift for the grotesque, Terranova makes a similar claim about the dangers of remaining stuck in the circuity of grief, even if she foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism. READ MORE…

Announcing our August Book Club Selection: People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami

August 31, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The portrayal and analysis of collective experience makes this a text that truly meets our moment.

As we continue into the latter half of this increasingly surreal year, one finds the need for a little magic. Thus it is with a feeling of great timeliness that we present our Book Club selection for the month of August, the well-loved Hiromi Kawakami’s new fiction collection, People From My Neighborhood. In turns enigmatic and poignant, as puzzling as it is profound, Kawakami’s readily quiet, pondering work is devoted to the way our human patterns may be spliced through with intrigue, strangeness, and fantasy; amongst these intersections of normality and sublimity one finds a great and wandering beauty.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen, Granta, 2020

Like a box of chocolates, Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen) contains an assortment of bite-sized delights, each distinct yet related. This peculiar collection of flash fiction paints a portrait of exactly what the title suggests—the denizens of the narrator’s neighborhood—while striking a perfect balance between intriguing specificity and beguiling universality. The opening chapters introduce readers to each of the neighborhood’s curious inhabitants, while later chapters build upon the foundation, gradually erecting a universe of complex human relationships, rigorous social commentary, immense beauty, and more than a little magic.

Existing fans of Kawakami’s will surely recognize these common features of her award-winning body of work, while first-time readers will likely go searching for more. Goossen is better known as a translator of Murakami and editor of the English version of the Japanese literary magazine MONKEY: New Writing from Japan (formerly Monkey Business); ever committed to introducing Anglophone readers to non-canonical Japanese writers, he brings his flair for nonchalant magical realism to this winning new collaboration.

The first story, “The Secret,” introduces readers to the anonymous narrator and sets the tone for the collection. First presented as genderless, (we only find out later that she is female) she discovers an androgynous child, who turns out to be male, under a white blanket in a park. The child, wild and independent, comes home with her. Despite occasional disappearances, he keeps her company as she ages, all the while remaining a child. In this story, we receive her only concrete—but general—description of herself: “I’ve come to realize that he can’t be human after all, seeing how he’s stayed the same all these years. Humans change over time. I certainly have. I’ve aged and become grumpy. But I’ve come to love him, though I didn’t at first.” This one statement exemplifies many of the collection’s trademark characteristics and overarching themes: a version of time in which past, present, and eternity coexist, the supernatural, and the narrator’s fascinating method of characterization. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: August 2020

August 17, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Samuel Kahler, and Scarlett Castillo

New work from Guadalupe Nettel, Małgorzata Szejnert, and Daniel Galera!

This month’s selections of newly translated world literature seem to revolve around the unknown, be it to uphold or dispel it: a Mexican short story collection explores its protagonists’ dark psyches while providing no easy answers, a piece of Polish reportage rediscovers lost voices on nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant experience in America, and a Brazilian novel hilariously tackles a group of friends’ exploits in almost unchartered digital territory during the nineties.

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Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine, Seven Stories Press, 2020

Review by Samuel Kahler, Communications Director

Unusual as they may be, the strange and wistful short fictions in Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories are not only clever in their portrayal of human desire and obsession; they are often wise as well. Nettel, an acclaimed Mexican author, was named as one of the Bogotá 39 and is a recipient of the largest Spanish-language short story collection prize, the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero. Bezoar is her second collection of stories, published in the original Spanish in 2008 and now translated into English by Suzanne Jill Levine.

Over the course of the book, Nettel and her characters have something fresh to reveal about their unique obsessions and secrets (the stories are told from the first-person perspective). But at just over one hundred pages, Bezoar is an all-too-brief journey through the grey areas and dark recesses of hidden passions, lusts, and compulsions.

Depending on one’s subjective definition, the narrators of Bezoar might be considered everyday people who, at face value, live quiet, unremarkable lives: a photographer in Paris, a man strolling through Tokyo’s botanical gardens, a teenager on a summer vacation, and—yes—a voyeur here, a stalker there, and one supermodel under psychiatric supervision. While memorable and idiosyncratic, these are not outsized characters with grand schemes; instead, they look inward and act in near-singular pursuit of resolving psychological issues. Fittingly, their stories are intimate chamber pieces that delight in the details of unfulfilled needs and wants, emotional attachments and detachments, and traces of personal insight that at times reflect a broader general truth about human dissatisfaction. READ MORE…

Symphonic Eternity: Gustave Roud’s Air of Solitude and Requiem in Review.

August 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Moore

His poems evoke all the senses, his landscapes orchestral, described in vivid detail with all their changing lights and colours.

Air of Solitude and Requiem by Gustave Roud, translated from the French by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds, Seagull Books, 2020

It is a question of the supreme instant when communion with the world is given to us, when the universe ceases to be a perfectly legible spectacle, entirely inane, to become an immense spray of messages, a concert of cries, songs, gestures ceaselessly beginning again, in which each being, each thing is at once sign and carrier of signs. The supreme instant also at which man feels his laughable inner royalty crumble, and trembles, and gives in to the calls coming from an undeniable elsewhere.

Once again the joy has fled with the change of season at the very moment we were about to come upon it.

Air of Solitude (Air de la solitude), the title of Gustave Roud’s most famous work is perfectly suited to the poet, who lived a secluded life isolated in Carrouge, his Swiss village in the Haut-Jorat. Moreover, it is crucial for the understanding of his poetry, which is rooted in these landscapes and customs, but often seen from an outside perspective. Considered one of Switzerland’s greatest poets, Roud’s work had a profound influence on the younger generation, the most famed of which is his mentee, prominent poet Philippe Jaccottet.

Roud published Air of Solitude in 1945 and Requiem, the second section of this two-part collection, in 1967. Whilst Air of Solitude expresses a celebration of—and nostalgia for—the inhabitants and landscapes of the Vaudois, Requiem displays Roud’s solitude through a personal quest to find a mystical fusion with nature and his beloved mother, who had already passed. This edition of his most important prose poems is now translated for the first time into English by Alexander Dickow and Sean T. Reynolds. READ MORE…

Our Enduring Fascination: On Patrik Svensson’s The Book of Eels

August 3, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting

Turning eels into an interesting read may seem challenging to some, but it’s exactly what Svensson accomplishes.

The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson, translated from the Swedish by Agnes Broomé, HarperCollins, 2020

The full English title of Swedish arts and culture journalist Patrik Svensson’s debut book is spot on: The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World. The original Swedish subtitle lacks “Our Enduring Fascination” and simply states “The Story of the Most Mysterious Creature in the World.” I like the English title better, because it’s that detail, the fact that the book is not just about eels, but also about us humans, our interest in the eels, and why they should matter to us, that makes this book about a slimy, snake-like water-creature relevant. 

Maybe you don’t think that you could be interested in a full-length book about every conceivable fact about eels. I certainly didn’t know I could be that interested until the buzz hit the Swedish literary scene last fall. It wasn’t just the book reviews, the author interviews, or the literary podcasts that kept turning their attention to The Book of Eels—Svensson was also awarded the August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award. And it didn’t stop there; even before the year ended, The Book of Eels had been sold to over thirty other countries. When I first heard about The Book of Eels, I could see why it stirred interest, because the subject matter is unconventional. So, what is the buzz all about? Well, for being a book about scientific, historic, and philosophical facts, it’s put together and presented in a prose that is easy to follow, even if you don’t typically read about the science of the bottom of the ocean or the ancient Greek origin of the scientific method. This is how Svensson depicts the Sargasso Sea:

The water is deep blue and clear, in places very nearly 23,000 feet deep, and the surface is carpeted with vast fields of sticky brown algae called Sargassum, which give the sea its name. Drifts of seaweed many thousands of feet across blanket the surface, providing nourishment and shelter for myriad creatures: tiny invertebrates, fish and jellyfish, turtles, shrimp, and crabs. Farther down in the deep, other kinds of seaweed and plants thrive. Life teems in the dark, like a nocturnal forest.

And so, with that nocturnal forest, Svensson establishes the centre stage for the Anguilla anguilla, the European eel, while simultaneously teaching us about the natural world and drawing us into his narrative. READ MORE…

Announcing our July Book Club Selection: A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti

July 30, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

If silence and solitude go hand in hand, so do music and communion.

After Fireflies’s acclaimed release in 2018, we are thrilled to present our July Book Club selection: Luis Sagasti’s A Musical Offering, the Argentine author’s second translation into English by Charco Press. Out this month in the UK alone, it is an early gift to our subscribers overseas. And what a gift it is: adding plenty of heart to the author’s signature heady humor, this exquisitely lyrical, genre-bending work explores music’s ties to everything from sand paintings to stars—and above all, perhaps, its ability to ward off death and loneliness.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

A Musical Offering by Luis Sagasti, translated from the Spanish by Fionn Petch, Charco Press, 2020

In his classic Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter waxes lyrical about the German composer’s BWV 1079. The Musical Offering is, he claims, J.S. Bach’s “supreme accomplishment in counterpoint”: “one large intellectual fugue” rife with forms and ideas, hidden references, and cheeky innuendos. The same could be said of Luis Sagasti’s near-eponymous book (the author humbly drops the “the” for an “a”), out now from Charco Press in Fionn Petch’s seamless rendition.

Anchored in music itself, this magpie suite of literary bites spans centuries, geographies, and disciplines. It opens with an allegedly nonfictional one-pager on the birth of the Goldberg Variations, another Bachian staple: in the retelling, Count Keyserling requests a musical sleep aid, to be executed nightly by the young virtuoso after whom it’ll be later named (a fetching origin story, no doubt, though I must side with those who think it apocryphal; as a seasoned insomniac, I can’t fathom sleeping through the shift from mellow aria to zesty first variatio, let alone the jump to outright fervid fifth).

Whatever its epistemic status—much of the book waltzes gracefully from fact to fiction—the narrative soon leads to something like a micro-essay packing a Borgesian punch: is Goldberg an inverted Scheherezade, Sagasti wonders, his endless performance meant to usher in sleep’s “little death” rather than stall it? These musings, in turn, link to a personal anecdote—the author humming his favorite lullaby—echoed in what can only be described as aphorism: “When a child first learns to hum a melody, the child stops being music and (…) becomes [its] receptacle” (or, ditching poetry for pop, “No child could fall asleep to [the Beatles’s] ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’”). This is just a sample; a thousand and one ties can be drawn among snippets on music and sleep, silence, space, or war, not just within the book’s broadly themed sections but across them—a veritable fugue of insights and literary forms. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2020

July 13, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng Chak-Kwan, Jiaoyang Li, and José García Escobar

New publications from Argentina, Quebec, and Portugal!

This month, our selections of the best in newly translated global literature consists of a thrillingly varied medley of styles, from a fictional Argentine study on an obscure poet, a French-Canadian narrative of images and their thrall, and Fernando Pessoa’s cheekily fabricated dossier of a fascinating character. Though they may perhaps be united by a mutual captivation for how the mundane strikes the artistic process, the writers of these exciting works are transforming what may be familiar matters with a unique and singular language. Read on to find out more!

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Notes Toward a Pamphlet by Sergio Chejfec, translated from the Spanish by Whitney DeVos, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020

Review by José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large

As much as Sergio Chejfec’s Notes Toward a Pamphlet offers a detailed voyeuristic look on trains, passengers, silence, and a radio announcer eating carrots, it’s also a gripping character study filled with philosophy and subtle humor. The use of randomness and meticulous narration of everyday, seemingly ordinary events, are no rarity in Chejfec’s work—the internal monologue of Masha, the meditative hotel clerk in his novel The Incompletes, as one example. Though they may appear disjointed, they often ignite the narrative and strengthen the enigma.

I think of Onetti and Piglia, and Chejfec, with his hidden tension and disarmingly beautiful writing—amplified by Whitney DeVos’ fiery translation—holds his ground against such giants.

In Notes Toward a Pamphlet, we see a nameless narrator following, or rather, discovering a poet named Samich. Unknown and unpublished, Samich does not even have a completed book to his name. He is solitary and lives a sedentary life in rural Argentina. His work, we learn, is scattered in magazines and “collectively-authored books.” But we can’t talk about poems per se. For these publications, Samich takes a fragment, at random, from the “writing mass.” There are no themes in his writing. No topics, concerns, or inspiration. No coherence or unity. But this is not an eccentricity. This, we understand, as we get to know Samich, is the way he viewed and experienced literature, based on “intuition instead of ideas.” Samich’s literary ways and lifestyle are almost like the antithesis of Bolaño’s Visceral Realists.

Notes Toward a Pamphlet is not bound by plot. There is no plot, but there is movement. But movement, motion, progression, and development, though noticeable, is rarely explicit. There’s barely any dialogue, action, interaction between characters, or issues to be resolved. Instead, we watch Samich grow. We see his flaws and contradictions. But his evolution occurs not in an artificial, literary way, but closer to how people experience it in real life: subtly and slowly. Samich’s growth is almost imperceptible. And while his life seems unexceptional and tedious, Chejfec’s mesmerizing writing, and the narrator’s prying, maintains the momentum. READ MORE…

On Hunter School: Indigenous Stories from Taiwan

July 1, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Saul Thompson

The Chinese language sings an altogether different tune in the mouths and hands of indigenous Taiwanese storytellers.

Hunter School by Sakinu Ahronglong, translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk, Honford Star, 2020

“I’m dumb,” I told an editor to whom I had shown an essay. “I haven’t read much, and the things I write nobody reads. I can’t write essays like other people.”

“Sakinu, why would you want to be like anyone else?” she said. “Everything in you is literature, things other people don’t have and can’t imitate. Sakinu, let everyone know all the things you keep hidden, let your life story, and Paiwan history, come flowing out of your pen.”

Translation specializes in the improbable, bringing faraway stories to unlikely audiences. The English-language translation of Hunter School (superbly crafted by veteran translator Darryl Sterk) goes further than most in this regard, because although Hunter School was originally written in Chinese, the author has no Chinese heritage, and his people have until recently had no voice in the world of Chinese-language literature, despite being part of the Chinese world; his name is Sakinu Ahronglong, and he is an indigenous man of the Paiwan ethnicity.

Like all of Taiwan’s many indigenous ethnicities, the Paiwan are an Austronesian people more closely related to the Maori of New Zealand than to the Han Chinese who now compose the majority of Taiwan’s population. Though their voices have been marginalized, they remain inheritors of living wisdom, passed from mouth to ear for millennia. Now, Sakinu’s stories have made the quantum leap, first from fireside storytelling to Chinese text, then finally into English, and they are here to show us a new way to relate to our planet and to people who have lived closest to nature for the longest time. This book is a fighter. It had to be. It has fought its way tooth-and-claw through the brambles of oppression—cultural cleansing, intolerant Christians, economic exploitation, etc. etc.—and against all the odds, here it is.

Hunter School begins with the author, Sakinu Ahronglong, in school. Flying squirrel school. Getting to class isn’t a simple commute. Luckily, young Sakinu has a guide in the form of his father, a consummate hunter who holds deep compassion for the animals he meets on his forays, and who teaches Sakinu many things, like the names of the bigwigs in local monkey society. The early chapters are short, leading readers on a tour of Sakinu’s mountain forest childhood and his wilderness education. As the book progresses and Sakinu’s world expands, the chapters stay short. They weave a sequence of life stories, crossing and re-crossing the frontier between a wild ancestral homeland and modern life in a globalized, post-industrial country. In the wilderness, we get to know a world that, for all its wildness, is still very much lived-in (and has been for thousands of years before the Han Chinese arrived in Taiwan in the sixteenth century). These stories show us a new way of imagining the wild realms of mountain and forest, which many of us are only acquainted with (and fond of) from various ventures into the “backcountry.” Of course, it’s only the “backcountry” if you don’t live there. In these pages, we see how people like Sakinu’s grandfather used to live entirely civilized lives in the wild before the time when much of the world’s nature was cordoned off from human society, emptied of most of its indigenous residents, and divided up into national parks, commercial forestries, and mines. READ MORE…

Announcing our June Book Club Selection: A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea

June 29, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

It’s a humbling, bittersweet experience, a beauty so terrible that you can’t quite bear to be in its presence for too long.

With expansive beauty and imaginative observance, Jean-Baptiste Andrea’s A Hundred Million Years and a Day has swept up a enormous amount of praise in its homeland of France, including being shortlisted for the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française and the Prix Joseph Kessel, and we are now proud to present it to our readers as our Book Club selection for the month of June. Andrea’s story of a man’s hunt for lost creatures pays equal tribute to the earth’s natural wonders and to human persistence and urge for discovery, culminating in a majestic and magnetic tale of what happens when the personal meets the eternal. Within its pages lies a thrilling poetry.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

A Hundred Million Years and a Day by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, Gallic Books, 2020

Stan, a middling French palaeontologist, is convinced that the skeleton of a “dragon” hides in the belly of the mountains that delineate the porous border between France and Italy. He heard about this dragon years ago, in a second-hand summary of the ramblings of a sour Italian man—the seemingly outlandish contents of someone’s childhood memories. Haunted by this skeleton, Stan drops everything in its pursuit: he quits his university job as a professor, sells his Parisian apartment, and self-finances an expensive expedition to these majestic mountains in the company of his former assistant Umberto, Umberto’s own mentee Paul, and Gio, a taciturn guide for whom the mountains are a second home. 

Of course, being a scientist, what Stan is looking for is not really a dragon. From the vague details he has heard, he surmises that the skeleton the caretaker had come across in fact belonged to a brontosaurus—a species that palaeontologists had agreed on being nonexistent, being simply a variation on the apatosaurus. While the book establishes early the love that Stan has for his discipline, for the fossils that he used to meticulously collect and treat as his friends during his lonely childhood spent in another set of mountains, the motives behind this expedition are not necessarily pure. For Stan, having lain forgotten, himself collecting dust in a basement office, this expedition presents his last chance at some glory. If he does find his brontosaurus, proving a theory disputed by palaeontologists for almost a century, the creature will bear his name, articles will be written about Stan, the “animal will give him back his voice.” READ MORE…

“The past is anything but”: On Elena Ferrante’s The Lying Life of Adults

June 22, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar

Ferrante aims to shock, and she aims to please. But she also aims to critique.

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Europa Editions, 2020

Reading is and has always been spatial. Zadie Smith has said it, Henry James said it before her, and I am certain someone else said it even before him. We often enter novels as if they were houses, taking in whole rooms at once, or stopping to admire a well-positioned taboret or fix a crooked frame. Because of this, reading different novels by the same author often gives us an uncanny sense of déjà vu, the familiar feeling of a thing estranged, of perhaps entering our neighbor’s house to realize that, unlike us, they have held on to carpeted floors, or have shown a preference for impressionist art or gaudy vases, but that, fundamentally, our house and theirs were designed by the same mind. This is exactly the kind of unfamiliarity I felt as soon as I began reading The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante’s latest novel, translated by Ann Goldstein. At first glance, fans and devoted readers of Ferrante’s work will not be surprised by this novel, which reworks some of the major themes that have made the pseudonymous author a worldwide phenomenon. It traffics in urgent issues like gender and its intersections with class, the tension between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of Naples, the perils of friendship and sexual desire, and the hypocrisy that often subtends the life of intellectuals. Ferrante isn’t exactly charting new territory here, and yet, as an undisputed master in rendering the familiar strange, her prose packs a punch just when we are about to settle into a sense of familiarity. With the publication of The Lying Life of Adults, we see an author at her peak, deftly synthetizing the density of her first three novels with the sprawling quality of the Neapolitan Novels, all while managing to uncover complex and challenging human truths.

Unlike its immensely popular predecessors, this novel does not trace a woman’s laborious ascent up the social ladder, but rather begins when the protagonist’s father has emerged victorious from the social battle and is comfortably settled into a middle-class life, which includes a position as a teacher in a prestigious liceo. The story is told in the first person, as are all of Ferrante’s novels. It’s hard to imagine otherwise at this point; prose, for her, serves as a conduit for the most rigorous kind of self-examination, often dragging us into psychic places we’d rather not inhabit. Take, for instance, the uncomfortable scene that opens the novel: Giovanna Trada, at age twelve, overhears a conversation between her parents in which her father calls her ugly. Or rather, she overhears him say that she is beginning to look like his long-estranged sister, Vittoria, a woman in whom “ugliness and spite were combined to perfection.” This aunt, whom Giovanna barely remembers ever seeing, has come to symbolize in the Trada household the squalor and indignity of the Neapolitan lower class—her name has, through the years, become a moniker for everything that Giovanna’s father has fought hard to leave behind. Thrown into disarray by her father’s words, an initiation into adulthood of sorts, Giovanna determines to establish contact with Vittoria, unleashing a series of events fated to unearth her family past and shed new light on her present. READ MORE…