Reviews

More Indestructible Than the Past: On Pascal Quignard’s The Fount of Time

March 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Quignard invites us into thinking alongside him, into an active engagement between two consciousnesses, writer and reader.

The Fount of Time by Pascal Quignard, translated from the French by Chris Turner, Seagull Books, 2022

You might not know it, but you’ve likely been affected by the work of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a professor of psychology and specialist in visual perception. That is—if a static image has ever given you vertigo, if you’ve taken LSD at some point in your life, or if you happen to be a fan of experimental pop band Animal Collective, whose 2002 album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is outfitted in one of the scientist’s undulating patterns. Carefully constructed to delude the eye, Kitaoka’s psychedelic, shifty images induce an anomalous motion illusion, wherein selective shadings and geometries, coupled with repetition, tricks neurons into thinking that a picture is moving when it’s not. What results is an extremely convincing array of stillnesses that nevertheless quiver, spin, and oscillate. It’s only a tiny, easily recognisable fissure in the reliability of perception, but just as such illusions hint towards the limits of seeing, the indisputable evidence of our deceptive and limiting physicality sends us outward, pushing us towards all that exists in the unseen—that which finds its way to us through the intuited at, the briefly sensed, the deeply felt.

Pascal Quignard is restless with the unseen. His immense body of work—comprising of over sixty titles—plunges into the lush fabric of invisible things. From loss, to silence, to love, Quignard introduces the solid infrastructures that seem to contain these wild and eternal subjects, only to then elaborate upon their perceptible dimensions with the secret experience of echoes, phantoms, and the vivid reality of the imagined. From novels that wrestle with the psychological tortured voyeur (Villa Amalia) to ekphrastic writings on sexual imagery, the author is famed for his ability to excavate the torrid undercurrents of our daily existence—the metaphors, symbols, and myths that enrich and multiply human experience.

The latest work to make its way to English, The Fount of Time, is part of Quignard’s Last Kingdom (Dernier Royaume) series, which today comprises of eleven titles perhaps most notable for their resistance to classification. At once novelistic, aphoristic, philosophical, and poetic, the books flow through the author’s intelligence and preoccupations, traversing the topography of his mind in the rhythm of thinking—which is to say, formlessly. The Fount of Time joins three other Last Kingdom books in the Anglosphere, all in the fastidious and graceful language of Chris Turner, including: The Silent Crossing in 2013, Abysses in 2015, The Roving Shadows (which won the 2002 Goncourt) in 2019—with Dying of Thinking due out in early 2024. All of the titles hold to the same mutable nature, composed of chapters of widely varying lengths (some a dozen pages long, some containing only a sentence). Of the sections, there are ones that sound like the beginnings of stories, and ones that sound like endings; the contents verge from the studious and cerebral, to the simplicity of oral lyricism. Subjects include the colour red, the spring, classifications of matter, civil war, seclusion, The Huainanzi, animality, orgasms, fairies, ancient Rome, and happiness. The prose is passionate, distant, and indelible. Certain lines are almost even funny. It makes sense that Quignard has now dedicated himself to this series; it is essentially to state that after a lifetime spent pursuing a craft bound by definitions, delineations, and elucidations, he has forsaken clarity for the infinitely more true nature of life’s complexity. The cage door of literature’s maniacal self-diagnosis is flung open; the words have been freed. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2023

March 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Ian Ross Singleton, and Rachel Landau

New translations from the Yiddish, Japanese, and Esperanto!

In this month’s round up of the latest releases, we’re thrilled to introduce three singular works from rulebreakers, free thinkers, and true originals. From Japan, an early novella from the nation’s renowned enfant terrible, Osamu Dazai, gives a telling look at the writer’s internal monologue. From the Nobel laureate Issac Bashevis Singer, a bilingual edition of the Yiddish author’s story—in multiple translations—opens up an inquest into the translator’s pivotal role. And from the Ukrainian émigré Vasili Eroshenko, a collection of the author’s fairy tales, translated from the Japanese and Esperanto, presents a well-rounded selection of the transnational author’s politically charged work. Read on to find out more!

gimpl

Simple Gimpl by Isaac Bashevis Singer, a definitive bilingual edition with translations from the Yiddish by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and David Stromberg, and Illustrations by Liana Finck, Restless Books, 2023

Review by Rachel Landau, Assistant Editor (Poetry)

Whether you choose to know him as “Simple Gimpl” or “Gimpel the Fool,” the main character of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novella is a likable, rambling man who finds himself in an unfortunate situation. His wife, Elka, is frequently using their shared home for affairs with other men, and all of Gimpl’s attempts to come to terms with the situation are complicated by his deep love for her. Even when the pair are forbidden by the town rabbi from seeing each other, Gimpl works tirelessly to provide for the children and for Elka. He feels betrayed to learn, at the end of Elka’s life, that the children were not really his—and his reaction to this deception is a surprising one.

The narrative in Simple Gimpl is slow-moving, reflective, and witty. It is an undeniable pleasure to read—and certainly not difficult to read multiple times in a row, as this edition of the book incites the reader to do. This “definitive bilingual edition,” released by Restless Books, includes back-to-back translations of the Yiddish work; first is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Simple Gimpl,” which is followed immediately by Saul Bellow’s “Gimpel the Fool,” and this compendium of translations is decidedly about translation itself. Over the course of more than one hundred pages, one must realize that this is not a book about Gimpl, and not even about the differences between Saul Bellow’s Gimpel and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Gimpl. It is about the role of the translator; it is about the strange impossibility of rendering a story. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera

February 27, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Science fiction is Herrera’s springboard for a ludicrously inventive imagination.

Many are likely to be acquainted with celebrated Mexican writer Yuri Herrera by way of his novels, but in this latest collection of short stories, the author extends his brilliance to a vast array of disciplines and subjects. With elements of politics, philology, science, and storytelling, these tales not only display the talents of a master craftsman of language, but also an endlessly inventive imagination, a sharp humour, and a fascination with how this world—and other worlds—work. As our Book Club selection for the month of February, we are proud to bring to our readers this riveting constellation of ideas and dimensions.

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 USD20 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.  

Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera, translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, Graywolf Press, 2023

One of the simple pleasures of science fiction is the possibility of escapism—into another reality, galaxy, or dimension beyond our reach. In the vibrant imagination of Yuri Herrera, however, abandoning the rules of our world allows for a speculative fiction that unites fantasy with lucid reflections on contemporary culture, experimenting with the bounds of genre to create something uniquely Herreran. The twenty stories that comprise Ten Planets, astutely translated by Lisa Dillman, combine the philosophical musings of Borges with a characteristic humour and warmth, inviting us to explore the twenty-first century and beyond.

From a house that plays tricks on its inhabitants to a bacterium that gains consciousness in an unsuspecting Englishman’s gut, Herrera’s imagination works on scales both large and infinitesimally small. The stories cover distances ranging the interplanetary and the interpersonal while retaining a sense of warmth and wonder at the world, expanding beyond genre conventions with a wry humour that packs a surprising punch. Dillman, in an insightful translator’s note, reflects on her personal reservations towards science fiction until she read the works of Octavia E. Butler, within which she saw how science fiction can shake off the coolness of rationality by turning its attention to very human problems, the ones we experience on a day-to-day basis. Herrera’s work is exemplary of the best of the genre in that sense, joining Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others in his ability to imagine a dazzling array of worlds that each speak to our contemporary anxieties—from technological surveillance in ‘The Objects’ and the absurdity of the terms and conditions tick-box in ‘Warning’, to real stories of alienation and societal marginalisation in ‘The Objects’ (two stories bear the same name—because why not be playful?). READ MORE…

The Wish as Transaction: On Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik

February 22, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

All the linked stories . . . embrace the stalemate struggle between external, seemingly deterministic forces . . . and individual choice.

Shubeik Lubeik, written, illustrated, and translated by Deena Mohamed, Pantheon, 2023

Shubeik Lubeik, Deena Mohamed’s ingenious graphic novel⸺whose title in Arabic means “Your Wish is My Command” ⸺seamlessly synthesizes Egyptian culture and history into an epic-scale social commentary, invoking direct parallels to the act of translation. Taking place at a Cairo kiosk, with “[its] banners, red iceboxes; [and] brightly colored snacks,” the vivid setting embodies both global capitalist influence and quaint elements of old Egypt, establishing a quirky but believable fictional venue where, among other sundry goods, bottled wishes are sold.

Originally self-published in Arabic as a ninety-page comic book, Shubeik Lubeik won the Best Graphic Novel prize and the Grand Prize at the 2017 Cairo Comics Festival. Mohamed then translated her work into English and sent it to Anjali Singh⸺a literary agent and translator of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis⸺who promptly agreed to represent Mohamed. After undergoing extensive developments in subsequent Arabic and English versions, Shubeik Lubeik is now released by Pantheon in its current 518-page incarnation, a magnificent trilogy of connected stories spanning over six decades of Egyptian social history—from 1954 to the present day. Kiosk owner Shokry⸺the seller of three bottled first-class wishes inherited from his pious father⸺serves as the central link to three narratives: Aziza, an illiterate, impoverished widow who refuses to be cowed by Egypt’s corrupt bureaucracy; Nour, a privileged, non-binary college student beset with mental illness; and Shawqia, a plucky matriarch whose life is marked with migration and health issues.

Shubeik Lubeik comic page

In the first story, Aziza is stubbornly resisting the state’s attempts⸺with its latent bias couched in convoluted wish licensing regulations⸺to deprive her of the ownership of a first-class wish, purchased with hard-earned savings from years of labor. While Aziza initially bought the wish to achieve material comfort, her dogged refusal to give up her wish—which lands her in prison—becomes a moral struggle against the state’s unjust process.

The second story, while also affirming individual choice, takes a different approach. Nour, steeped in material comfort but plagued by chronic depression, cannot decide if they deserve happiness. As a wish studies scholar, Nour is vexed by the gap of knowledge between the wish and its fulfillment. Since a disparity can exist between a wish⸺formed by exigent circumstances⸺and the irrevocable effects of its realization, Nour fears that their wish for happiness won’t alleviate, but perpetuate their exile in an emotional zombie land. READ MORE…

Inside the Prison of Her Own Skin: On Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde

February 16, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Leduc is therefore bisexual, and La Bâtarde, a bisexual text.

La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc, translated from the French by Derek Coltman, Dalkey Archive Press, 2023

“. . . very often, women think that all they need do is to tell their unhappy childhood. And so they tell it, and it has no literary value whatsoever, neither in style, nor in the universality which it ought to contain. So there are many, many autobiographies which publishers reject . . . Very disappointing . . . to think that as long as they’re women telling their story it will be interesting. . . . [but] there are extraordinary cases, like that of Violette Leduc who, exceptionally, was wonderfully successful.”

—Simone de Beauvoir, La Revue Littéraire des Femmes (March 1986)

“Being a woman, not wanting to be one,” Violette Leduc writes about her mother, Berthe, in La Bâtarde [The Bastard]. Perhaps she is speaking about herself as well, the reader takes a guess, which later in the autobiography is—spoiler alert—confirmed. Originally published in 1964 by Éditions Gallimard in Paris, La Bâtarde was translated into the English by Derek Coltman (who has translated two of her other works) as La Bâtarde: An Autobiography, and released the following year by C Nicholls & Company in the United Kingdom and by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States. Over the years, at least two new editions have been published, and this year, we are given a new edition to this bestselling French autobiography from Dalkey Archive Press.

“Being a woman and therefore condemned to the miseries of the feminine condition,” echoes Simone de Beauvoir in the foreword. Like Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Robert Brasillach, and Richard Wright, Leduc is considered a historical contemporary and political protege of Beauvoir (although ecofeminist-biographer Françoise d’Eaubonne disagrees, stating that Leduc never subscribed to Beauvoir’s philosophy or politics). It may have been, however, more than that; newly discovered letters—two hundred and ninety-seven of them—have revealed Beauvoir rejecting Leduc’s repeated romantic advances.

This autobiography is unapologetic—particularly so, as Laetitia Hanin deems, because while its predecessors within Francophone women’s literature, like the memoirs of George Sand and Marie d’Agoult, sacrificed to self-mythification, Leduc did not apologise for writing the story of her life. Beginning in northern France, the author reveals a childhood spent under WWI German occupation, where the government’s rationing of food is so insufficient people resorted to stealing cabbages from the back of carts. Two maternal figures among a neighbourhood of women raise her: her mother, Berthe, with whom she has an extremely agonising and suffocating relationship (“You were all I had, mother, and you wanted me to die with you”); and her grandmother, Fidéline, “an angel” who loved her “in passionate silence.” In her youth, as an “unrecognized daughter of a son of a good family,” she yearns for a paternal figure, but she will never know her father André, a man whose dominant quality is anonymity: “It is a strange moment when you gaze questioningly at an unknown figure in a picture and the picture, the unknown figure, is your nerves, your joints, your spinal column.” Further contemplating on her lineage, Leduc writes, “I reject my heredity.” This is particularly true with her maternal relationship, when in the later years Leduc would say: “Her absence was a relief; I was oppressed by her return.” Eventually, she would burn André’s photograph along with his death certificate. She writes, “My birth is not a matter of rejoicing.”

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“. . . I am sure of it”: On Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir

February 15, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

The readers . . . become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles.

Deranged As I Am by Ali Zamir, translated from the French by Alice Banks, Fum d’Estampa Press, November 2022

In Ali Zamir’s third novel, Deranged As I Am, narrator-protagonist Deranged is an impoverished man, somehow surviving on the paltry daily wages he manages to earn through hard labour at the docks from transporting goods and cargo, who keeps himself aloof from his fellow workers who make fun of him, using his clothes as a calendar: “Deranged as I am I have only seven ancient shirts in all. Seven pairs of trousers and seven pairs of shorts all pocked with holes and on each of them a day of the week so I don’t forget remaining me that I shouldn’t wear the same outfit twice you see?!” The novel itself begins intensely in medias res with Deranged trapped in a confined space, wounded and on the verge of death, his limbs tied up as flies swarm around him. His crying out, while exaggerated, highlights a jagged agony. 

The rest of the narrative recounts the incidents that led to this low point, with Deranged refusing to keep quiet and hunker down in the face of his many painful oppressions: “Let me make you understand this loud and clear as long as my heart beats your ears will bleed they will bleed until my soul is dizzy lest I disappear with a stream of tears in my charmless eyes.” Situated at the dizzy intersection of various vulnerabilities, he has minimal hope of having his voice heard or his exploitation compensated, because to the “angels of darkness,” as he calls the flies that represent his numerous tormentors, he is nothing but a speck of dirt that they can wipe away and then go about their day. The readers therefore become interlocutors, individuals who would not easily dismiss him or his story, and give a patient ear to his list of troubles and problems. 

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What’s New in Translation: February 2023

February 13, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Cecilia Weddell, Charlie Ng, and Meghan Racklin

New translations from Hungarian, German, and Spanish!

This month, we are excited to present new works in translation that consider survival and coexistence in many forms. From the Hungarian, renowned author Magda Szabó delves into the embittering effects of poverty and hardship. From the Spanish, Pilar Quintana creates a riveting familial portrait of vulnerable parents and too-wise children. From the German, Dr. Ludger Wess leads us on a journey to discover the smallest lifeforms amongst us. Read on to find out more!

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The Fawn by Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix, New York Review Books, 2023

Review by Meghan Racklin, Blog Editor

In The Fawn, the latest of Magda Szabó’s novels to be translated into English, it is 1954 in Budapest. For Eszter, the novel’s main character (it is difficult to call her a protagonist), it is 1954—but it is also the interwar years and the years of the war, and it is also, disastrously, almost the future. “The Future . . .’” she thinks, “[t]hat was something I had no desire to build. I had enough of the past about me already for the thought to do anything but horrify me.”

The novel is Eszter’s account of her life and her surroundings, told in a monologue directed at the man she loves, and the language is as beautiful as Eszter is bitter. In Len Rix’s translation, Eszter’s sentences are full of clauses; she’s in a rush, trying to get out everything she wishes she had already said. She recalls, of the evening when her childhood home was hit by a bomb, “Mother neither wept nor blanched; we slept the sleep of the contented in the main hall of a school, along with everyone else who had lost their homes; I felt like the nation’s favourite child, everyone seemed to want to look after us, and the whole city shared our grief.” As her outpouring continues, details pile up like debris. 

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

February 9, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Chinmay Rastogi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fatal to the Satire: A Review of The Master by Patrick Rambaud

February 6, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Matthew Redman

The . . . parables [leave] Rambaud’s account of Zhuang’s life apocryphal and myth-tinged, and the China he roams becomes lurid and fabulistic. . .

The Master by Patrick Rambaud, translated from the French by David Ball and Nicole Ball, Seagull Books

Patrick Rambaud’s The Master tells the story of the life of Zhuang Zhou, a legendary philosopher, the progenitor of Taoism, and the probable author of the eponymous Zhuangzi, a collection of metaphysical teachings beloved by ancients and moderns alike. Zhuang Zhou lived two and half thousand years ago, only a few centuries removed from the misty limits of recorded history, during the Warring States period, a febrile, fractious time of geopolitical strife and civilisational flourishing. Historical accounts about him are nearly nonexistent, and what little is known of his life we can only glean from the Zhuangzi, whose lessons come in the form of parables supposedly inspired from events in his life. 

The life and times of a quasi-mythical master philosopher, so far away in time, so sparsely recorded by contemporary historiography, so enmeshed already in fable and allegory, are ripe for historical fiction: the genre’s usual constraints, born of the need to fictionalise within the bounds of the historical record, become looser as the hard truths of history become more difficult to pin down. Rambaud uses this unusual latitude cleverly, but also with scrupulousness. The Zhuangzi is his source text, and he treats it with immense respect—something clear in all of the literary inventions present in The Master, and clearest of all in Zhuang Zhou himself, his chief creation.  

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When Meaning Fails Us: A Review of A Sun to be Sewn by Jean D’Amérique

February 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Language is not only adjacent to violence in this novel, but comes to physically embody it . . .

A Sun to be Sewn by Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, Other Press, 2023

March of 2023 will bring A Sun to be Sewn, a novel by Haitian poet, playwright, and novelist Jean D’Amérique, translated from the French by Thierry Kehou, to bookshelves around the world. D’Amérique explores ravaged landscapes of the city and the heart, delves deep into wounds collective and individual, and parses fragments of hope shored against the ruin of a land ravaged by violence and destitution. Recounting the story of a young Haitian girl fleeing from a cruel prophecy and into the arms of her beloved, treading a path that weaves amidst the dangers of her Port-au-Prince slum, D’Amérique unfolds a panorama of pain and courage, death and desire, telling all in a wounded lyrical style that haunts the reader long after the novel’s end.

A Sun to be Sewn is narrated by a talented young girl, known to the reader as Cracked Head, living in a slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her mother, Orange Blossom, is a prostitute struggling with alcohol addiction, “drowning,” as Cracked Head puts it, “to draw her halo from the abyss.” Her adoptive father, Papa, makes money from various criminal activities, working for a cruel and powerful man known as the Angel of Metal. Cracked Head is no stranger to crime herself, as it provides for survival which would otherwise be impossible. Even so, she lives off of “bread and sweetened water,” anchoring her hope in the image of her beloved: Silence, the daughter of her teacher.
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Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel

January 30, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The necessity of casting off shame and regret, of rejecting violence instead of our identities, are crucial messages in this book.

In Stênio Gardel’s The Words That Remain, everything hinges on the unfolding of a page. Through the Brazilian author’s vivid prose, a world unfurls between the covers: of unrequited love, of shame and survival, of rurality and history—all of it circulating a letter that its protagonist has never opened. Asymptote is proud to present this incredible debut work as our first Book Club selection of the year, a book that merges its triumphant celebration of language with the pivotal interrogation of marginalization, all along the long journey towards self-acceptance.

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 USD20 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 Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated from the Portuguese by Bruna Dantas Lobato, New Vessel Press, 2023

Much like the relationship that dominates it, The Words that Remain is just long enough to leave an indelible impression—but finishes in a flash. Stênio Gardel’s debut novel packs a literal and figurative punch, its brief pages flecked with contrasts: pleasure and pain, pride and shame, love and violence, peace and regret, strength and submission, what is spoken and what is kept silent. The storytelling moves fast, spanning half a century in its 150-odd pages, but Gardel’s sparse prose never creates a sense of freneticism. Through swirling reflections, the novel moves like a steady whirlwind, conveying inner turmoil and external inaction, punctuated by powerful, sometimes devastating change.

The Words that Remain tells the story of Raimundo Gaudêncio de Freitas, who paints his life as framed by two transformative events: learning to read and write at age seventy-one and falling in love at seventeen. Almost everything between the book’s covers oscillates between these two experiences, the chasm between them held taut by a letter—“half blessed, half cursed, wholly mysterious”—that he has never before been able to read. Penned by his past lover, the letter hangs over his life like a talisman, a burden, and a beacon of hope all in one.

Raimundo is gay. He and his lover, Cicero, are able to embrace their sexuality and one another for two years, but always with the fear of rejection from their families and community persisting in the background. This is rural Brazil in the 60s and 70s, and life is hard. Prevented from going to school by his father at an early age because “writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table”, Raimundo must instead do backbreaking work to help support his family through floods, poverty, and infant death. While he longs for an education and the freedom to live with Cicero, the harsh realities of working-class life and widespread bigotry are so pervasive as to be almost completely internalised: being together gives them “a good taste, but [one] that left something sour in the back of their minds”, and even when they fantasize about living together, it is only imaginable in a big city—where no one will know they are more than just roommates. Sadly, their fears prove to be well grounded; when their families find out about their relationship, they are forbidden from seeing one another, and Raimundo is beaten mercilessly by his father for days, until he is driven away by his mother. In the long aftermath of this rejection, Raimundo thinks of himself as fated to wandering in a shadowy husk, his sexuality locked away, his life and love suspended in Cicero’s impenetrable letter, completely opaque like Cicero’s own destiny. READ MORE…

Tunnel of Forking Paths: On Can Xue’s Dystopian Moral Fable, Mystery Train

January 25, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

For the author, the deconstruction of language allows her to explore themes close to her oeuvre, but also to her personal experience.

Mystery Train by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce, Sublunary Editions, 2022

To board Can Xue’s novella, Mystery Train, the reader must surrender entirely to a world plunged into eternal night, where characters give themselves up to be devoured by wolves and execute perfect needlework in pitch-black darkness, where fear and worship surround a power figure known only as the conductor, and where many are unable to make any sense of the cruelties perpetrated upon them. Can’s Matrix-style text offers little answers, opening up instead a multitude of unsettling questions about the body, induced guilt, and the illusion of choice.

In her introduction, Can (the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua), is generous enough to provide a warning to the unsuspecting reader: “We might decide that the life the artist is describing belongs to someone else, and has nothing to do with us. But it does have to do with us—because, for us, the people of the new millennium, the body-soul contradiction is vitally important.” Indeed, Mystery Train can be read as a fable on the struggle between the presence and demands of the body—down to its most basic instincts such as sex or bowel movements—and the incessant inquiries of the soul, which demand explanation yet continually fail to culminate in satisfying answers. The author goes on to explicates the purpose of this work in the short introduction: “Mystery Train characters suffer, but never in vain. Hardship forces each one to grow, and mature, and to become tougher than they were before. Gradually, they form themselves into responsible, creative individuals. The veiled yet nevertheless intense longing for death that pervades the story is in fact a longing for performance—for a death-defying stunt played out on a clifftop.”

As promised, Can is not tender with her characters. The protagonist, Scratch, has been working on a poultry farm; the train is taking him on a business trip to a remote city in the north of China, bordering Russia. He soon discovers after boarding his train, however, that he has most likely been fired—but nothing is clear. He recalls a strange send-off by the farm’s boss: “At the bus stop, the manager grasped Scratch’s hand in his own callused one and said, with strange formality, ‘I’m sorry. I haven’t taken good enough care of you. Please forgive me.’ Not yet sixty and already going senile, thought Scratch. It made no sense. Why all the emotion? He was hardly being sent to his death.“ In such short, sharp sentences, Can builds an atmosphere of oppression—a sense of imminent danger in a forest of undecipherable symbols and signs.

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Memory as Political: On Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir

January 18, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Shehadeh treats this memoir as an evocative paean towards a landscape that can never be recovered.

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh, Other Press, 2023

In Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East (2012), Norbert Bugeja defines the memoirist as operating “within that representational chasm . . . in which the memoirist’s chosen interpretation of a space or preferred schema of memory come to be reconfigured against the received facts of traditional ideological geographies and vice-versa.” In the harrowing We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir, Raja Shehadeh shows he is no exemption to this friction between fact and memory. A Ramallah-based human rights lawyer with several acclaimed memoirs (one received the 2008 Orwell Prize; another was adapted into a stage play) and scholarly essays (covering topics from international law to theatre criticism) to his name, Shehadeh is a cosmopolitan, peripatetic writer and addresses the topic of his personal history and homeland with wide-ranging expertise. According to Jonathan Cook in Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008), Shehadeh “is perhaps the most knowledgeable critic of Israel’s labyrinth of legislation in the occupied territories.” In addition to enacting activism through his writing, he also founded al-Haq in the 1970s—a Palestinian organization at the frontlines in peace negotiations and in providing legal aid to Palestinians.

In We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, his eleventh book of non-fiction, Shehadeh foregrounds the Nakba—the catastrophic aftermath of the 1948 Palestinian war. But a better appreciation of his works necessarily invites a discussion on the milieu of where he is writing from—both ethnopolitically and aesthetically. Ethnopolitically, the memoir centres the land dispossession, drone warfare, and strategic erasure of Palestinians perpetrated by the Israeli military government—as well as the treacheries committed by Palestine’s former coloniser, the Ingleez, Britain, and even neighbouring nations like Jordan and the League of Arab States. Aesthetically, on the other hand, the writing evokes other articles of “resistance literature,” such as those concerning Partition or occupation, as well as the larger body of Arab political essays and political memoirs that permeates Shehadeh’s œuvre: his powerful storytelling emanates from the kind of clearsighted prose afforded by forthright reportage.

Conor McCarthy favourably compared Shehadeh to Edward Said as being “more directly political,” evidently a departure from show don’t tell (a hackneyed chestnut propagated by workshop cultism because there should be, in descriptive writing, room to explain, to tell). Shehadeh takes advantage of the power in exposition even as he plays with form; the narration and the way the chapters are organised as somewhat non-linear and non-chronological, jumping from one particular time and place to another, but remain always guided by both reminiscence and research. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2023

January 16, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Irmak Ertuna Howison, and Matthew Redman

The latest reads from Hungary, Sweden, and Kurdistan!

2023 is already setting up to be one of the most wide-ranging and bounteous years for literary purveyors of the world, with an abundance of exciting works slated for publication. This month, we’re presenting three texts that enrapture the imaginative prospects of a world in translation: László Krasznahorkai subverts every expectation for the travelogue, Bachtyar Ali braids storytelling and truth-seeking, and Maria Adolfsson reasserts feminist presence in the male-dominated mystery genre. 

krasznahorkai

A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, New Directions/Serpent’s Tail, 2023

Review by Matthew Redman, Digital Editor

László Krasznahorkai is among Hungary’s most feted writers in the Anglophone world. His works, characterised by inordinately long, slow sentences which chart the depths of obsession and madness, have earned him a cult of devoted readers and international acclaim, while his translators—Georges Szirtes and Ottilie Mulzet—are lauded writers in their own right. However, his most recent novel to be translated into English, A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East, is an intriguing departure from the works that have made his name. The vast sentences he is known for are intact, but they are used in service of a radically different tonal palette. Where his other novels use length to induce futility and despair, A Mountain to the North explores the beatific, languorous, and even beautiful possibilities of extreme syntax.

Set in Japan, the novel takes the form of a travelogue—albeit with the sheer mass of textual detail slowing the journey to an ooze. Strip this away and you find comparatively simple structural bones: a train deposits us at a deserted platform somewhere in Kyoto, we leave the station and wander half-lost through empty streets until we arrive at our destination, a Buddhist monastery in which we remain for most of the novel, touring the grounds and slowly penetrating the interiors. It is a balmy late afternoon, there are beautiful gardens all around, the monastery is silent and exquisite. This part of Kyoto is almost entirely bereft of inhabitants, but the emptiness is one of the rare details that Krasznahorkai chooses not to linger on. In fact, the absence is fortuitous, because the novel is uninterested in people; what consumes the author instead is the immutable, near indescribable beauty of things wrought in accordance with Japanese tradition. With the streets and monastery empty, the prose is freely devoted to the description of his sublime surroundings. Plants in their carefully tended gardens; the shrine’s architecture—their calculations and materials, the minutiae of their construction; the nigh-divinely sagacious prescriptions according to which every detail within the monastery was planned, planted, and built; the commitment at every turn to the tireless refinement of perfection; and above all the feel of all of this beauty—the texture and the grain, and the effect on the soul.

Each chapter houses a single enormous sentence that describes and extols a single beautiful object (a gate, a shrine, a statue) or craft (carpentry, gardening), and ends only when Krasznahorkai deems the subject exhausted. As demanding and unconventional as this novel is, it is not difficult in the way that experimental fiction is often thought to be.  For all its density, there is a deceptive simplicity, even a solicitousness to Krasznahorkai’s prose. His sentences are slow enumerations in service of a simple message that never changes: the monastery and everything within it are perfect, and it could only ever have been so, for it is all the product of patient, genius craftsmen adhering immaculately to faultless prescriptions. The long succession of accounts of perfect things has an incantatory quality, the meticulousness neither torturous nor bewildering, but rather intended to soothe. Krasznahorkai wants to leave you tranquil:

[…] it was something like a labyrinth, of course, but at the same time the chaos causing the oscillation of the layout of these streets wasn’t frightening and even less so futile, but playful, and just as there were finely wrought fences, the grated rolling gates protected by their small eaves, above, leaning out from both sides here and there, were the fresh green of bamboo or the ethereal, silver foliage of a Himalayan pine with its firework-like leaves unfolding; they bent closely over the passerby as if in a mirror, as if they were protecting him, guarding him and receiving him as a guest within these tightly closed fences and gates, these bamboo branches and the Himalayan pine foliage; namely, they quickly gave notice to the one arriving that he had been placed in safety […]

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