Her characters are profoundly human, each wrestling with their own fears, hopes, and desires . . .
Abandonment by Erminia Dell’Oro, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky, Héloïse Press, 2024
Why do we leave behind people and places? Is it painful or bittersweet? Does it indicate bravery or cowardice, altruism or egoism? Do we have complete agency in these decisions or are we instead constrained by necessity, oftentimes masked by the illusion of choice? What kind of person do we become in the aftermath?
Tongueless . . . [mirrors] Hong Kong’s plurality and [elucidates] the darkening, authoritarian clarity of Hong Kong’s future.
Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless was published before the 2019 pro-democracy protests that saw two million people take to the streets in Hong Kong, but its prescient atmosphere of psychological horror and brilliantly embedded language politics anticipated the curtailing of Hong Kong’s linguistic and social liberties after 2020. Demonstrating Lau’s percipience and sensitivity, Tongueless is a timely and vital addition to the growing corpus of Hongkongese literature available in English. Jennifer Feeley’s masterful translation follows in her track record of translating titles from Hong Kong—most recently Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast (New York Review Books, 2024), for which she was awarded a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts.
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.
Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley, Feminist Press (US) and Serpent’s Tail (UK), 2024
Allegory depends on wordplay, and Tongueless starts with its title. The two ideographs in the original Chinese title, 《失語》, stand respectively for ‘loss’ and ‘language’. Together, they can both denote aphasia, a form of brain damage that hampers speech, as well as a Chinese expression that refers to a ‘slip of the tongue’. In Jennifer Feeley’s acerbic translation of this novel by Lau Yee-Wa 劉綺華—originally published in 2019 in what the copyright page calls ‘Complex Chinese’—《失語》becomes Tongueless. Lau’s psychological story of horror and loneliness in Hong Kong transfigures the metaphorical resonance of tonguelessness—losing one’s language, or mother-tongue—into a near-literal embodiment of mutilation and physical deprivation, a bloody allegory for the silencing and violence that Lau charts through the interpersonal and institutional politics of contemporary Hong Kong society.
Looking for your next novel? Here are three of the most exciting new releases from around the world.
Every month, batches of books arrive fresh on the shelves of bookstores around the world. Our team has handpicked three exciting new reads to help you make up your minds on what to sink your teeth into, including novels from Italy, Brazil and Norway.
Dust by Adrian Bravi, translated from the Italian by Patience Haggin, Dalkey Archive Press.
Reviewed by Lara Norgaard, Editor-at-Large, Brazil.
“‘How long will I have to flail about, drowning in the world of the microscopic?’”
This is one of the many questions that the narrator, Anselmo, of Adrian Bravi’s novel Dust anxiously asks himself while coping with his total phobia of dust. The depth of his internal interrogation hinges on the word “microscopic”: Anselmo faces not the literal question of clean living, but instead the concept of infinite accumulation and infinite loss—of seconds and minutes, of words and ideas, of skin and hair and other shavings of the physical self.
To read Patience Haggin’s forthcoming English translation of Dust (Dalkey Archive Press, October 2017) is to slowly sink into an ocean of everyday minutiae. The book centers on Anselmo, a librarian living with his wife Elena in the fictional city of Catinari, Italy, and his daily routine of cataloguing books, obsessively dusting surfaces, and frequently writing letters that invariably never reach their destination.
What gives this novel its power is not the literal subject matter of the book, which often threatens to overtake the prose in its tedium, but instead the artful language that invites us to meditate conceptually on the simple life represented. Anselmo, at one point, compares his monotonous work cataloguing books to that of a “simple mortician sorting bodies for burial according to their profession”; at another moment, his wife Elena says that reading newly published books is akin to, “‘studying smoke your whole life when you’ve never seen fire.’” These metaphors broaden a seemingly narrow scope, bringing us closer to fully imagining humanity’s constant and immense decay.
Asymptote reviews the latest translated books from Spanish, German, and Konkani
The Moravian Night by Peter Handke, tr. Krishna Winston, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review: Laura Garmeson, Assistant Copyeditor
Not long after midnight, with wintry constellations etched across the Serbian sky, a group of six or seven men make their way through the darkness from various nearby villages to approach the Morava River, a tributary of the Danube. They have been summoned by the owner of a houseboat moored by the riverbank, guided by its neon sign blazing the boat’s name: “Moravian Night”. Once on board, they are greeted by a man who was formerly a well-known writer. He extinguishes the glowing sign, calls for silence, and begins to tell the listeners his story.
So begins The Moravian Night, the latest shimmering, introspective novel to appear in English from the renowned Austrian author Peter Handke, translated from the German by Krishna Winston and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Handke is no stranger to controversy, with his support for Serbia’s Milošević in the 1990s provoking widespread outrage, and the alchemy of this work seems to draw from the political life and writing life of its author. Employing cameo appearances of characters from previous Handke novels and plot points about the fallout of Central European projects and failed Balkan states, Handke toys with reality, as he sees it, through the cracked lens of fiction.
The resulting book, which on the surface is the story of the nameless writer’s journey across Europe from east to west, is really a travelogue of the mind. This obscured narrator travels through the Balkans, Spain, and Germany, retraces his own steps from previous decades, and reencounters figures who were once figments of memory: “the longer he walked the more he fell into his previous footsteps, footsteps of air”. The parallels to One Thousand and One Nights are established in the book’s first scene, and continue with the same undercurrent of danger and threat of death that forced Scheherazade’s stories into being. The narrator seems impelled by the same threat in the dark on board the Moravian Night. Storytelling here is the antithesis of death – the recreation of a life – and a disrupter of time.