Translation Tuesday: “Childhood” by Maria Karpińska

December 3, 2024 | in Translations, Uncategorized | by Jonathan Baines

Right there, in a setting so much like a fairy tale that it felt unreal, we would imagine the end of the world.

A single season can completely upend everything you used to take for granted—at least, that’s how it often feels when you’re young. This week’s short story, “Childhood”, by Maria Karpińska and translated by Jonathan Baines, depicts one such formative period. Over the course of a summer vacation, a boy is increasingly caught up in the escapades of his magnetic new friend, who sweetly conceals her taste for cruelty. Together, the children dream of apocalypse. If chaos were to invade the pastoral setting of childhood, what form would it take? Karpińska’s piece quietly hints at the looming shadows of global crises, cast over those who are too young to make sense of them.

As a child I loved the steady rhythm of trains. It sent me to sleep. The whole family, laden with provisions and luggage in extraordinary quantities, would board the train and within a quarter of an hour I’d be asleep. I’d settle down on a pile of suitcases, or on my mother’s generous thighs, and drift off, lulled by the rattling of the wheels.

It was high summer. The trees outside the window were such a luscious green, that you could sink your teeth into it, and it would dribble down your chin. The picture postcard quality of the season had not yet been spoiled by the heat. Cottages were scattered here and there. The scene was peaceful, idyllic. Everything was blurred around the edges, smudged with dirt, like a windowpane smeared with the grease of a hundred different hands, imperfectly cleaned up by Polish State Railways.

And who should step into this picture, but a wee girl. That’s how everyone referred to her. I can still hear my mother saying, “There’ll be a wee girl there. You’ll get along.” We were on the train then, too, on our way to see my uncle’s family, or some in-laws, I don’t recall. I’d never met the people we stayed with and I haven’t seen them since. I don’t know what the thinking was behind that trip, but then one’s childhood is packed with events for which one receives no explanation, things happening for no reason and with no goal in view, coming to pass abruptly, with no introduction. A blissful world of ignorance with no decisions to be made.

In Review: “The Impossible Fairy Tale” by Han Yujoo

August 17, 2017 | in Reviews | by Emma Holland

Emma Holland reviews a disturbing, brilliant, "oddly riveting" novel from South Korea.

Han Yujoo’s debut novel is chilling and surreal, raising questions about deep-seated human violence, and the nature of art-making. A review by Asymptote Executive Assistant Emma Holland.

The Impossible Fairytale pulls readers into its disorienting and brutal world, spinning a dark narrative of the nameless Child and her classmates. Later the perspective shifts into a meta-narrative—questioning and twisting ideas concerning language and the restraints of the novel as a literary form. Korean author Han Yujoo’s debut novel, translated by Janet Hong, The Impossible Fairytale is a wildly gripping page-turner, and ultimately a powerful yet unsettling read.

Through the narrative, Han explores the notion that violence is an ingrained part of society. Speaking at the Free Word Centre in London on July 10 at an author discussion hosted by the UK publisher, Titled Axis Press, Han talked of how “from a young age we are exposed to violence, it becomes normalized, a part of our everyday life…eating away at our minds.”

The End of Eddy Review: Édouard Louis’s story of rejection, queerness and trauma in working-class France

May 29, 2017 | in Reviews | by Madeline Jones

He tried with such violent passion and self-betrayal, even self-degradation, to fit in with these people—his people

Édouard Louis’s debut novel The End of Eddy gives voice to a demographic often excluded from mainstream literature—the elusive “white working class” so frequently cited by politicians and publishers lately—while also telling the story of a young man who is completely rejected by that same group. In this apparent contradiction lies the work’s most remarkable achievement: to illuminate the lives of, and even empower, the narrator’s own antagonists—without forgiving them.

Bear in mind this is a work of autofiction, á la Knausgaard’s My Struggle opus or Sergio del Molino’s Lo que a nadie le importa, completed when the author was just twenty years old. Any editor would expect a manuscript so early in a writer’s life and career to lack “perspective,” to need some “distance,” especially given the drama and violence in this story in particular. Most memoirists don’t like to be too close to the time and people they’re writing about—and I did have to continually remind myself I was not reading a memoir while falling headfirst into Louis’s story. The lumps the character Eddy has taken have certainly not gone down, but that they are still swollen and purple is just what makes the read so engrossing, and makes the strange duality of the characters’ sympathetic and reproachable natures believable.

The book was first published in France in 2013 to great acclaim, making the now 24-year-old something of a literary star. Out this month in the U.S. with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and translated by Michael Lucey, the work has begun to receive a lot of attention in English, too. Louis has had his critics, however, particularly regarding the work’s believability—a plight that perhaps inevitably threatens the autofiction writer. There is something inherently uncomfortable about reading such a novel; you can’t settle in and let the story carry you to a made-up place and time, but at the same time you can’t walk away feeling you know something for sure, something you can report to a friend later. One can’t help but want to know after all, is it real or not?