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?
With so many stellar pieces in the Spring 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.
In a Bethlehem of the future, no one is left. Some undetermined ecological catastrophe, shown only through a black, viscous flood tiding over the narrow alleyways, had sent volcanic streams of smoke up through the minaret and the turreted roofs, obliterating the limestone, the arched windows, the indecipherable urban folds. This is where Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s 2019 film, In Vitro, takes place: a world where two of the last remaining survivors of the human race meet in an abandoned nuclear reactor. One of them is dying, and the other seems to be a designed individual, a living archive. In the dialogue that unites the disparate scenes—some archival, some distinctly futuristic, some shimmering with ghosts—the woman lying in the hospital bed says to her visitor: “Your memories are as real as mine.” The younger woman gets up and walks to the other side of the room. “I disagree,” she replies brusquely. “The pain these stories cause are twofold. . . because the loss I feel was never mine.”
Living within an increasingly crowded media landscape, combined with modern technology’s dissolution of physical distance, the significance of these lines from In Vitro do not escape most of us. The theorist Alison Landsberg called it “prosthetic memory”: a phenomenon in which recollections are lifted from a cultural landscape and implanted almost seamlessly within an individual consciousness, culminating in a psychic patchwork that does not distinguish between what has happened to us, and what was simply witnessed. Uban Cristina Ali Farah’s “Three Short Pieces”, in a delicate and tender translation by Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen, sees the Somalian-Italian author picking over such stitches in her own life, examining what has been lived and what has been given; what has been inherited and what has been picked up along the way. Some of the memories she discusses, as in a shared experience of migration, have slowly unwound inside her by way of language, and others, as in the first three years of her life, are echoed into the body through photographs, tastes, trails, stuttering fragments that she pieces together into a portrait of lineage, a half-there origin story.
Taking a closer look at pieces on landscape’s multiplicity, unrequited love, and memory amidst grief.
Launched four days ago, our blockbuster Summer 2023 issue gathers never-before-published writing from a remarkable thirty countries—including a spotlight on Indonesia. Don’t know where to begin with this thrilling mélange of established and emerging voices? To help you dip your toe into this brand-new edition brimming with literary gems, our blog editors take you through their favorite pieces. Read on!
Within the tensions of unrequited love, the transformative faculties of ardor conduct their most astounding magic. Time is stretched to its utmost limits, unbound feelings hit a multiplicity of extremes, and the physical proof of reality collapse under the extraordinary pressures of belief. There’s not a lot of happiness that can be found amongst the shifting phantasms and polarities of this condition, but there is plenty of beauty, of poetry, of hope and awe, all of it stemming from nothing but the imagination in overdrive, sparked brilliantly alive by the beckoning figure of desire.
There are many examples of such love to be found in life and art, but one that seems particularly difficult to understand is the love of a fan. The indulgent culture of fandom gives free reign to displays of love-as-devotion, ranging from pedestrian claims of destiny to reckless acts of sacrifice—and because it often inflicts the young and the hyperbolic, its passions are seen as lacking any certifying element of truth. A one-sided, disingenuous, superficial love. But just try telling that to a fan.
In an excerpt from her novel, Phantom Limb Pain, Heejoo Lee does much to redeem this expressive, unrestrained love. Tracing the contours of a fan’s deep—even vicious—adulation for an idol, Lee’s forthright prose, translated with a sensitive colloquiality by Yoojung Chun, reaches a tender, natural honesty, describing an emotion that gives a rhythm to the days and months, a thrill to the pedestrian events of waiting and wanting, and a vividity to the fantasies making life more beautiful. Manok, the young woman who paves the way for our nameless protagonist into fandom, is “downright shameless,” keenly following her idol’s every move, openly displaying her possessive jealousy, and attributing her love to an act of God. Being a fan in South Korea’s multibillion-dollar idol industry is nothing less than laborious; fans religiously attend promotional events, spare no expense in purchasing goods and merchandise, and “pour their hearts out” at every opportunity. From the outside, one is made to wonder what any individual gets out of this all-consuming lifestyle, and here, Lee explains it to us through Manok, with the eloquence of absolute sincerity:
Their presence stayed mysterious over repeated encounters, and it refused to be locked into language. Their real presence rendered everything in high relief, so that everything—even their shadows or things that might be their shadows—became amazing to me.
I scrawl / lacerate / squeeze / twist / hammer
This Translation Tuesday, enter the oneiric geography of acclaimed Cuban poet Soleida Ríos in a hybridised work that is her own fluid and inventive relationship to genre and tradition. The airport—with all its connotations of citizenship, mobility, and border-making—is given a surreal makeover when the speaker at every unexpected turn is confronted with the presences of Chagall to Sarduy, from an Arching-Eyebrow Woman to (Normal-Brow) woman. Accompanying Kristin Dykstra’s energetic translation is an illuminating tour of Ríos artistic and political inheritances that allows us to see the poet’s workings, but which renders her poem no less strange and powerful.
“Soleida Ríos often explores dreams, as well as realities refracted through dreamlike states. An elusive quality characterizes her work, the spirit of creative cimarronaje. This term refers to the ethos of the fugitive slave, which Ríos has invoked in some descriptions of her writing. Her book Estrías (Grooves) intertwines that spirit with a more recent strand of Cuban history: the internal migration of rural citizens (many of them Afro-descendent), who like Ríos moved from their origins in eastern Cuba to the western capitol, Havana, in the decades after 1959. In the city, finding and keeping a home can be a struggle.
“CABO ROUGE / Kabiosile” depicts psychological navigations of national space and legal language in search of one’s own place. Along the way the narrator registers artistic legacies of Severo Sarduy, Marc Chagall, René Magritte, and Yoruba traditions in Cuba. Here too are figures from local bureaucracy, which might well be described as a culture in its own right. The agent at an airport counter initially seems responsible for enforcing travel regulations, then transforms into a subject struggling to create a place that state officialdom would interpret, legally speaking, as her house. Settings shift, contributing to the sensation of unreality. Perhaps we have fallen into a Chagall painting. But the woman’s refrain foregrounds practical acts of migration: “I left MY COMMUNITY and I moved on to THE COUNTRYSIDE … From the countryside I came HERE.” Other recurrent elements invoke attributes of the orisha Changó, who is associated with the color red and explosive percussion in ritual music. The kabiosile of the title is a verbal salutation to Changó.”
—Kristin Dykstra
CABO ROUGE / Kabiosile
… I’m not reproducing …
I scrawl, lacerate, squeeze, twist,
hammer.
A number.
A smudge.
In the airport (one example), my head filled with such disorder that I’ve forgotten to retrieve my suitcases. Eighteen suitcases.
But since I also forgot to set aside my essential documents, namely: TICKET, BOARDING PASS, BAGGAGE CLAIM stub, among others of subtle distinction, which I can’t remember now … I’m thinking about how I can maneuver, to present myself in transit and request my entirely disproportionate and (I guess) extremely suspicious baggage.
So now I’m at the counter saying, with all the composure of (borrowed voice) I-Came-On-The-Flight-From-Paris….
Arching-Eyebrow Woman looks at me doubtfully …, she turns back to the heap of papers … So I confirm, “The-11:39-From-Paris.”
And immediately I remember, horrified, “the PERMIT, I forgot the PERMIT …”
Nothing subtle about that.
And my wings drop away from me.
Arching-Eyebrow Woman, still doubtful?, asks me, “Your last name is Vives ….?!” READ MORE…
I think most of [my characters] are looking for a way out of society—this thing we call society.
Jonas Eika’s After the Sun is a masterfully realised work of contemporary fiction. In potent combination of the lyrical and the visceral, the five stories that make up the collection span landscapes, relationships, and planes of reality, moving with intensity and poeticism to form characters and worlds which convince us of their reality through their strangeness. After the Sun was featured as our Book Club selection for the month of August, and Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan spoke live to Jonas Eika and translator Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg about the exceptional qualities of this text—its dream logic, its musicality, and its radicalism. Their conversation is as follows.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I had approached this collection from the underlying cohesion of dream logic—which seemed to me to be what rounded out all the narratives in this volume. So I was wondering—first of all—do you remember your dreams?
Jonas Eika (JE): I’m really bad at remembering my dreams. I used to be kind of good, but I lost it. One dream that I do remember—which is also relevant to this book—is the end scene of one of the stories called “Rachel, Nevada”, which is in the middle of the book. It ends with this old woman coming home from a concert in this very ecstatic state, telling her husband that the singer from the concert had and came to her and said, So good to see you. We’ve met before, we’ve met on the radio. And that dream is what sort of started the story—I just knew I wanted to find a way to get there, to find out what came before. But I must admit, it’s also rare for me that I use dreams so specifically in writing, or maybe it’s there without me knowing.
Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg (SNH): Actually, I often remember them. But I think my dreams are usually very easily interpretable. I’ve had a dreamscape that’s mapped onto every place that I’ve lived, which is interesting. So I have a Copenhagen scape, and a New York scape—slightly altered landscapes of the places. I grew up on Long Island and in the Long Island scape, there are wolves everywhere—though I’ve never seen a wolf on Long Island. I tend to remember dreams really vividly, actually, and then they kind of dissipate over the course of the day. But the scapes I remember.
XYS: There’s always these associations of dreams with the divine or the primordial, but what actually what related these narratives to dreams for me was the idea that anything could happen at any time, and no matter what was happening at whatever time, it always kind of made sense. There was this cohesion throughout the writing that allowed absurdities to occur without them seeming as absurdities. I mean, this might be just a cultivation of the stories’ surreal circumstances, but I also think it has a lot to do with the innate musicality and the structure of the writing. So I wanted to ask both of you—was this an intentional thing that you were constructing? Or is it something that was more of a stream-of-consciousness ideal?
JE: I really like that description—and I think that the dream logic you talked about is making sense for me now. One of the things I did attempt consciously while writing was to keep it very open in terms of genre and narrative, but with the scenes that seem to break most with the reality of the story, I wanted them to somehow come out of the same logic, or be born out of the same landscape—out of the same objects and emotions that are already in the realist world of the story. So I’m glad you think it feels sort of logical or that it makes sense, even though it’s surprising. And how that came about was actually by finding this musicality in the language. I feel like often when writing works for me, it is like I’m tapping into an underlying rhythm. I will usually have a few sentences, which are often the first sentences of the story that just play around in my mind, and then I really get into that rhythm, and then I start writing when I’m ready or when an energy has sort of build up. So there was something improvisational about it.
SNH: Maybe it’s the dream logic, or the musicality, that ties all of the stories together—because I do think it’s interesting that they are so different. They take place in different places, they have different tones, they’re shifting in perspective, they’re playing with different genres, but there still is something that makes it such a coherent work. Perhaps that does have to do with that specific kind of musicality, that maybe is also in its own way, connected to a logic—or this dream logic.
XYS: I’m always pleasantly surprised when I read prose writers who also kind of have this insistence on continuity of music in their work; we tend to think of fiction as a lattice built architecturally, and then ornaments placed on top of that, but there’s something attractive about the idea that prose writers are paying equal attention to the movement of one sentence to the next—as poets do. Do either of you read or write poetry at all?
JE: Maybe I write a poem now and then, and just hide it in my drawer quickly. But I do read a lot of poetry and I just came to think of the Japanese poet Hiromi Ito, who I really read while writing this book, actually. And, I mean, she writes poetry, but a lot of narrative poetry. I read mostly Wild Grass by the Riverbank, and there’s something about the way she used rhythm and repetition to make even the weirdest things—the scenes where the distinction between life and death or human and non-human totally dissolve—make total sense, because she introduces it by the same patterns and rhythms that constitutes the universe of those poems. So I do read a lot of poetry, and I take that into my prose writing as well.
SNH: One of my guilty pleasures is reading poetry really fast—reading it as if it was prose, because I love that feeling of just being completely overwhelmed by language. And sometimes I’ll go back and read it more slowly, but I think that also has something to do with the way that I translate—a sort of expectation of having this full sensory experience wash over you without thinking too much about it, just letting the craft that’s been put into it do its work. READ MORE…
Eika has convinced the cacophony and sensory exhilaration of dreams into the accounts of narration.
In the last act of summer, the Asymptote Book Club is proud to present an award-winning collection of short stories by Danish writer Jonas Eika. In five deeply immersive studies of sensation and cognition, After the Sun is an introduction to a stunning new voice in descriptive prose, establishing a new narrative tradition with non-linear dreamscapes and astounding evocations of the physical body as a site of storytelling. As our own world continues to evolve ever more into the intangible, Eika is a writer that makes corporeal the unreal realities of our times.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.
After the Sun by Jonas Eika, translated from the Danish by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, Lolli Editions, 2021
To throw things into relief, I’ll play an old trick and say there are two kinds of people—those who seek to understand their dreams, and those who prefer that they remain in the inscrutable realm from where they came. The deciding quality—which also contributes to one’s ability to endure an intensive retelling of another’s dreams—is perhaps having to do with one’s own understandings of a life’s compartments; if within the rationale of time’s chronology, strangeness and encryption can occasionally take on the roles of logic and comprehension. Whether one sees a life’s events as a series of why-questions seeking the compatibility of answers, or if what we perceive as happenings are innocent to their order, oblivious of our insistence on purpose, and the phenomenon of them all fitting into the elapse of a life is simply an incredible feat of human storytelling.
It is incredible: that what baffles us about our own lives—mysteries, coincidences, appearances, and disappearances—is given such distinct clarity when organised into the perpetuity of sentences and pages. They move the world, they provide instruction, they are understood. A gun never appears to not go off. Fiction gives dreams a language that we also speak, ascribing to their impossible nature the subtle conviction of a greater design. In the reassuring procession of language’s patterns, we read life, with all the pieces fit somehow in place.
The stories in Jonas Eika’s collection, After the Sun, move firmly against this reassurance of knowledge; instead they insist forward with all the strangenesses of reality. Time is liquid, settings shift like cards in a deck, the present arrives as if already in memory. The logic of dreams dominate the prose in a determination that thwarts simple comprehension, and as such, Eika has convinced the cacophony and sensory exhilaration of dreams into the accounts of narration. In these five stories, the interruptions of the world—antithetical to our egocentric perceptions of individual purpose—is what drives the reading forward. We are led not by the simple fact of our choices and pathways, but by the world as it happens in experience. Before the discerning objectives of order intervene, we are allowed to luxuriate awhile in the immediate poetry of sensation—consciousness amidst the inexpressible moments of a new encounter.
Eika is especially interested in those dreaming moments where one is estranged from our lives and our bodies. “Alvin,” the story that begins the collection, establishes its opening shot in the aftermath of an “extremely fictional flight.” Then, nothing goes quite according to plan. The bank he’s meant to work at has burned to the ground, his savings and accommodations along with it. Eventually, he falls into the company (and the apartment) of a man he meets on the street. In confrontation with the dissonance between world and interiority, language serves to confirms the singularity of experience; in the wide landscape of world-events, we speak of what is happening to us as a confirmation of being. But where this iteration of feeling and knowing is so often a seeking of solidarity and mutual recognition, these stories instead maintain the volatility of selfhood: life as easily mutated by us as we are by it. The domino-effect of Eika’s narratives then signal a thrilling ceaselessness of possibility, speaking to the world as we know it now, boundless in abstraction. The speed by which we travel, the phantasmagoric architecture of financial markets, the way temporality collapses between reality and virtuality, After the Sun molds these accustomed surrealisms of our everyday into established reality. READ MORE…
In this exploration of the passage of time, Sönmez is at his most philosophical and his most political.
To live, to remember, and to forget—these are the mainstays of nearly every narrative both real and imagined, and this month, we have selected Burhan Sönmez’s masterful novel, Labyrinth, which traverses these themes with a lucidly Borgesian, yet stirringly original hand. A highly anticipated publication in Sönmez’s award-winning body of work, this profound book navigates the psychogeography of Istanbul to interrogate that most mysterious creature: the self.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers in the US, the UK, and the EU. 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!
Labyrinth by Burhan Sönmez, translated from the Turkish by Ümit Hussein, Other Press, 2019
Boratin Bey knows that his name is Boratin, that he lives in Istanbul, that he is a blues musician with a tattoo on his back, but he doesn’t know why. And, more urgently, he doesn’t know why he jumped from Bosphorus Bridge—a fall he survived but which has now caused total memory loss. At the beginning of Burhan Sönmez’s Labyrinth (deftly translated by Ümit Hussein), Boratin wakes, disorientated in his unfamiliar apartment with no knowledge of who he is. Luckily, he has a few anchors that can guide him through his now estranged surroundings. Firstly, his bandmate, Bek, who takes care of practical matters, informs him of his likes, dislikes, habits and tries to settle him back into his old rhythm. His sister helps as well, taking great joy in remembering the past and recounting tales of his childhood to Boratin over the phone.
His experience of the world may only just be commencing, but it doesn’t take long before the big philosophical questions start to appear. “Did I choose and buy the furniture in this house?” and “Have I always lived alone?” are suddenly supplanted by “What does beautiful mean?” and “What brings on the desire to die?” A change that is, of course, understandable as Boratin is suddenly forced to step into his own life through the eyes of a complete stranger to it. READ MORE…
This struggle for clarity through self-regulated therapy-by-writing is what makes the novel so compelling.
Empty Words by Mario Levrero, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott, Coffee House Press, 2019
“The best part about Coffee House Press books is that they are often difficult to categorise, difficult to describe . . . because they are pushing the boundaries of form, language, syntax, genre, and so on,” says Chris Fischbach, publisher for Coffee House, in a recent interview with Asymptote’s Sarah Moses. Empty Words, the first book by Uruguayan author Mario Levrero to be translated into English (by Annie McDermott), fits this description to a tee. The premise is simple: the narrator, whose voice Levrero claims to be his own with some (potentially heavy) editing, is determined to alter his personality through altering his handwriting. Since, according to graphology, “there’s a profound connection between a person’s handwriting and his or her character,” surely altering one’s handwriting through diligent daily practice would bring about discernible changes in personality.
Somers’ carefully-crafted novel reveals the effects that living in a society in which women are repressed has on both women and men.
The Naked Woman by Armonía Somers, translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude, Feminist Press, 2018.
What could freedom from the pressures and expectations of society mean for a woman in Uruguay in the 1950s, and what might the impact of this freedom be on others? These questions are explored by Uruguayan author, scholar, and feminist Armonía Somers in The Naked Woman. Written in 1950, this is the first of Somers’ books to be translated into English. The novel tells an energetic and enthralling story through which Somers articulates a pressing need in society for people to find ways to escape prescribed roles, express desire, and renew one’s sense of self. The narrative focuses on the experience of the female protagonist, Rebeca Linke, and sheds light on the repressive context of 1950s Uruguay when, according to scholar Maria Olivera-Williams, “middle-class social mores proved particularly suffocating to women.” Somers explores the effects of these constraints on women and creates a subversive protagonist who creatively and successfully challenges these expectations by allowing herself to release her natural instincts and understand new forms of intimacy. Whilst the female experience is the focus of the book, Somers’ carefully-crafted novel reveals the effects that living in a society in which women are repressed has on both women and men. She achieves this by depicting male violence against women and the harmful effects of a lack of freedom of choice.
The Naked Woman begins with Rebeca Linke’s revelation of the failed hopes that she had pinned on her thirtieth birthday. This sense of disillusionment is the driving force behind her decision to abandon her everyday existence and move to the countryside: she is desperate to break the daily monotony of her life, to embrace freedom and to live in the present. She takes a train to a small cottage in a remote part of the Uruguayan countryside where she casts off her one remaining item of clothing, her coat, having abandoned everything else. As a result, her break with the past and her commitment to the here and now becomes urgent: “[s]he was beholden to the present, like water held in the palm of a hand.” When she ventures out into the night, she is immersed in a natural environment that she has never before experienced so intimately. This then extends to her own body: she discovers its uniqueness by touching it and she remarks upon changes that she had not previously noted. It is Somers’ focus on the present, the protagonist’s physical experience of each moment, and the centrality of the female body that make the book so compelling, exciting and enticing for readers today.
This week we are proud to feature three poems by the Angolan-French poet Landa wo, in which he blends enquiries into human nature with nature itself, and transforms the silence and stillness of the world into the qualities of song. We hope you enjoy it, and don’t miss next week’s Translation Tuesday!
Words
Let words burn
While saying the truth
For I, the poet,
I would not keep her on a leash.
READ MORE…
The new year kicks off with new releases from Japan, Germany, and Italy.
Every month, our staff members pick three notable new releases in world literature to review. The first month of 2018 brings us short fiction from Japan and novels from Germany and Italy.
The Bear and the Paving Stone by Toshiyuki Horie, translated from the Japanese by Geraint Howells, Pushkin Press
Reviewed by Theophilus Kwek, Editor-at-Large for Singapore
Mention ‘contemporary Japanese fiction’ to the average reader and bestselling names like Haruki Murakami, Ruth Ozeki, and Keigo Higashino might come to mind; or indeed last year’s Nobel laureate, the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. From that perspective, at least, Toshiyuki Horie can be considered one of the modern Japanese canon’s best-kept secrets, happily resurfaced for an Anglophone audience by the ever-intrepid Pushkin Press. A critic, translator, and professor of literature, Horie has garnered numerous accolades for his fiction and essays, and is also—as the three novellas collected here reveal—a masterly prose stylist, a ruthlessly effective narrator, and a seasoned traveller between the real and imagined geographies of experience and history, dream and memoir, and past and present.
The first and longest section of the volume contains Horie’s novella “The Bear and the Paving Stone,” which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2001, and lends this volume its title. The tale opens in a strange, allegorical dream-sequence that ends just as abruptly when the narrator wakes, alone, in a rural farmhouse in Normandy. Drawing on Horie’s own time as a graduate student at the Sorbonne, the story unfolds with exquisite pacing into a long-awaited reunion between two unlikely college pals: the narrator (then a student from Japan, now a professional translator) and Yann, a free-spirited, petánque-playing photographer. As they embark on a breakneck drive to see the sun set over Mont St Michel from Yann’s favourite spot on the coast, we are plunged as if into another dream: this time, comprising the layered narratives of French intellectual history, the Holocaust and its aftershocks, and a post-modern, international friendship. Ghostly historical figures such as Émile Littré, Jorge Semprún, and Bruno Bettelheim haunt these pages with a sense of driving, almost teleological purpose, but the two friends’ conversation somehow remains light, and movingly human, throughout.
if I should die on a plane and be…a free-floating atom in the sky
To commemorate International Women’s Day coming up tomorrow, I’m thrilled to present the following poem by award-winning Portuguese poet, Ana Luísa Amaral, translated by the brilliant Margaret Jull Costa. Addressed to the narrator’s daughter (and, it seems, the daughter of that daughter), these words celebrate the hidden potentiality inside every woman—and the spontaneity of life itself, even in its contemplation of sudden death.
Testament
I’m about to fly off somewhere
and my fear of heights plus myself
finds me resorting to tranquillisers
and having confused dreams
If I should die
I want my daughter always to remember me
for someone to sing to her even if they can’t hold a tune
to offer her pure dreams
rather than a fixed timetable
or a well-made bed
To give her love and the ability
to look inside things
to dream of blue suns and brilliant skies
instead of teaching her how to add up
and how to peel potatoes
To prepare my daughter
for life
if I should die on a plane
and be separated from my body
and become a free-floating atom in the sky
Let my daughter
remember me
and later on say to her own daughter
that I flew off into the sky
and was all dazzle and contentment
to see that in her house none of the sums added up
and the potatoes were still in their sack forgotten
entire
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.
