Posts filed under 'family'

Announcing Our November Book Club Title: Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada

November 30, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Laurel Taylor

. . . the tension of the story's thread does not snap; it remains taut and coiled, hinting but never giving.

After a long history of marginalization, unconventional narratives of gender, parenthood, and conception are coming to the forefront, representing a pivotal step forward as our conversations around these foundational matters continue to be rife with tumult, tensions, and inquiries. In this month’s Book Club selection, Weasels in the Attic, award-winning Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada confronts the murky subject of family and childbearing with her signature command of the strange, weaving a narrative that encapsulates the surreality of these societal pressures. In her questioning of gender stereotypes and heteronormativity, Oyamada’s novella is a fascinating, disarming path through the psychology of not-yet parents, casting a dark suspicion onto the bright facade of nuclear familyhood.

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.  

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2022

Though Japan is famed for horror films of unsparing gore, I feel that the nation’s best stories of the uncanny are found in quieter narratives. Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic, translated by David Boyd, joins other globally famous Japanese authors like Yoko Tawada, Yukiko Motoya, Sayaka Murata in delivering a chill, caused not so much by overt implications of a world gone sideways than by the uneasy feeling that something is deeply wrong—something you can’t quite put your finger on.

Weasels in the Attic, Oyamada’s third volume from New Directions, also shares with Tawada, Motoya, and Murata a preoccupation with fertility and childlessness, two physio-sociological conditions gripping contemporary Japanese society as the population continues to shrink. While some politicians have acknowledged that reforms in work life and childcare are necessary to encourage population growth, blame is still often laid at the feet of women who supposedly prioritize career over family. In Weasels, however, the women of the story seem desperate to have children, while men are the ones expressing reservations or shock at the thought of starting a family. The narrator and his wife haven’t yet gotten pregnant, and she is increasingly frantic for a child while his interest is lukewarm at best. “I always tell her it’s her call,” the narrator explains to his male friends. “Then she comes back with all these pamphlets and websites . . . It’s the same thing every night. Then she asks me: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want kids?’” The narrator’s qualms are further hampered by his possible impotency, something he refuses to investigate even when his wife hands him a sample cup point blank.

During a visit to friend-of-a-friend Urabe, the narrator holds Urabe’s newborn daughter and narrates her appearance: “The baby’s face was small and red. Her shut eyes looked like knife slits. I could feel her warmth and dampness through the layers of cloth.” In such a small child, there are already hints of the uncanny, of something lurking in the humid, murky depths. The moment the narrator relinquishes the baby to her mother, he becomes preoccupied with Urabe’s extensive exotic fish collection. Tanks fill Urabe’s home, and he and his wife breed the fish selectively, carefully—yet at the same time, unpredictably. “We still don’t fully understand the relationship between genotype and phenotype,” Urabe’s wife tells the narrator. “We haven’t been able to confirm which genes lead to which patterns. He says that’s why we need to experiment with different pairings—to see which combinations they produce.” In the course of rereading (which I would highly recommend with this text), this sentence rings differently, terrifyingly. Who precisely is experimenting with whom? And to what end? Is it Urabe experimenting with fish worth hundreds of dollars, or is it his uncanny wife—or more accurately, the mother of his child—experimenting with potential mates? After all, as we soon learn, she might possibly be the same girl he discovered in his storeroom dressed in nothing but underwear and a slip, eating bags of dried fish food. The reader, however, is never given clear confirmation of this fact; the shadowy depths of Weasels refuse any straightforward details. READ MORE…

To See a Mother Through the Eyes of a Child: On Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead

October 19, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Kent Kosack

“The first song I ever heard was Mum crying by my cradle.”

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, Verso Books, 2022

In a charming 2017 interview with the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth sang the praises of Kierkegaard, quoting the proto-existentialist on life being a task and an adventure—the adventure just to be you, “every single day with great fervor and responsibility.” Her novels, over a dozen of them, instantiate this charge, with several following characters grappling with existential crises precipitated by a sense of alienation from their families, their past, and their own authentic selves. 

Such a crisis breathes life into her latest novel, Is Mother Dead, out with Verso Books and translated by Charlotte Barslund. Joanna is the narrator and protagonist, a successful artist in her mid-sixties who is estranged from her family, which inevitably causes an estrangement from her past and—she wonders—her true self. Confronting her family—her mum and the woman’s role in affecting the formation of Joanna’s self in particular—becomes the task of Joanna’s art and her life, this adventure driving the novel.

What could cause a rift in a family so enduring that decades later, a daughter is forced to stake out her mum’s apartment just to confirm she isn’t dead? Writing with a rush of anxious interiority beautifully reproduced by Barslund’s translation, Hjorth spins out Joanna’s hopes, fears, and half-suppressed memories in obsessive and propulsive run-on sentences, full of self-reflexive questions and crushing doubt. Though Joanna’s “default setting” is feeling alone in the world, she is compelled to confront her mum to understand something deeper about herself—to consult her deepest self, because “. . . we all carry our mothers like a hole in our souls.” Her mum has no interest in such confrontations or consultations, and therein lies the conflict. 

READ MORE…

The Work of Feminism: On Elena Medel’s The Wonders

June 2, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Alicia and María constantly think about the other women missing from their lives.

What makes us who we are, what shapes and defines us? Is it the country that we come from or the language we speak? Is it our sex or sexual orientation? The generation or political system into which we were born? Is it our job, the class we belong to, or the education that we are privileged with or denied? Is it our family, and, if so, as one character from Elena Medel’s The Wonders puts it, “What if genes determine your character, not just your eye colour or the shape of your mouth?” And in all this, how much is pre-ordained, what role is there for choice and free will?

Medel’s debut novel,  translated from the Spanish by Lizzie Davis and Thomas Bunstead, does not presume to offer a single, clear-cut answer to these questions, but one thing is obvious right from the start through the Philip Larkin quotation she has chosen as an epigraph: “Clearly money has something to do with life.” Weaving together the stories of three generations of women from a single family over the course of half a century, from the ’50s to the death of Franco in 1975 to the 2018 Spanish Women’s Strike, the novel seems to suggest that gender clearly has something to do with it, too.

As the novel opens, Alicia (the third generation in the family), finding herself without “so much as a used tissue,” feels uncomfortable from the sense of material limbo. Even at the age of thirteen, she understands that “money tempers [mediocrity], helps to conceal it.” Although she defines her life through money, or the lack thereof, her experience has also been shaped by another great absence that is inextricably linked to financial ruin: that of her father, who feigned the life of a successful businessman while getting increasingly into debt and committed suicide after a bungled attempt at life insurance fraud. From thereon out, Alicia is denied the expensive school and new apartment she’d expected and must move back to the suburbs of Córdoba, eventually moving to Madrid and a mundane life of insecure work and an unsatisfying relationship of convenience punctuated by anonymous casual sex with men who she can approach cynically as “safe bets.”

READ MORE…

Blackness and the Experience of Blackness: Paulo Scott and Daniel Hahn on Phenotypes

February 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

I think if you read a sentence in Portuguese, you would recognize it as a Paulo Scott sentence from two hundred meters away.

In the electrifying novel Phenotypes, Paulo Scott takes on the complex subject of Brazil’s racism and colorism, dispelling rosy myths of the country as one of harmonious multiculturalism. In a story of two brothers—Lourenço and Federico, the former dark-skinned and the latter light—the intricacies of privilege, identity, activism, and guilt are brilliantly explored in Scott’s unmistakable blend of length and lyric, bringing to the page some of the most urgent and daunting questions of our time. We are honored to host this title as our Book Club selection for January, and also to have spoken live to Scott and translator Daniel Hahn about the novel’s nuances, regionality, and language.

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.   

Rachel Farmer (RF): One of the main themes of Phenotypes is what constitutes an activist approach to the many problems portrayed in the novel. Paulo, could you talk about what inspired you to write about activism in this way?

Paulo Scott (PS): Well Rachel, I come from Southern Brazil, which is a very racist region. My family is black, upper-middle class—you know, the kind of family that is in a position to speak out against this racism. So I took the truth of my family to create fiction. My brother is black—real black—and I have this lighter skin. But I see myself as a black man. My mother might deny it now, but as I remember, she always said that we were a black family.

I think that this book is both one of anger and of self-reflection. The protagonist found a place in the heart of anger to build a very specific story for himself, then at some point, he got lost in this fight against racism. He believed himself to be really strong, he saw his father as a very strong man, and he thought that his father’s power was in this anger, his rage against the world—but it wasn’t. Instead, the fact is that his father could understand the complexity of racism, like [Martin Luther] King [Jr.].

There is a connection between the members of this family: father, grandfather, son, and granddaughter—Roberta, the niece of the protagonist. They are almost the same entity, as three different movements of the same vision. The story ends with Roberta sleeping in the back seat of the car because she’s the future. I could have written a book about Roberta, for efficiency’s sake, but this is not a book of answers; this is a book of questions. The racism in Brazil is very, very strong, and it’s still a taboo topic here. The suffering is so pervasive that some readers struggle to see themselves in this mirror. 

RF: Were certain characters—such as that of the mother—inspired directly by the memories of your own family?

PS: My brother was the coach of my state’s basketball team, and he is a really dark-skinned man. He’s not afraid to be with white people—powerful people. He’s black, but he’s in that club of the upper-class, and he doesn’t accept any disrespect. That’s really strong. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: Phenotypes by Paulo Scott

January 31, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Farmer

In raising the issue of racism and one’s actions in the face of it, the book itself is arguably a force of social progress and understanding . . .

In the first few pages of Paulo Scott’s striking Phenotypes, the protagonist and narrator describes the appearances of himself and his brother in contrasts: blond and brown, fair and dark. What follows is an immersive and urgent novel that addresses the ethics and injustices of Brazil’s colourism in Scott’s signature fluidity and perspicacity, exploring the limits of intentions and justices to probe at the centric forces of activism. As our first Book Club selection of 2022, it is a vital and incisive look at a nation—and a world—stricken with crises of race and identity.

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.  

Phenotypes by Paulo Scott, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, And Other Stories, 2022

What is the price of activism? Of wanting to change the world for the better? Do motivations, or true intentions, make a difference?

Federico, the protagonist of Paulo Scott’s engrossing and astute novel Phenotypes, is an activist by most definitions. He is co-founder of the Global Social Forum in his hometown—the “whirring blender” that is Porto Alegre; he has researched colourism in Brazil; he has advised NGOs in Latin America and beyond; and now, he is serving on a commission tasked with solving the problems caused by racial quota systems within universities.

Activism, from catalyst to consequence, forms an unavoidable part of his reality. The son of a white mother and a Black father, Federico has always been light-skinned while his brother Lourenço is much darker, and this ability to pass as white has afforded Federico privileges that his brother has never been able to enjoy. The discrepancy has been a lifelong source of awkwardness and discomfort, forcing him into a complex relationship with his own identity. Over time, Federico has ensconced himself in layer upon layer of guilt—a self-inflicted yoke around his neck that continually fuels his activism and shapes his life’s ambitions.

Federico’s impressive resume of achievements stem from his efforts to tackle Brazil’s seemingly insurmountable racism problem—but are these noble actions merely attempts at controlling his circumstances? Is he simply—as his former girlfriend Bárbara puts it—surrounding himself with “noise”? Bárbara, a psychologist who provides clinical care for those traumatised by activism, knows all too well the price people pay fighting for causes they believe in. In her patients, the constant struggle to topple a seemingly insurmountable system, as well as exposure to the true extents of injustice, has left them physically and emotionally drained. In certain cases, the trauma is irreparable. READ MORE…

To Love God and Women: On The Last One by Fatima Daas

September 16, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Fairuza Hanun

The Last One . . . challenges what constitutes faith and its validity, between society’s shared meaning and love in all its variant forms.

The Last One by Fatima Daas, translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud, Other Press, 2021

Of the human world, love is both conflict and destination. Our understanding of love—what it is, how to do it—is immensely varied, and its dominating presence rules our formative years. To be deprived of, or shamed from, an open expression of love can be a numbing experience, one that rearranges the nucleus of our social interactions and emotional familiarities into a sinister puzzle. Still, no matter in estrangement or intimacy, our lives revolve around our need, or lack thereof, for closeness; the life of The Last One’s narrator, Fatima, is no different. For Fatima, the precariousness of love applies to her human relationships, but are further compared and contrasted with the relationship she nurtures with God.

The novel, comprised of vignettes and fragmented memories, is coalesced by Fatima’s attempt to comprehend, or perhaps mend, the conflicting multiplicity of her self—queer, Muslim, Algerian-French, woman. Each scene opens in a diary-like manner: “My name is Fatima,” followed by a personal fact—sometimes trivial, such as the consequence of her naming or her like/dislike for commuting—and other times, a profound reflective statement: “I regret that no one taught me how to love”. The entire book charts her pilgrimage of probing about in the study of love, of creating and maintaining meaningful and intimate relationships with other people, with God, or with herself. All of this is interlaced with disparate interpretations of cultures and languages, often governed by paternalistic attitudes.

From the beginning, we learn the precious nature of her name—that it “mustn’t be soiled,” or “wassekh”: to “soil, stir shit up, blacken.” The origin and meaning of her name is sacred, derived from the Prophet Muhammad’s beloved daughter Fatima—which means “little weaned she-camel.” She analyses the different definitions of “fatm”—the Arabic for “to wean”—compiling all three in the same paragraph as if to correlate them with one another: “Stop the nursing of a child or a young animal to transition it to a new mode of feeding; feel frustration; separate someone from something or something from someone or someone from someone.” In the same scene, she compares and contrasts her strained familial circumstances with the other Fatima’s:

Like Fatima, I should have had three sisters. […]

Fatima’s father deems her the noblest woman in heaven.

The prophet Mohammed—may God’s peace and blessings be upon him—said one day: “Fatima is a part of me. Any who harm her harm me.”

My father would never say such a thing.

My father doesn’t say much to me anymore. READ MORE…

An Occupied Literature: On Julián Fuks’s Occupation

September 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Fuks has “put something more than pain, something more than misfortune” in his novel, making “something worth writing.”

Occupation by Julián Fuks, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn, Charco Press, 2021

I’m writing a book about fatherhood without being able to become a father—and probing motherhood as if I didn’t know that I will never learn it. I’m writing a book about death without ever having felt it switch off a body, in a speculation of feelings that one day will seem laughable, when I do encounter the pain. I’m writing a book about the pain of the world, the poverty, exile, despair, rage, tragedy, ludicrousness, a book about this interminable ruin surrounding us, which so often goes unnoticed, but as I write it I am protected by solid walls.

Occupation, Julián Fuks’ latest novel to appear in English translation by Daniel Hahn, is a quiet masterpiece. Touching on family and relationships, birth and death, colonialism, the refugee crisis, political activism, the Holocaust, our (in)ability to identify with one another, and how to find hope in a world of ruin, this novel is sweepingly ambitious in its themes, yet the measured, self-critical voice of the narrator and the calm, understated prose prevents it from veering into sensationalism or sentimentality.

The novel’s chapters alternate between the different preoccupations of our narrator, Sebastián: his father, who is occupying a hospital bed; his wife’s decision to have a child, which will occupy her body and shift the dynamics of their relationship; a group of migrants occupying a dilapidated building, many of whom exiles from lands that have been occupied, now seeking refuge in Brazil, a country with its own history of occupation; and his own attempts to understand what all of this means for his occupation as a writer.

Small jumps in time, along with chapters that begin mid-conversation, can at times create a sense of dislocation, but Fuks weaves the strands together so gently and dexterously that when they coalesce, it does not feel like the technique has been a pretext for creating suspense; rather, it is as though the narrative has been constructed this way so that the narrator might himself work through and better understand the components—as if each narrative thread must be understood on its own to bring the whole into relief. Nevertheless, the technical mastery of this construction should not be downplayed, and throughout the book, the reader will notice explicit motifs along with subtle echoes and patterns in the language. All this adds to a sense that the novel’s threads are both connected and discreet, amplifying the plurality of the voices and experiences which ultimately merge with the voice of the narrator, who “allow[s] them to occupy [him], to occupy [his] writing: an occupied literature.” READ MORE…

To Channel a Voice: Adam Morris on Translating Beatriz Bracher’s Antonio

April 22, 2021  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Nicole Bilan

[T]he concept of mediumship resonated with me as a metaphor for what it was that I was trying to do as a translator.

In Antonio, our Book Club selection for March, acclaimed Brazilian writer Beatriz Bracher uses the mystifying, sustaining story of one family’s tragedy to paint a larger portrait of a tumultuous nation’s political and sociological landscape, reverberating through the discrete lives of its citizens. Constructed in a triad of narratives and rich with the fullness of voices in distinct oration, Antonio is both an electrifying mystery and a carefully constructed study of inheritance. In the following interview, Assistant Editor Nicole Bilan discusses with translator Adam Morris about the rigors and pleasures of translating this multifarious, scrupulously woven text.

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!

Nicole Bilan (NB): I’m going to be really reductive with my first question and say that Antonio is like a book of stories—or various perspectives of the same story—and this makes it quite difficult to kind of pin down its continuity. How did you navigate this ambiguity, that dynamic of mystery?

Adam Morris (AM): Well, one thing that helped was that I actually decided not to read the novel the whole way through before translating it. When New Directions accepted my initial proposal to translate I Didn’t Talk, they wanted to make sure that they had a follow-up. I recommended Anatomy of Paradise (2015), the author’s most recent novel, but the editors decided on Antonio, which I had only sampled for the purposes of writing the proposal. After reading about four or five chapters, I decided that if there was a chance I going translate Antonio, I wouldn’t want to know the explanations behind the novel’s central family secret as I worked; I wanted to find out as I was translating, to see if I could replicate that sense of not-knowing the reader is supposed to experience. So that’s what I did.

NB: That is an absolutely incredible thing to do, because even encountering it as a reader, you’re just constantly thinking: Wait, hold on, hold on, I’m lost. And then it hits you all at once. So how did you find it looking back in retrospect, trying to untangle those pieces of information—how did you refine something that’s so messily constructed in a way?

AM: I think “tangle” and “untangle” are the right verbs to use here; that was what it felt like to be working with the three narrators of Antonio. The way this novel is constructed, the voices aren’t interwoven. They’re tangled. It feels deliberately very messy, as you said; there’s conflicting information disclosed by the three voices as they evolve throughout, each becoming more familiar with their silent interlocutor, Benjamim. And one of the ways that I handled the untangling of these competing strands was to look at the novel in continuity, with each voice isolated, to see how they individually evolved without interference from the others—it’s almost impossible, of course, because their interlocutor transmits portions of each of their stories to the others, and they respond accordingly. So I tried to look at the story as a whole, and then as discrete narrative lines, and then finally reconstructed a synthesis with my revisions. But for the first draft, I just went straight through; I wanted the conversational approach that Bracher adopts to feel as natural as possible. That’s why, when I’d first started reading the novel, I knew I needed to stop. I wanted to preserve and capture the narrative effects. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Oyster Pond” by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

February 2, 2021  |  in Translations  |  by Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán

When I swallow saliva I can feel / how it rained the afternoon I first knew about you.

Memories of a family outing are preserved for posterity in Xosé Anxelu Gutiérrez Morán’s “Oyster Pond,” this week’s Translation Tuesday selection. Our speaker’s second-person address captures the intimacy and awe of a parent-child relationship, here a one-sided epistolary written for a hypothetical being (the future adult) recording the experiences of an actual being (the present child). The recurring images of wetness—foam, rain, saliva, the sea—evoke images of nascent life and mimic the ebb and flow of a child’s mind (e.g., the “life or death” urgency of collecting beads). At the metapoetic level, the gift our speaker offers the child is placed into the interim care of the reader—we are witnesses and keepers of a private and cherished memory.

Oyster Pond

To Nora, barely two years old

You are not going to remember this moment,
that is why I am writing it down for you.
You do not know either that you have
all your memory to celebrate
while you bring us
more beads for a necklace
as if your life depended on them. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky

January 27, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

My Grandmother’s Braid . . . takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level.

The intricate latticing of a family’s dysfunctions can provide ample material for any writer, but that is no indication that the material is easy to render in its full complexity. In our Book Club selection for January, however, we are proud to present a text that explores the peculiarities of familial relations to tremendous result. My Grandmother’s Braid, written by acclaimed author Alina Bronsky, tackles the subject(s) with equal parts biting wit and generous compassion, culminating in a subtly sensitive portrait of what happens behind the closed doors of households, and the closed minds of our loved ones. 

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! 

My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr, Europa Editions, 2021

Over the years, I have grown weary of that infamous Tolstoy adage that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mostly because it seems to me that the sources of our unhappiness tend to be often so ordinary (and thus far more common that we’d like to admit); evil can lack imagination, and even the worst of pains can soon turn into dull aches as we get used to almost everything. Dysfunctional families, however, are another story, and the family at the center of Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid, translated by Tim Mohr, takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level. Despite its relative slimness, this book takes the reader on a journey with so many twists and turns that I kept staring at the pages in disbelief.

At the age of six, our narrator Max immigrates from the Soviet Union to Germany with his maternal grandparents, taking shelter in a refugee home. The verb “immigrate” is technically correct, although there is a sense that Max and his grandfather, Tschingis, didn’t immigrate as much as they were dragged to the unnamed German town where the story takes place by Max’s grandmother, Margarita Ivanova, or Margo.

Margo is the driving force behind this story and almost everything that happens in Max’s life (and not only Max’s). Worried that Max’s health is too precarious for Russia, she exploits the family’s threadbare Jewish heritage to gain refugee status. Once in Germany, she seems to suffer from what can potentially be described as Munchausen syndrome by proxy: she is certain that Max is too fragile to live as a normal child would—that he is afflicted by a number of inexplicable maladies. She hauls Max from doctor to doctor, all of whom continually refuse her diagnosis as she grows ever more certain of their incompetence. She feeds Max only steamed vegetables and unseasoned barley and oats and refuses to let him go play with other children. When Max starts first grade, she insists on being seated at the back of his classroom and interrupting his lessons with her often-wrong advice on how to solve his math assignments. The dullness of Max’s school life eventually becomes too much for her, and it is only when Margo grows bored that Max is able to gain a little bit of freedom and agency. And it is here that the narrative begins to speed up, and the years slide by to the point where reader loses track of how much time has passed. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Border” by Olja Savičević Ivančević

October 20, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Andrea Jurjević

Here’re her documents. You better hide ’em in a safe spot once you get to Zagreb.

A brother’s mission to bring his estranged sister to Zagreb betrays less-than-altruistic motives in Olja Savičević Ivančević’s short story “The Border,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. Set in the cultural aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, the enduring religious and ethnic tensions between Bosnia (majority Muslim) and Croatia (majority Catholic) foreground the social taboos that persist at the borders of ethnicity, religion, and sexuality. Our narrator is an exasperated sibling charged with taking care of his (seemingly) eccentric and persistently angry half-sister, Ribbit. Through a sequence of flashbacks and narrative breaks, Ribbit’s true goals are unveiled, bringing to light the source of her defiant anger and her siblings’ xenophobic and homophobic motives. Savičević’s strategically unfolding plot and her skillful use of a morally unreliable (i.e., a clueless and bigoted) narrator provides a fascinating character study of a young woman who must transgress national, societal, and even familial boundaries to freely live her own life.

The cold is unbearable, yet Ribbit, head freshly shaved, wears a miniskirt.

“Isn’t your head cold?”

We stand on a patch of ice in front of her building. It’s Christmas morning. The steam fogs up my glasses. She smokes and shivers in her short jacket.

“I’m asking if you’re cold. Don’t you have a hat?”

“Are ya fuckin’ cold, baldie?! What kind of a bullshit question is that?”

She’s like that. It’s how she talks. A normal person would slap her, but I don’t. She knows I won’t harm her. She flings the cigarette and lights another, ignoring me. Buraz pulls up in my car and steps out. He blows into his hands to warm up and tosses a purse into the trunk.

“Jesus, Ribbit! Don’t be such a dumbass!” He yanks the hood over her head and turns towards me.

“Have her sit in the back and don’t let her out before you get to Zagreb under no circumstances. She’ll cut and run. How do I know where she’d go . . . Yesterday I left her alone for ten minutes. She put on an act like she needed to pee and ended up shaving her head. She can piss in a bag for all I care.”

Buraz pulls forward the seat and she crawls in, onto the back seat.

Ribbit graduated last summer, and is now nineteen. She’s grown tall, five foot eleven. Black eyeliner frames her green eyes. Before her brother slams the door, she screams from the top of her lungs:

“Hey, Buraz! Drop dead, ya filthy scumbag!”

She’s crazier than she used to be, but then again, she was never terribly normal.

I press the gas pedal. The car rattles, then slides down the slope’s muddy ruts, across frozen puddles. I exhale when I see Buraz disappear toward the building. In the rearview mirror I catch Ribbit’s empty side profile. She’s stuffing her thumb, with its blue fingernail, into her mouth.

The streets are empty as the snow-water pisses down. Random windows sparkle with Christmas ornaments and crosses made of string lights. A plastic Santa with a busted nose climbs over one balcony.

“There’s some ice on the road, but fortunately it’s not a long trip,” I tell her in the rearview mirror.

I had received the call from Buraz two days earlier. He had begged me desperately to take our sister in at my place in Zagreb. A few months, a year, who knows? Maybe even for good I thought, and did not like it one bit.

“Buraz pleaded for me to take you,” I try to suck up to her a little. “He’s terribly worried about you, you know. Look, he couldn’t even wait until after Christmas. I know you’re upset right now, but you’ll like it in Zagreb. Don’t worry. You’ll work in my shop. I can use the help.”

“I heard you went bust!”

I’m not close to Buraz, or Ribbit. The last time I saw them was two years ago in Bosnia at the funeral of a man who had been our father, my sorta-father, just like they’re my half-sister and half-brother.

I remember when I first met Ribbit. She was five and wore a flannel nightgown around the flat. She had the flu, yet still she kept chirping, wouldn’t keep quiet. Now she’s mum the entire trip, impenetrable.

New bright snow starts sprinkling and as soon as we leave the city the world outside the car windows becomes dreamlike, like a piece of naïve art, but beautiful. The small houses in snow-blanketed valleys are all equally white, even the ones without doors and windows. Smoke from the chimneys disappears into the hills. The roads are lined with newly built minarets, or tall church towers under construction, depending which town we’re passing through.

“Check it out, Bosnia with whipped cream,” I say to break the silence.

“Right. Shit topped with cream still tastes like shit.”

I surf the radio stations.

“If you say so.”

Her problem, not mine. I’ve got nothing to do with Bosnia except for my father and except for the two of them. And we aren’t even alike. The folk singer cursing love on the radio sounds better than Ribbit piercing my ears with silence. She glues her forehead and nose to the window. A young lady, yet still a child. A big bald baby. While on a straight stretch of road, I look over my glasses at my hairline in the mirror. She’s right, goddammit, I’m rapidly losing my hair.

“Want to sit up front? It’s more comfortable.”

Curled up in that tiny skirt, she shakes her head and then drops it between her embraced raised knees. On her scalp is a fresh scar and redness, probably from shaving. What the hell did she do that for? I remember she used to have long, golden hair when she was a child, nearly platinum. Later she had red hair, then it was black with a piercing in her brow. Then it was green with another piercing in her belly button, and the last time I saw her, canary-yellow.

“Well,” I give it another go. “It won’t be so bad. You always liked Zagreb. It will be nice, it’s a big city. Theatre, live music, nightlife. You’ll see, dear. So much better for a young girl than in a small . . .”

She lifts her head and looks at me with hatred, then lays it onto her knees again, without a word. She remains that way the entire trip, motionless—all the while the news keeps forecasting a snowstorm and negative twenty degrees that night. Only after we pass through the villages near the border does she stir. At that point she gets antsy. I tawt I taw a puddy tat, I think to myself and keep slowly driving toward the border.

“Hey, can we stop? I gotta pee. Oh, come on! Don’t be a dick, brother. I’m not gonna run away. Where the hell would I go, anyway?”

We’re surrounded by a desert of snow. An erased space. A few empty houses gape hollow by the side of the road and in the distance are woods. A kilometer down the road we see a large house with a neon Tavern sign. Only the bottom part of the lemon-yellow facade is finished. I park near the front—looks like it’s open. Ribbit gets out of the car and spreads her arms over her head as if she’s surrendering or waving and for a moment it seems as if a slight smile cracks across her face, the first one I’ve seen since I arrived.

In front of the tavern stands a scrawny Christmas tree, and inside, right above the bar, hang photographs of war generals decorated with shiny holiday tinsel.

While I wait for Ribbit, I order us coffee and settle closer to the fireplace. I hope she doesn’t vanish through the bathroom window, like in the movies.

Buraz said this: “Yeah, she’s a shame to me and the family but dammit, I worry about her. Someone’s gonna beat her to death while she’s walking home at night.” I imagine Ribbit tramping down dark city streets late at night with that once colorful, and now bald, female head beneath thin Christmas paper lanterns swinging in the wind.

It’s always windy around there.

“So, what’d Buraz tell ya?” she asks, returning from the bathroom.

He had shoved an envelope into my hands. “Here’re her documents. You better hide ’em in a safe spot once you get to Zagreb. It’s her ID, passport, health card, driver’s license, etc. There’s enough money for bills and food for at least three or four months.”

The envelope contained a whole lot more than food money. Buraz knows the shop has not been doing well, and that I’m up to my neck in debt. And I know it, too. He winked and gave me a tap, rubbed my shoulder for a second, like brothers do, a buddy to buddy. “You gotta keep her papers under lock and key. Swear on your life.”

“He told me everything, and just to be clear,” I respond to Ribbit, “in this case I’m entirely on his side. You can’t chase a married man.”

I lean over the table toward her. “A married man, and on top of that, one of theirs? You’ve really crossed the line. You’re truly asking for someone to break your bones and toss you into a trash can.”

Ribbit looks at me without blinking those green eyes, now smeared with makeup.

“Whaddaya mean, one of theirs?!”

“You know what I mean. Personally I have nothing for or against them, but I’m concerned about your wellbeing. You’ve crossed the line. That’s no small thing, Ribbit, not in Zagreb or Frankfurt or London or anywhere else in the world, never mind in the small . . .”

“What ya talking about, dude. One of their guys?!”

Ribbit laughs, but in a slow, heavy manner, as if she’s shorting, skipping. She tosses the small plastic coffee spoon toward me onto the tablecloth. “You mean their girls. It’s a she.”

“A she,” I repeat as if in a dream.

“Yep, a she. Her name’s Senada. What ya starin’ at,” Ribbit says rocking in her chair.

Senada is the woman Ribbit babysat for at times, that much I know. I only saw her once, at a funeral. A pale girl with dark eyes, two or three years older than Ribbit.

“And I ain’t chasin’ her. Her idiot husband’s been killin’ her since they got married. He’s after her. I ain’t chasin’ no one. We’re an item. Now ya know the whole truth.”

I feel the room spin and the coffee mixed with acid from my stomach returns into my throat. I inhale sharply, so much that it hurts.

“Since when are you into women? You used to have boyfriends.”

“I’m not into women. I’m into Senada. She’s my woman, gettit? We were gonna go with her kid to her sister’s in Sarajevo. She found a job there. But her husband figured everything out and collared Buraz. He stole her documents just like Buraz stole mine so Senada and I couldn’t cross the border to see each other. Buraz lied. He lies the moment he opens his mouth. Obviously the truth is worse than what ya thought,” she says and fires off another burst of laughter.

“Give me a break!” I yell. “Did Buraz shave your head?”

She blushes.

“Ah, well, good for him,” I say dryly and release the air from my lungs. I take the car keys and leave enough cash on the table for coffee.

“Wait for me in the car, it’s open.”

I feel the envelope with her documents and the money in the inside pocket of my coat. At the bar I wrap the envelope several times with tape and put it back in its place.

As soon as I walk down the tavern’s steps, I feel a hefty stone, or perhaps a piece of ice, hit my neck. The blow is cold and sharp. I’m stunned by the ferocity with which she pounces on me, biting my cheek and ear. She wraps her legs around my waist, mounts my back and keeps pounding, biting till she pulls off my glasses and snatches my keys. I barely break free and throw her onto the ground, stuffing her eyes and mouth with snow. That subdues her momentarily. My ear bleeds, and so does my lip. I hopelessly try to find my glasses, buried somewhere in the snow. Under my weight Ribbit cries, howls and wails from the top of her lungs. The few restaurant patrons are now crowding the windows, staring. They see a maniac strangling a bald girl. I hurry up before some fool dares to get involved. I thrust her down with my whole body so she can’t move and with my free hand I pry the envelope out of my pocket: “I see you’ve planned this all out, but you’re missing something.” I say into her ear, lying on top of her. I rub my own blood off her smeared face. “Merry Christmas, little sister,” I say. “And Merry Christmas to Senada.” I shove the envelope into her tights, ass-bound, deeply, so it won’t fall out: “You won’t get far without this.”

She kicks me in the groin and I turn over, folded up. Lying in the snow I see the blurry outline of that scrawny Christmas tree in front of the tavern at the Bosnian-Croatian border. Lights blink red-white-blue-red or perhaps in some other order . . . My glasses rest in the snow, too, surprisingly intact. I wait for her to stagger to the car, and then I put them on, slowly, not to hurt my ear. The forecast called for a deep drop below freezing and a blizzard. Another hour and a half to Zagreb. Ribbit finally starts the car and takes off in the direction opposite the border, toward Senada. By now people have already run out the front of the tavern.

I grab that hefty stone and throw it at the car, aiming precisely, so the rear window cracks audibly, and folks will never say I let her go without a fight.

Translated from the Croatian by Andrea Jurjević

Novelist and poet Olja Savičević Ivančević is one of the most prominent contemporary Croatian writers. Recipient of numerous awards and honors, her books have been translated into eleven languages. English translations of her work include her novels Adios, Cowboy (McSweeney’s) and Singer in the Night (Istros Books), both translated by Celia Hawkesworth, and the poetry collection Mamasafari (Diálogos) translated by Andrea Jurjević.

Andrea Jurjević grew up in Rijeka, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia, before immigrating to the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Small Crimes, won the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, and her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020).

*****

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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…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpt from Naulakhi Kothi by Ali Akbar Natiq

August 18, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Naima Rashid

Maulvi Karamat would be furious and ask him why he had returned so late. Sometimes, he would give him a few whacks in anger.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a slice of rural life frames decades of a family’s history in this excerpt from Ali Akbar Natiq’s acclaimed novel, Naulakhi Kothi. We’re treated to an abridged biography of Maulvi Karamat, an imam at a small village mosque. Maulvi Karamat is heir to his patriarchs’ accumulated knowledge, which he bestows upon his dutiful (but much abused) son, Fazal Din. An arduous errand to collect food (and consequently, money) unfolds into a lively character study of a mother, a father, and a street savvy son. Natiq deftly contextualises the present by manipulating narrative time, weaving generations into concise pockets of exposition.

“Maulvi Karamat”

When Maulvi Karamat left home, he could barely walk straight. Every few minutes, he would lean his full weight on his staff, and had a sharp headache. He had developed a slight fever because of being on an empty stomach for long. At intervals, he felt a renewed bout of anger against Fazal Din, who had still not returned with the rotis. Maulvi Karamat was afraid he might fall while leading the prayer. It was hard to sustain oneself till Zuhar on the glass of sweet buttermilk he had had at Fajr. As a result, he wasn’t too sure of what he had recited during prayer. In fact, at one point, he had said one verse out of place. It was a good thing that Zuhar prayers were not recited aloud, otherwise, he would have suffered a lot of humiliation, and the attendees would have begun to doubt his sanity. Performing the motions of sujood, ruqooh, and qayaam, he swore at Fazal Din countless times, and also thought ill of the attendees behind him, who were content to line up in prayer behind him, but could not tell whether he was hungry or not. In this state, he thought of the hadith that said, ‘If the time for prayer conflicts with the time for a meal, take your meal first, for one cannot pray on an empty stomach.’

For the past thirty years, Maulvi Karamat was the head imam of this small mosque. More than a village, it was a small cluster of around fifty to a hundred houses. Maulvi Karamat’s great grandfather, Khudayaar, had come here first, seeking alms from people who lived here. At that time, this mosque was an empty and unmarked spot. He was the first to mark the precincts as his own by throwing his patched quilt of rags on the floor here, and started saying a prayer. At first, the villagers would give him two square meals out of pity. Then slowly, some more people, seeing the earlier ones, began to join him there for prayers. Khudayaar had spent a year attending religious lectures in an institution. As a result of that experience, he had memorised some verses of the Quran, and also knew how to pray. On the basis of this knowledge, he started performing his duties as imam, and declared himself the maulvi of the village. Little by little, the functions of the mosque began to shape up around this. After his death, Maulvi Karamat’s father, Ahmed Din, succeeded him. Since that day, from generation to generation, they had remained here. Showing great foresight, Ahmed Deen had taught Karamat a few initial books of the Quran, and sent him off to attend religious lectures in Qasoor. Maulvi Karamat spent six years here. By the time he was fifteen, he was fairly fluent in Urdu, Arabic, and Persian. During this time, Maulvi Karamat’s father, Ahmed Din, passed away at the age of sixty. After his father’s death, instead of going elsewhere, he had preferred to stay in this humble mosque at Chak Rahra. He was sixty-five years of age now.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Daughter from Jannina” by Vassilis Alexakis

June 16, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Rebecca Dehner-Armand

It feels as if I’m using this story just to see if I am able to write a more personal piece.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, a proposed coffee date unearths secrets and regrets in Vassilis Alexakis’ “The Daughter from Jannina.” Our protagonist is a journalist awaiting the arrival of a young woman claiming to be his daughter. A conversation about the veracity of the woman’s claim reveals a bittersweet history of personal mistakes. Here we have the trademarks of Alexakis’ writing: straightforward exposition, quotidian detail, and a dryly comic voice, all of which belie a deeply complex interiority and emotional self-awareness. With emotional subtlety and humour, our protagonist weighs the importance of love and family life against the backdrop of national displacement. Translator Rebecca Dehner-Armand writes: “[Alexakis] has composed a singular œuvre, marked by his particular staccato and wry style, that illuminates the experience of a growing sector of French society: immigrants, exiles, and foreigners.” 

A cloud of smoke floats above the ping-pong table. I am seated at my desk, at the other end of the room. At the moment, I am not smoking. On the ping-pong table there is a mostly used-up roll of toilet paper, a paddle, and Lina’s camera, as well as a Tupperware container that I should return to Grigoris’ mother. A few days ago, she brought me some garbanzo bean soup in this container. Where has the other paddle gone? I don’t see the ball either. I played ping-pong last night with Vasso. The match was shit. Lina came over afterwards, around midnight. She slept here last night. It hasn’t been long now since she left.

I am listening to The Turk in Italy, a joyful opera by Rossini. The Turk falls in love with a married Italian woman and begins plotting to purchase her. She gently explains to him that this type of transaction is not done in Italy. In reality, I am not really paying attention to the opera. My mind is elsewhere. It seems the cloud of smoke is headed for the open French doors. It is quite chilly, but I don’t have the strength to get up and close the doors. Lina will no doubt come by sometime during the day to pick up her camera.

Normally, I should be prepping for my TV show by now – I am going to be interviewing the minister of maritime trade—or writing my column for The Investor. These notes surprise me; I am not used to recording my comings and goings. I am writing in pencil, which surprises me even more: for a long time now, I’ve typed out everything. Maybe I chose a pencil precisely because I ascribe no importance to this story, because I can envision a quick abandonment. I can see myself throwing it in the trash after ripping it to shreds. A little piece of paper will fall to the floor. Once I bend to pick it up, there will be a knock at my door: it will be Stavroula, this young girl who was not at our get-together last night and who thinks she’s my daughter. READ MORE…