Posts filed under 'illness'

Translation Tuesday: “The Woman to Make Over the World” by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers

October 1, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Trask Roberts

If I want to make over the world, it must start with me.

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers, translated from the French by Trask Roberts. In it, a son frantically tries to outrun his mother’s approaching death by embarking on a total makeover: an aesthetic project which requires, most crucially, a long-anticipated nose job. His dissatisfaction with his face mirrors his resentment of his Quebec hometown, polluted by chimney smoke. Both are the unappealing, defective raw materials from which he was forced to fashion his life. Yet even as he rejects his origins, he is drawn to recreate them through his physical transformation.  His ideal of beauty is, after all, his dying mother; he wishes to “breathe from the same smokestacks, taste the same exhaust fumes, the same deadly cold, the same snowy thoughts.”

At the clinic. 

—What is it about your nose that bothers you?  

If only I could come up with a good reason: I have a deviated septum, I struggle breathing, my nose keeps me from going out, from speaking—my nose, attached as it is to my windpipe, keeps me choked up, keeps me from living, plain for all to see—please, doctor, I’m begging you, fix it! But really, no, I don’t know what bothers me about my nose.  

—I don’t really like it.  

—Don’t really like it? 

—I’ve always thought the nose makes the face. So, if I fix my nose, my face will follow.  

—Yes, but… 

I start to cry. Nothing showy, nary a sniffle, no, just tears on a stolid face.   

—Young man, could it be that perhaps you’re not quite ready?  

—No, I’m crying because I hate my nose.  

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “The Diary” by Edogawa Ranpo

September 3, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Erin Vastola

A sudden thought struck me—could my brother have been in love with Ms. Yukie?

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an intricate puzzle by master mystery-writer Edogawa Ranpo, translated from the Japanese by Erin Vastola. An admirer of Edgar Allan Poe (to whom his pen name was an homage), Edogawa is celebrated both in Japan and abroad for incorporating Japanese cultural elements into suspenseful narratives driven by rigorous logic, and “The Diary” is no exception. Following the death of his younger brother, the unnamed narrator of this peculiar short story mourns the fact that his sibling died too young to experience romantic love. But as he inspects his brother’s diary and letters, he begins to doubt his assumptions. What follows is an elaborate psychodrama of code-cracking, thwarted courtship, and the correspondence culture of early twentieth-century Japan. Read on!

It was the evening of my younger brother’s memorial service, exactly seven days after his passing. I entered his study and picked up the writings he had left behind. Alone with my thoughts, I sank into deep contemplation.

Though it was not particularly late, the household—still damp with tears—had fallen into complete silence. From afar came the plaintive echoes of street vendors’ cries, somehow imbuing the scene with the flavor of a modern play. Touched by the gravity of long-forgotten childhood emotions, I unconsciously opened the diary on my brother’s desk.

Gazing at the diary, I mournfully thought of my twenty-year-old brother, who, I feared, had left this world without ever knowing love or romance.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: from “And Death Shall Have No Dominion / Killing ‘The Mother’”

July 23, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Honora Spicer

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

This Translation Tuesday, we bring you an excerpt from Victoria Guerrero Peirano’s experimental novel Y la muerte no tendrá dominio, translated into English for the first time by Honora Spicer. In surreal and brutal fragments, Guerrero recounts the death of her mother in a state hospital, the two women alienated from each other not only by the physical process of death itself, but by the mediating force of medical bureaucracy. Elsewhere, Guerrero is pursued by thoughts of her pet rabbit, whose “half-dead brood” have similarly consumed her, the process of grief expanding even to overwhelm nonhuman life. Yet even at its most grim, Guerrero remains clinically attentive to the social and political forces that determine embodied experience, her oscillation between passion and restraint serving to heighten the eeriness of her prose. Read on!

7

Ever since she was admitted to the Emergency Room, I kept a sort of diary. I kept note of everything the attendants baldly said. Under duress, they barely opened their mouths to say, “I’m not the one in charge.”

From that day on, death buckles and becomes something nasty, dramatic, dreadful, defining. I thought about that whole troop in white, green, or plum scrubs who disconnected patients by night, failing to give medications on time, falling asleep or going to drink. About those messengers of mortal death who instead of preparing a smooth way, impose the stoniest. They made it all the more difficult: an emotional test, a test of lucidity and endurance.

To More Deaths, more glasses raised in secret toasts.

READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Summer 2024

July 22, 2024  |  in News  |  by Meghan Racklin and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper look into our Summer 2024 issue!

With so many wonderful pieces in the Summer 2024 issue, where to start? Read the blog editors’ top picks.

We loved Eduardo Galeano when he spoke of “the infinite and invisible altars of our Latin America”, but perhaps we paid not enough attention when he called reality “. . . life that sings with multiple voices”. Despite the efforts of many historians and writers in establishing the distinctions and singular complexities of Latin American countries, outsiders tend to cohere the regions in a syncretic whole, held by the commonalities of language, Iberian colonialism, and modals of development. The term “Latin America” originated with the Chilean philosopher and politician Francisco Bilbao, who sought to contrast Europe and the Americas as past and future, instating a rhetoric in which the archaisms of the former could be overturned by the luminous visions of the latter: “. . . reason against religion, hope against tradition, union against isolation. . . the logic of sovereignty against oligarchic constitutions”. This summation of continents may have served him when the routes of imperialism carved the globe up into the Old World and the New World, but we’ve no use for such simplistic declarations today.

In “neozone”, the Chilean writer Juan Carreño is on the road. In a diaristic frenzy, this excerpt translated by Maya Feile Tomes moves from Mexico’s San Cristóbal to the city of Comitán, then past the Guatemala border with a stop at the capital, before urging its way towards the Nicaraguan capital of Managua (“crossing the whole of El Salvador and that little stretch of land where Honduras borders on the Pacific”). All the while the writer’s mind is running faster than the speed of any car or bus, threading in memories and markers across this immensely varied continent in the electric instantaneity of mobility, when every new encounter sends itself hurtling across the mind, awakening memories, desires, references, the middles of anecdotes, connecting itself to the great shifting web of a body amongst. Yet, even as the sights, the people, the landscape are playing their own pinball game within the ratting corridors of Carreño’s journals, the stark insider-outsider paradigm finds plenty of iterations in movements and border-crossings, illumed within the subtle details of social code—“I try to speak Spanish in a generic fashion”—that characterises the Chilean against the Guatemalan, the Mexican, the Nicaraguan. Regionalisms, habits, and assumptions abound, and the people who offer their company or a splinter of their story are as open as they are fleeting, honest in a way that is only possible without surnames. Holding to the shared language that occasionally sizzles with the separateness of nationalities, they share opinions, invitations, songs, insights. There’s something familiar, profound in this incidental intersection of the passing-through, when finding oneself in a different country and suddenly given the position of ambassador, as if a person is a miniaturised model of a nation. And when you tell them about where you came, you give the truth as only you could, and the country glows a little in response, in that stranger’s mind, and another house is built on the phantasmagorical, long accumulated, imagined atlas of the world—that which makes the maps seem paltry in comparison. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Vitiligo Fawn” by Tijana Rakočević

April 16, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Will Firth

Two months after bwana’s return, a girl from Kashasha had a fit of laughter.

This Translation Tuesday, we are pleased to present new short fiction from the Montenegrin author Tijana Rakočević. A surprise awaits—for this story takes place not in contemporary Montenegro, as one might expect from the author’s identity, but in Tanzania’s colonial past, during the Kashasha laughter epidemic of 1962. This hypnotic tale describes the outbreak of the epidemic in remote Tanzania following the arrival of a British agent. As the narrator returns continually to the central image of a vitiligo-mottled fawn, whose coloration is mirrored by that of the disabled protagonist, Andwele, a haunting parable of illness, dehumanization, and assimilation emerges, rendered here in elliptical but powerful English by Will Firth.

Wache waseme nimpendae simwachi.[1]

If you never leave the house, no tragedy can befall you.

The edges of Tulinagwe’s purple khanga danced in the air as she kneaded a ball of risen dough. Whenever eight-year-old Andwele, as piebald as a scrofulous calf, stuck his finger into his mouth so far that he could touch the back of his throat, she would snarl, You sure know how to get on one’s nerves, boy, but this time she held her tongue. He tested her patience by rocking on a loose wooden board on the ground that moved to the rhythm of his round heels, and he only stopped when his mother glanced at him; in those moments, he felt I’m the center of the world, but she—if she had the strength to speak—would have called it asking for a hiding. It was a holiday in all Kashasha: the white man, Sir Jonathan, had returned—a dissolute English bon vivant, who their Baba wa Taifa, their savior Mwalimu, Julius Kambarage Nyrere, had befriended in Edinburgh during his studies. Tulinagwe saw him out of the corner of her eye as he ambled along the main road escorted by a gaggle of black girls, and, if she had not been busy rolling the dough for the family, which was so thin that it kept breaking in the middle, she would have said, not particularly handsome, not particularly tall; instead, she decided, I’ll save salt; if they still like it, they can ask for more.

Andwele slipped and fell. It was a tragedy.

He remembered that Mwanawa had given him five shillings and he limped off through the yard. The women wanted him to leave the village, which he sensed in the way they prepared him for the trip and because they had whispered ever since Kyalamboka lived in Sir Jonathan’s house. The man’s collection of romantic safari oddments in his private residence—photographs with animals, human animals, and human humans—seemed a grotesque combination to him, who imagined Muleba district as a mind-bogglingly vast Tanzanian shilling: go banana picking, they would have advised him if he were older, I’ll go cotton picking like Ipyana, my dad, he thought, but he lacked the courage. After that unusual visit, he believed Muleba was a heart broken. Hidden in the bushes near the house, he tried to get a glimpse of the vitiligo fawn that bwana had brought as a trophy from Europe, a fawn they called Sekelaga, Joy, but it was not there; he just heard the titillated giggles of his elder sister that vanished in the warm breeze. What did he promise her, he wondered, and will he take her with him? He would notice a villager and hire them to scrub the floors, and he would look on that troglodyte as human—that was the fortunate circumstance that made them dignified in their own eyes. The foreigner, always well-meaning and amicable, as if his earthly life depended on that handful of semi-savages, offered him Abba-Zaba chocolates so he would keep the secret; Andwele first spoke hapana, hapana, later nasikitika, but he was captivated by the sweet pain in his throat: asante sana, he repeated more and more often, thank you very much. He went away calm and beaming, his face radiant like a young idiot, dragging along his leg that they broke four more times after the accident, only to conclude it was better to leave it. Kyalamboka watched her disfigured brother and snorted spitefully in her rich lover’s ear, that little freak—sometimes I’d like to trip him up.

READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Immortal by Miklós Vámos

January 9, 2024  |  in Translations  |  by Ági Bori

if possible, I’d rather not talk about the awkward details, I did horrible things, and pretended to do even worse ones

How do you say goodbye to those you love? In Immortal, one man concocts a desperate plan: to mistreat his wife and daughters in the hope that it will lessen their pain when he inevitably dies from terminal illness. An emotional rollercoaster, full of twists, jokes, ironic digressions and absurd scenarios, this dark, comedic stream-of-consciousness by the prolific Miklós Vámos swells with feeling, dexterously captured in Ági Bori’s translation from the Hungarian. Read on to slip into a mindset irreversibly eroded by anguish.

XXXXXlet’s have a man to man conversation
XXXXXdon’t tell me you’re doing everything that is humanly possible
XXXXXit’s been nine months since I first came to see you, they sent me here with my lab results since you’re a nationally renowned expert, aren’t you, doctor, and you looked deep into my eyes with that nationally renowned expertise of yours, let out a long sigh, and told me: this is where your knowledge ends, given that my case is not operable, but you wanted me to believe that you’re doing everything that is humanly possible, and you might also recall that I received the news quietly, and only asked, how much time do I have left? you tried to dodge the question, you beat around the bush, saying you’re not a psychic, the same illness could manifest itself in numerous ways, there is no universal rule, but when I cornered you, you finally spit out that I had about six months to live, and I thanked you
XXXXXon my way home I reflected on what still remained for me, what my realistic expectations should be, and I refrained from swearing, because the larger the problem, the more calmly my brain operates, it turns into a sober and reliable computer, back then I was working on my doctoral dissertation, The French Enlightenment and its Hungarian Relations, which still needed two to three weeks of work before it would be complete, was it even worth finishing, I pondered, but then I decided to devote the necessary time to it, let it be finished, order has been important to me all my life, why would I back out on my own principles now? as soon as I type up the final copy, I’ll bid a proper farewell to everyone and everything, people and things I loved…then let…let it come READ MORE…

Illness in the Mirror: An Interview with Senka Marić and Celia Hawkesworth

November 24, 2022  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Carol Khoury

I want to take on the subject of my personal journey—to maybe find some truth in it, or even just to ask the right questions.

Our October Book Club selection, Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, is a profound documentation of the author’s fight with cancer, and as such it is also an interrogation of time, of physicality, and of transformations. In writing of illness’ warping effect on reality, Marić broadens the claustrophobically private experience of disease and recovery to address universal themes of loss and survival. In this following interview, Carol Khoury talks to Marić and her translator, Celia Hawkesworth, about the immediacy of the text, the mirror image, and how powerful emotions can be distilled into 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, 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. 

Carol Khoury (CK): Despite the narrative of Body Kintsugi not being contemporaneous, it’s ‎written with such an engaging power that it feels as though it is happening in ‎real time. ‎So my first question to you, Senka, is about your relationship with time. Is it really ‎as you say in the book—that it has no meaning?

Senka Marić (SM): In a sense, I have told the story of a distinct experience—that of suffering from breast cancer—in a relatable way. Within those moments dictated by illness, time becomes really relative; it doesn’t flow as it normally would, as it is directed or determined by check-ups and operations and chemotherapies. All other matters really cease to exist in the reality of the person who is sick, and as such, time becomes relative, because everything that life normally contains is no longer present. For me, personally, that was the case.

CK: Celia, how did you experience time while you ‎were translating this?

Celia Hawkesworth (CH): Because I had to spend a lot of my own time physically putting myself in the place someone who was going through such hell, I was always quite relieved to get to the passages where the protagonist was remembering her childhood, or other parts that took us a bit away from that continuous, strange world where time didn’t have the same meaning. It’s a bit like in Shakespeare, when you have high drama and high tragedy, and then occasional moments of release. I thought that aspect was very important for keeping one’s attention, but also giving one a bit of a break from the real horror of the suffering.

CK: Senka, one other element in the book that caught my attention is mirrors. ‎There’s something like fifteen mentions—all of which refer to physical mirrors. ‎Yet, the whole narrative is about another mirror. Might I say there was ‎some sort of a mental mirror, one that you used not only to see and show ‎the “you” and the “I”, but also to negate other existences.‎

SM: Frankly, I was trying to play with the idea of reality in its most basic sense: how we take things for granted, and how a sense of reality can be distorted when catastrophe occurs. That’s the background for the whole story—not being able to believe what reality is, and how we then perceive it. When everything is slipping out of our hands, time and space and mirrors in general are our checkpoints. We can be spiritual, we can be this and that, but in the most basic sense, we are physical beings, and we identify with the image of ourselves. We need the acknowledgment from the mirror that we are who we are. That’s why I wrote the moment in which the main character loses her hair, and she starts to cry. That’s the only time she actually really cries. READ MORE…

Tales of Contagion: A Comparative Reading of Goran Stefanovski’s Divo Meso

November 23, 2022  |  in Essays  |  by Sofija Popovska

[T]he image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages.

The Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski, working against the background of ex-Yugoslavia, has long used the microcosm of the theatre to address shifting politics, disintegrating identities, and violence in both physical and spiritual levels. His most well-known work, which encapsulates this lifelong address, is perhaps Divo Meso, an intimate family drama that speaks to the overarching condition of the Macedonian nation, as it is subsumed by invasive forces. In this following essay, Sofija Popovska discusses how the play’s oft-overlooked pathogenic themes dialogue with other texts and narratives from across history, and how, seen along these lines, it speaks universally to the private tragedy of loss, as hidden within the greater global narrative of cultural collisions.

The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. . . While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases.

—Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

In Scene VIII of Goran Stefanovski’s 1979 theatrical piece, Divo Meso, a destitute Macedonian household is paid a visit by a German investor, who offers to buy their house in order to have it remodeled into a showroom. Upon his arrival, Maria, the mother of the family, plunges into reverie, ruminating about a mythical condition she’s certain she’s plagued by: the eponymous divo meso. It is, we are told, an “old wives’ tale”—flesh which forms around a hair inside the throat, and grows until its victim asphyxiates. Despite its superstitious roots, Maria’s fear sublimates the intuition of a condition more cataclysmic and widespread: the body of Macedonian society, weakened by discord and poverty, being infiltrated by foreign interests as if by a pathogen. Transformed into an eschatological growth, the will of their German visitor continues its indomitable conquest throughout the play, leading the family to a coda marked by desolation, surrender, and powerless rage.

Though indicated by the title, the element of illness in Divo Meso hasn’t been explored much, relegated to the background in favor of discussing the loss of tradition. Regardless, the pathogen metaphor is especially apt at describing imperialist intervention into cultures; rather than cultivating a mutualistic or commensalistic relationship between two consenting cultures, it introduces a drastically one-sided power dynamic, to the profit of one and the undoing of another. However, before we delve further into the specificities of Divo Meso, I would like to invite you to consider two episodes, one historical and one literary, that tell stories of cultural contagion. These will help unravel the pathogen-host relationship in its cultural, imperialist context, and illuminate individual processes that comprise it—such as the transformation of identity into a collision site of imposed, internalized, and inherent traits. Rather than the reductive (albeit also valid) reading of Divo Meso as a tragedy of familial and national scope, a simultaneous reading of the following tragic—and in many ways analogous—texts will allow for a richer understanding of the theatrical piece, one that includes transcultural motifs.

On June 23, 1763, trader and land speculator William Trent recorded in his diary that two Native American diplomats had arrived at Fort Pitt in order to persuade the British to abandon the location. After negotiations failed, the British offered the Delaware emissaries a parting gift. “Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect,” wrote Trent. It remains unknown whether this instance of biological warfare succeeded, though the Native American population around Fort Pitt was “struck hard” by smallpox in the spring and summer of 1763. This wasn’t the first, nor last tale of contamination to be found in the imperialist trajectories of Western Europeans. Engraved upon traditions, echoing through languages, and rising scar-like from the surface of collective memory, the image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages. READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Title: Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić

October 31, 2022  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Katarina Gadze

Marić has honored the vibrant, silent energy that the body contains, bringing it to the page in its truest form.

This month, the Asymptote Book Club is proud to present Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, a moving and lyrical documentation through a woman’s interrogation of her own body as it undergoes disease, fracturing, and metamorphosis. Tracing the lineage of her physical fracturing through a fight with cancer, Marić reconstitutes the ideas of bodily fault lines and ruptures to conceive of a new wholeness, addressing the rifts and traumas of life to incorporate loss as an essential fact of survival. 

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.

Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić, translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth, Peirene Press, 2022

We don’t like to think of ourselves as a collection of fragments, but it is in our nature, as humans, to be cleaved into pieces by time and death—into “corpses strewn over the pages of history,” with nothing but the remnants of stories to tell of our struggles and victories.

Out of this nature of fragmentation arises Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić, a daring, visceral meditation on the female body and its reckoning with loss, fear, and mortality. A “story about the body” and “its struggle to feel whole while reality shatters it into fragments,” the book centers on Marić’s experience with breast cancer, a vehicle by which she uses to explore self-perception, self-preservation, and relationships. Although Marić begins with her singular, personal history, her discursive space gives birth to an ambiguous “you”; the narrative quickly evolves into a discourse on the collective reality of shreds and patches, enticing a metaphysical reconciliation of impermanence—our own and of those closest to us.

The protagonist’s rupture begins with the loss of her husband to adultery, followed by a more visceral loss: that of one breast, then the other, and finally her hair and life force through the traumatic process of chemotherapy. Although the protagonist loses her former self piece by piece, she comes to reassemble it through surgery, treatment, and radical acceptance, focusing not on the disease itself, but what remains in lieu of it. This theme blossoms to take hold of the entire text—that of physical and spiritual kintsugi. READ MORE…

Unexpired Bodies: On Malika Moustadraf’s Blood Feast

May 4, 2022  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Vignettes, as building blocks of Moustadraf’s narrative, are wielded to strip away at illusions of respectability.

Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf, translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie, The Feminist Press, 2022

More than a decade after the original publication of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley infamously called the book her “hideous progeny.” A whole critical tradition was born in the shadow of that phrase, obsessively sewn together by the umbilical connections between writing, motherhood and the monstrosity of autobiography; no one could forget that the complications of Shelley’s birth had literally sent her own mother—the pioneering English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft—to an untimely death.

Like giving birth, writing exacts an extraordinary sacrifice in order to grant the gift of life to another. It’s difficult to imagine a more tragic illustration than the story of Moroccan cult feminist icon, Malika Moustadraf. Debilitated by chronic kidney illness but dogged and uncompromising in her devotion to her craft, Moustadraf skipped rounds of essential medication to fund her first publication. This literary progeny consumed her—heart, soul, and kidney; still she insisted, “writing is a kind of sedative for the pain I live with.”

Every word she set down on the page sustained as much as it killed her, as Alice Guthrie tells us in her tender and comprehensive translator’s note, appended to her crisp rendering of Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf (issued in the UK by Saqi Books under the title Something Strange, Like Hunger). Beyond its ambitious sweep of contextual detail, Guthrie’s essay represents a loving tribute to Moustadraf’s tempestuous and painfully ephemeral existence in the karians of Casablanca—a monument to all the work she could have written if not for the overlapping violences of the systems that failed her, one after the other.

Karian, a term unique to Casablanca, is cleverly left untranslated by Guthrie and glossed as impoverished neighbourhoods—with “unregulated improvised residential structures,” “often inhabited by recent migrants to the city from rural areas.” Fringed by a context of Sufi marabouts and witchcraft, these spaces are rife with djinn and black magic curses inflicting impotence, lovesickness, and malady on the integrity of bodies. Throughout Blood Feast, Guthrie’s familiarity with the rituals, superstitions, and slang of the region are not simply evident in the cadences of her translation, but further substantiated by the specific Arabic and Darija expressions she opts not to translate. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito

December 2, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s rare for a novel to so deftly balance character and plot. It’s even rarer for a complex plot to sprout from such unlikely sources . . .

A winner of Mexico’s prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Award, Fabio Morábito’s El lector a domicilio is the first of his works to appear in English—and having read it, we can only hope there’s more to come. It’s hard to think of recent novels as well-rounded as this, which is why we’re delighted to announce it as our November Book Club pick: in just over two hundred pages, it delivers rich characters and riveting plots; it balances heart with humor; it sets us up only to shake our assumptions. More importantly, though, it finds value in lives that are often neglected, prompting us to fully see, hear, and touch those around us—an especially timely reminder as we continue to emerge from our pandemic solitudes.

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.  

Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer, Other Press, 2021

If ever a novel was deviously set up for stasis, it’s Fabio Morábito’s latest. Its protagonist, thirty-four-year-old Eduardo Valverde, is “stuck in second gear” after a case of reckless driving costs him his license, part of his job, and much of his time. Already living at home with an ailing father, he must now serve as a home reader to some of the other “elderly and infirm” in Cuernavaca—many of whom spend their days alone or half-silently with others, in dim rooms at the end of long passageways. Meanwhile, Eduardo has either cut or strained all ties with friends and family, and doesn’t seem keen on forming new ones; he, too, lives in “his own little world,” and while his court-mandated gig beats scrubbing public toilets, his heart just isn’t in it.

This is apparent to several of his listeners. “You come to our house,” one berates him, “sit on our sofa, open your briefcase, and with that magnificent voice of yours you read without understanding anything, as if we weren’t worthy of your attention.” To be fair, though, he’s not exactly dealing with a rapt audience. The Jiménez brothers are more eager to taunt him with vocal antics than take in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; the Vigils lose focus on Verne’s The Mysterious Island when they can’t read his lips (they appear to be deaf), and they don’t bother to mention it until he brings it up; Coronel Atarriaga drifts off like clockwork after two or three pages of Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.

The characters’ mix of decrepitude, distance, and detachment sprouts from their broader environment. Once worthy of its nickname as the “City of Eternal Spring,” Cuernavaca has long since been “expelling young people and keeping only the old-timers around, like any godforsaken town of emigrants”—even “the bougainvillea on the fences are rotting.” The remaining population lives “closed up in houses and yards surrounded by high walls,” and these walls have “infected” them: “everyone walk[s] around stone-faced.” It is the product of “unchecked danger” at the hands of drug lords and mobsters, one of whom routinely visits the Valverde furniture store to collect a “protection fee.” But even this rattling occurrence is mentioned almost in passing, thus avoiding the immediate strike of conflict. The novel’s context in its first few dozen pages, then, seems hardly ripe for character or plot development. READ MORE…

Announcing Our May Book Club Selection: To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young

May 31, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alexandra Irimia

Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.

As pandemic literature carves out a space of its own in contemporary letters, such writings unveil what is seemingly opaque or inscrutable about the presumed normalcy of “the before times.” In our Book Club selection for May, To the Warm Horizon, Choi Jin-young sketches a fragmentary, kaleidoscopic tale of survival and longing in the aftermath of a global catastrophe triggered by illness. The focus, however, is not on contagion itself. Instead, it falls on the variety of ways in which human interactions unfold within a more general dynamic of contrasting forces: fear and hope, reason and unreason, cruelty and love. 

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 Q&As with the author and/or the translator of each title!

To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young, translated from the Korean by Soje, Honford Star, 2021

Among the many side effects of the pandemic, we have witnessed a global reawakening of the taste for narratives of contagion, (post-)apocalyptic scenarios, and disaster fiction. If in March 2020, readers rushed to revisit the classics (Boccaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, or Camus’s The Plague), the public quickly moved to explore newer works as the pandemic stretched on, such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). The early months of 2021 came with an entirely new crop of contemporary writing, whose publication in English translation was likely encouraged—if not sped up—by the timeliness of their subject matter. Choi Jin-young’s To the Warm Horizon, published originally in Korean in 2017 and in Soje’s translation in 2021, is an example of the newly acquired popularity of these viral themes.

An unnamed virus serves only as a distant background for the five first-person narrators whose voices echo one another in this book, wherein the disastrous toll of hundreds of thousands of victims a day has decimated the population of the globe in a matter of days, setting in motion massive flows of refugees headed for an ever-distant promise of warmth and safety lurking on the horizon. Not much is disclosed about the disease itself, except that it provokes a rapid death; Choi Jin-young focuses instead on the possibilities for love and caring connections in a time of societal breakdown and civilizational disarray.

Countering the entropy of a world in dissolution, the narrative stitches together twenty kaleidoscopic chapters, in which five nomadic voices each offer their own experience of the events. The fragments are titled after their narrators and read like curated journal entries, varying in length and intensity. Amongst the speakers, Dori and Jina are given the most depth and contour; they speak for themselves as queer women, and their burgeoning romantic relationship is at the core of the novel. Ryu is the spokesperson for her family’s story, while Joy and Gunji are episodic storytellers whose accounts center on their own desires. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: May 2021

May 10, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Jacqueline Leung, Lindsay Semel, and Sarah Moore

New work from Iceland, Chile, France, and Argentina!

We take our jobs of bringing you the best new releases from the realm of world literature very seriously, and this week, we have four astounding texts from authors notorious for their intelligence, their variousness, and their ability to captivate. From Iceland, Sjón explores the banality of evil in a charged, probing character study. In Argentina, the legendary Norah Lange comes to new light as she evolves beyond her reputation as a literary muse, and tells her story in her own, singular language. The latest from French writer and playwright Yasmina Reza is a poignant meditation, guided by oratory, on selfhood, aging, and human frailties. And lastly, Chile’s award-winning Lina Meruane comes out with an exploration of illness and intergenerational trauma that is at once dreamy and deeply grounded in physicality. Read on to find out more!

red milk

Red Milk by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb, Sceptre, 2021

 Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

Sjón, one of Iceland’s most internationally recognizable literary figures, is a lifelong cultural miscegenationist. Since his earliest days as a neo-surrealist poet and musician, he has drawn proudly and liberally from global artistic lineages. In Red Milk, his latest collaboration with long-time translator Victoria Cribb, he employs an intentional, methodical restraint to examine the survival of Nazism post-World War II through the life and early death of Gunnar Kampen, a fictionalized version of a real, small-time Icelandic neo-Nazi. Sjón’s policy of omission—of drama, psychology, violence, grandeur of any kind—results in a delicious tension. He tempts us to expect so much of the novel, and though he never provides the relief of clean culminations, he manages to keep the reader wanting.

More than anything, we want Gunnar to either damn or to redeem himself, but he refuses to be anything more than a tempest in a teacup—a chess piece carved in ivory rather than ebony. He passes his brief life engaged in the mundane building of a movement that never comes to fruition. He stumbles into nationalist socialism the same way any young person stumbles into their solidified adult identity. This is not a psychoanalytic assessment of what draws him to Nazism so as much as a collection of images, inputs, choices, and feedback that nudge him there. One such curious image comes from a party he attended with his parents as a child. Bored with the adults, he wanders through the house until he encounters “a human figure, sitting in the shadow thrown by the curved back of the armchair,” in the library. He marvels at her brown skin and colorful clothing.

Without releasing her grip on his left hand, she raises his right hand and pulls it under the lampshade, holding it up to the strong bulb until the light shines red through the child’s flesh, revealing the silhouettes of the bones inside.

            ‘Only possible with such a hand.’

The woman nods at him. The filigree brooch on her shoulder gleams, exposing the pattern from which it is made: a myriad tiny swastikas that differ from the hated one only in that they stand upright rather than tilted on their side.

            ‘Only white people let the light into themselves.’

The imagery is not attributed any meaning besides its own aesthetic potency. The woman’s exoticism is a neutral source of intrigue for Gunnar, unrelated to his blossoming racial beliefs. The woman—as an ideologically educated Gunnar discovers later—might well have been Savitri Devi, the all too real mother figure of contemporary neo-Nazism, but Gunnar’s brush with history is told with the same tone as if she had simply been Reykjavik’s witchy spinster. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 4, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, David Boyd, MARGENTO, and MK Harb

This week's latest news from Lebanon, Japan, Romania, and Hong Kong!

Our writers bring you the latest literary news this week from Lebanon, where writers have been responding in the aftermath of the devastating port explosion. In Japan, literary journals have published essays centred upon literature and illness, responding to the ongoing pandemic. Romanian literature has been thriving in European literary initiatives and in Hong Kong, faced with a third wave of COVID-19, the city’s open mic nights and reading series have been taking place online. Read on to find out more! 

MK Harb, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Lebanon

This week, as French President, Emmanuel Macron, began his Lebanon tour by meeting the iconic Lebanese diva, Fairuz, the literary world continued to grieve for Beirut in the aftermath of the explosion. Author Nasri Atallah, writing for GQ Magazine, recounts the cataclysmic impact of “Beirut’s Broken Heart.” Writer and translator Lina Mounzer and writer, Mirene Arsanios, exchanged a series of letters to each other for Lithub, talking about the anguish of distance and the pain of witnessing tragedy.Writer Reem Joudi also wrote an intimate essay exclusively for Asymptote, reflecting on her experience of the explosion and the uncertain future that Beirut now faces. Naji Bakhti, a young Lebanese writer, made his literary debut with Between Beirut and the Moon. Published on August 27 with Influx Press, the book is a sardonic coming of age story in post-civil-war Beirut (1975-1990). While Bakhti was chronicling the past, reading it now feels eerily relevant.

In translation news, writer and transgender activist, Veronica Esposito, interviewed Yasmine Seale about her upcoming translation of the Thousand and One Nights. Seale, whose English translation of Aladdin is beautiful in the most transgressive sense, will be the first woman to translate the Thousand and One Nights into English. In the interview, she discusses the colonial and class legacy of translating classics and the wild possibility of re-translating and re-imagining many Arabic classics. Lastly, here at Asymptote, we are excited about acclaimed Egyptian author, Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s new novel, Basateen Al-Basra from Dar El-Shourouk publishing house. Her previous novel, Beyond Paradise, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2010. We eagerly await its translation from Arabic!

David Boyd, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Japan

This month, Japan’s major literary journals continue to showcase writing that deals with illness. The September issue of Subaru features several essays on the intersection between literature and illness, including “Masuku no sekai wo ikiru” (Living in the World of the Masque), in which Ujitaka Ito connects Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman to the current pandemic. READ MORE…