Posts filed under 'intimacy'

Daily, Unforgiving, Incessant: On Cho Nam-Joo’s Stories of Ordinary Repressions

November 18, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Throughout the collection, we realize that there is nothing easy in the effort towards collective liberation…

Miss Kim Knows and Other Stories by Cho Nam-Joo, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, House of Anansi, 2024

Cho Nam-Joo, author of the bestselling novel Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982, has returned with Miss Kim Knows, a collection of eight short stories featuring an intergenerational array of characters and their struggles in a contemporary South Korea. The first story follows an elderly woman named Dongju as she visits her older sister, Geumju, who is housed in a care home for Alzheimer patients. Geumju’s health has devolved to the extent that Dongju is reminded of her son, whose life she had begged the doctor to save: “it didn’t matter if he had to lie in bed unable to talk or open his eyes.”  As she compares the two, she wonders about the meaning of her life, and eventually, as the story goes on, we are made to learn that Dongju has also lost both her husband and her younger sister. The truth, that “death is so close and so common,” is brought to close regard. This opening tale then sets the tone for the rest of this collection, wherein we must reckon with what it means to live, what kind of life is worth living, and what it means to sacrifice one’s life—or to give up on it.

In “Dear Hyunnam Oppa,” a young woman moves to Seoul and dates a man for ten years before he makes a casual proposal of marriage, upon which she is forced to contemplate being bound even more inextricably to him. She asks for time to think and writes a long letter in response, taking us from their first interaction to the announcement that she is breaking up with him and moving to a place he shouldn’t try to find. She expresses gratitude for all the help he has offered since her arrival in Seoul many years ago, but her letter unveils the suffocation she felt—that despite her appreciation for his clear and insistent instructions when she first moved to Seoul, she does not want to continue to relinquish control to him. “There’s so much I want to do,” she says, “I can’t give up on my own life.” The longer the letter goes on, the more insufferable this male character becomes—a caricature of the archetype he is supposed to represent; he even expresses to the narrator’s friend how much he appreciates that she “isn’t like other girls,” and when the friend doesn’t take it well, he turns on her, calling her a bitch (classic). The most compelling element in this story came from its disturbing ordinariness—that a reader is able to understand the exact trajectory of the relationship, as well as all the little seemingly benign phrases (“be careful”; “let me”) that culminate in an unbearable cage and a watchful eye she cannot be rid of. In light of her apology in the beginning, the partner’s “care” is revealed as a desire to be obeyed, in control, and never doubted—especially as that is the only form of love he offers. He does not want the narrator to be “corrupted” or to make significant decisions on her own, but also wants her to be socially “capable” and successful. In clear, compelling prose, Cho demonstrates how “daily” this relationship is, how casually it chips away at her narrator’s sense of self, how she is unable to name or pinpoint her discomfort as her boyfriend gaslights her. Her friends (sometimes unknowingly) re-ignite her initial feelings of dissatisfaction, but ultimately agree that her gnawing unease should not be brushed under the rug, and it is these friendships that allow her to “see [herself] for who [she is].” READ MORE…

The Richness of the Fragment: An Interview with Oksana Vasyakina and Elina Alter

February 21, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Jaeyeon Yoo

I don’t believe in wholeness and I don’t believe in Chekhov’s gun. Language . . . isn't enough to reflect the fullness of the world.

What does it mean to hold grief—to physically carry your mother’s death with you in daily life? 

Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound documents the journey of a queer poet as she delivers her mother’s ashes from Moscow to Siberia. Translated from Russian by Elina Alter, the novel is an auto-fictional exploration of processing grief through language, and also a meditation on the Russian lesbian lyric—a polyphonic conversation with feminist thinkers across time and space. While making her way across Russia, the narrator weaves together a cycle of poetry, composed of recollections of her past sexual experiences and fragmented essays. Wound then began as a few pages typed alone in the dark, when Vasyakina was writing during the pandemic, and this sense—of both intimacy and intensity—persists throughout the book. Vasyakina writes, as Alter puts it, with a brutality and directness that feels “exceptionally clear-sighted.”

Wound is Vasyakina’s first novel and the winner of the 2021 NOS Prize. Since then, she has published Steppe and Rose, books that also center on family figures. In addition, her works include two collections of poetry: Женская проза (Women’s Prose) and a cycle of poetic texts titled Ветер ярости (The Wind of Fury). 

Alter is the editor-in-chief of Circumference, a journal of international culture and poetry, and has also translated It’s the End of the World, My Love by Alla Gorbunova. Her translation of Wound has been listed as one of Nylon’s Must-Reads of the Month and LGBTQ Read’s Most Anticipated Titles of the Year. 

This interview, conducted with Oksana and Elina separately, has been edited for clarity.

Jaeyeon Yoo (JY): How did Wound begin? 

Oksana Vasyakina (OV): As I rode a bus through Volgograd while carrying the urn [containing my mother’s ashes], it occurred to me that I would never be able to describe this experience. It wasn’t because the situation was tragic; I just saw how complicated it was, and I felt that I wasn’t equal to the material. This was in early 2019. 

A bit later, in the summer, I wrote a cycle of poems—which are included in the book—called “Ode to Death.” I had the desire to write, but I understood that poetry wasn’t sufficient for the challenge I saw before me. And then the pandemic began. I was shut up in my apartment, all events were canceled, all work went on Zoom. One night, I opened up my laptop and wrote the first few pages of Wound. I was writing in the dark, because it wasn’t clear to me how to write long prose, and before this I’d only written short poems, I didn’t know how to put together a novel. A week later I pulled up my draft, reread it, and understood that this was what I wanted to do, that I had to continue. 

I’m superstitious, so when I start writing a text, I name the file with a random combination of letters, just in case I never finish. But as I continued writing, I thought that the novel needed a simple name. The simplest word. The first word a child utters when it learns to speak is mama, and that was the original title of the manuscript. But some time later, I thought that mama rhymes with the word rana [“wound” in Russian]. It’s just as simple, and contains many meanings. After I wrote the scene in which the mother is lying in her coffin, I renamed the file. Since then, the book has been called Rana: Wound. 

READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Lojman by Ebru Ojen

August 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Ojen writes along the pulse, and everything she describes is powered by the thrashing motions of something holding on to life.

Lojman is a book that shows its teeth. In powerful, unflinching prose of malevolence and confinement, Ebru Ojen depicts the family unit as a condition in which the most abject of cruelties and annihilations are imagined, resulting in an unparalleled portrait of madness and oblivion. By pushing her characters to mental precipices, the author points us toward the emotional peaks of human existence, drawing blood in an open display of intense, battered aliveness.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Lojman by Ebru Ojen, translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu, City Lights, 2023

There’s something out there. Such are the familiar words that announce fear’s dramatic incarnations—a sudden violent churning along the horizon, a scream that shears the night-fabric, a figure separating itself from the darkness. The common portrait of horror is aiming its heavy steps towards us, drawing nearer with each quickened breath—a grasp, a suffocation, a descent inevitable as gravity, an opaque force and singular direction. We’ve all been stranded in this lingering vastness, certain of some unbearable thing that approaches, and yet this dreadful knowledge, of what may lie out there, is only an elementary stage in fear’s true theatre. Eventually, one finds a more intolerable, more defiling fact: something that does not pursue, does not invade—something that does not come scratching at our windows, but dwells already in the closest, most secret part of us, capable of everything and knowing nothing of order, nothing of control.

Ebru Ojen’s Lojman is a horror of intimacies. In brutal, visceral treads, it walks that demarcation separating the inside from the outside, revealing all that rages against walls both visible and invisible—the unspeakable violence of the precipice. And while the outside still holds the unknowable chill of our darkest suspicions, in Lojman, it is the inside where monsters are unleashed. The title, transliterated from the Turkish word for lodging, is the first indication of this novel’s form—as tightly fortified as architecture, and as taut and enigmatic as the human body. Through passages of incandescent maleficence and enthralled terror, we are led into the stifling, worldly containers that somehow manage to hold utterly uncontainable things—all that goes on in a house, all that goes on in a mind. We have been made so small in order to live, and that unbearable reality is given, here, for writing to bear. READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma

July 27, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Posthuma develops an affecting novel about grief by embracing its full complexity.

Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About delves into the closeness of a relationship that many find difficult to understand: the inextricable link between twin siblings. Through a delicately woven tale of memory, shared selfhood, and grief, the author takes us into the mind that struggles to understand a world shattered by loss, when one sibling dies and another is left to reconstitute the fragments. Poetic and surprising, Posthuma shows how even in the most intimate of connections, in another person lies the great unknown.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma. Translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey, Scribe, 2023

In short, poignant vignettes, What I’d Rather Not Think About is Jente Posthuma’s story of twin siblings: a brother who commits suicide, and a sister who is left behind. True to its title, the novel grapples with the narrator’s dark, complicated feelings of loss following the death of her brother, as she ruminates on the intensity of their relationship. In reflections of the siblings’ childhood and youthful dreams, tracing how these dreams changed or were lost on the way to maturity, Posthuma develops an affecting novel about grief by embracing its full complexity.

From its opening passage, Posthuma hints to the darker turn the twins’ story will take; the first memory shared is of the two experimenting with waterboarding as children, after seeing a film about Guantanamo Bay. To this, their mother sighs, accurately guessing that: “this has to be one of your brother’s ideas”. The untraditional game cleverly introduces their relationship, with the brother being more in control of their makeshift experiment, leaving the narrator coughing and spluttering from the experience. She asks her brother: “Why didn’t you help me?”, and only receives a single “sorry” in return. This pattern of behavior continues as adults, such as when the narrator joins her brother in a diving lesson, since “my brother expected me to follow him because that’s what I always did. If I wanted to go in a different direction, he would ignore me and keep walking.” READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “A Hunger to Soothe” by Maartje Wortel

November 3, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Jozef van der Voort

It was like being very near to someone. It felt good and bewildering all at once, and then she realised: This is all me.

A woman’s abiding desire for touch underlies a deeper sense of disaffection in Maartje Wortel’s short story “A Hunger to Soothe,” our selection for this week’s Translation Tuesday. When Gradda’s pious husband dies in an accident, the touch-starved widow seeks comfort in another way: she offers free lodging to a young man who can provide daily physical contact. Instead of finding fulfillment, however, Gradda uncovers an enduring disappointment in God—and an enduring insecurity over her own desirability. In subtle yet direct prose laden with emotional uncertainty (a subtext carried over artfully thanks to Jozef van der Voort’s superb translation), Wortel’s story captures the heartache and loneliness that can fester over a lifetime of self-doubt and thwarted intimacy. We’re honoured to showcase “A Hunger to Soothe” in dialogue with our Fall 2020 Dutch Literature Feature (graciously curated by International Booker Prize-winning translator Michele Hutchison).

Gradda knew very well that she didn’t exactly look like someone you’d want to touch, which was why she liked to touch other people. She tried not to be too blatant about it: she shook hands, just like everyone else; she gave the usual three kisses on the cheek; and on public transport she would brush her leg against other passengers’ legs—all for ever so slightly longer than was normal, but not long enough for anyone to get any odd ideas about her. Yet now, at the age of sixty-seven, she longed for more.

Gradda had no illusions that she would find someone, but she had enough money now Joop was dead. She could pay for it with her inheritance. She placed an advert. And then Sebastiaan came along. But before him, there’d been Joop.

She’d spent thirty-five years married to a sternly devout man named Joop, and strictly speaking, she was still married to him. When they’d first got to know each other, she’d been so incredulous that anyone would want to be with her that she’d said, I don’t mind what you do with other girls as long as I don’t find out about it. I don’t have to be the only one, as long as you make me feel like I am.

Joop had felt offended. He’d told her there was nobody else and there never would be. And even though it was probably the truth, in all those years Gradda never felt for a moment like she was the love of his life. Maybe that was God’s fault. She was often struck by a jealousy she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t her, but some invisible force that kept Joop in his place. She’d tried to understand her husband, she’d gone to church with him, she’d prayed with him before dinner and celebrated every Christian holiday, and yet God had never found her. She thought, If He’s so great—greater than mankind—then surely He can seek me out too? Surely it doesn’t have to be so hard? READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2020

October 12, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla, George MacBeth, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

The best new writing from Norway, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia!

In the shorter brightnesses of autumn, we bring you four sublime new translations from around the world to fill your days with their generous offerings of fantasy, mysticism, intrigue, depth, and good old excellent writing. From a radical, genre-defying text that blends the textual and the cinematic, to an Argentine novel that expertly wields dream logic, to lauded Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada’s latest release, to the first ever volume of poetry from a Colombian woman to be published in English, we’ve got the expert guide to your next literary excursions.

girls

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss, Verso, 2020

Review by George MacBeth, Copy Editor

Unlike musicians, who often hear the same refrains sung back to them in crowds from Norway to Nizhny-Novgorod to Nottingham, writers can become disconnected from their corpus through the process of translation, often finding new markets and new readers for their early novels well into the mature phase of their authorship. Sometimes these multiple lives run in parallel, but more often than not, they’re discontinuous. Translated authors therefore begin to live out-of-sync with their work, jet-lagged as their oeuvre moves in transit across borders and between languages. This much is true of Jenny Hval, whose celebrated debut novella Paradise Rot was translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, nine years after it was originally published in Norway. Now comes its highly anticipated successor Girls Without God, again translated from the Norwegian by Idriss.

Though mainly known for her eponymous musical output, comprising five studio albums and multiple collaborations (all in English), Jenny Hval originally studied creative writing in Melbourne and then in the Midwest, an experience of deracination (she originally hails from a small town in the south of Norway) that became the template for Paradise Rot. This book was a compost heap of bildungsroman, fantasy, horror, and queer love story—a peculiar, taut dreamwork that left residual stains in this reader’s memory. Its success lay in its distillation of a very particular ambience, the same oneiric mood conjured up by Hval’s music at its best (as on 2015’s Apocalypse, Girl): a dank warehouse filled with rotting fruit, sprouting mushrooms, and trashy novels; the estrangement of the Anglosphere’s soft food; the paradisical claustrophobia of a sudden and intense intimacy.

As Hval expressed in a discussion with Laura Snapes at the LRB bookshop in London, writing (rather than lyricism, or music) was her original aspiration—not so much because she felt she had any particular aptitude for it, but that, unlike the technological or instrumental expertise demanded by music, “it was unskilled. I could just do it.” This DIY ethos clearly informs the ambitious Girls Against God (whose title is itself drawn from a CocoRosie zine), which works over its themes in the same transgressive, intermedial groove as authors like Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and, more recently, Jarett Kobek’s invective “bad novel” I Hate the Internet. For this reason, the novel deliberately resists a simple synopsis. An unnamed narrator, who in many respects resembles Hval, is back in Oslo after a spell abroad, working on a film treatment that will channel the provincial hatred of her rebellious adolescence, the legacy of early Black Metal’s irruption against Norwegian petit-bourgeois society, and the desire of “Girls Against God” to sustain their rebellion against the heteronormative “Scandinavian reproduction blueprint” even when “our corpse paint has long since run from our cheeks.” Whilst working on her filmscript, she documents the formation of a sort-of witches’ coven with her bandmates, co-conspirators, and weird sisters Venke and Terese, with whom she engages in esoteric rituals and discussions about art, gender, and magic.  READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2019

April 22, 2019  |  in News  |  by Jonathan Egid, Nina Perrotta, and Xiao Yue Shan

Join our blog editors as they explore everything the Spring 2019 issue has to offer!

The Spring 2019 issue of Asymptote, “Cosmic Connections,” features work from 27 countries and 17 different languages. If you’re not sure where to begin, our blog editors have you covered with recommendations for some of their favorite pieces, including an essay about an adventure in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a story that jumps from medieval Jewish theology to the relationship between an Argentine father and son, and poems that offer us a glimpse into intimate moments in the city of Shanghai.

Asymptote’s newest issue is one of the journal’s best to date, meaning that it was nearly impossible to choose just one piece to highlight. In the interviews section, I found Dubravka Ugrešić’s comments on literary activism and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s discussion of the role of Marxism in his work particularly illuminating, while, in the special feature, Nancy Kline’s essay stood out for its focus on the often-overlooked role of the writer’s (and the translator’s) accent and spoken voice in the translation process. But I’d like to devote my highlight to an essay by a somewhat lesser-known writer, one who might otherwise get lost among the many big names that appear in this issue.

READ MORE…