Posts filed under 'Memoir'

Asymptote Podcast: Hiromi Itō on “Living Trees and Dying Trees”

December 18, 2020  |  in Interviews, Podcast  |  by Steve Lehman

For our final podcast episode of the year, we sat down with Japanese poet Hiromi Itō, whose essay was one of Fall 2020’s highlights.

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In this episode, podcast editor Steve Lehman chats with acclaimed poet, essayist, and novelist Hiromi Itō about her development as a feminist writer, the importance of the environment in her life, and the moving experience of reading her own work translated into another language. Plus, hear an excerpt from Itō’s essay “Living Trees and Dying Trees,” translated from the Japanese and read by Jon L. Pitt. You can check out the full essay, along with new work from 32 countries, in our Fall 2020 issue.

What’s New in Translation: September 2020

September 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal and Filip Noubel

New work from Taiwan's Amang and Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck!

This month’s selected new translations from around the world cross more than geographic boundaries: the first combines deliciously feral Taiwanese poetry with exclusive, first-hand conversations on the process of writing and translating it; the second features a series of stylistically varied but equally poignant essays on an acclaimed German author’s personal and political journey. Both titles prompt us to peek into their subjects’ fascinating lives and work, and we’re all too happy to indulge.

amang

Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations by Amang, translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, Deep Vellum, 2020

Review by Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large for Uzbekistan

When I agreed to review Raised by Wolves, I thought I had signed up to read a translation of contemporary Taiwanese poetry. I very quickly realized my mistake: Raised by Wolves is much more than that; it is an invitation to partake in a feast of words that agree to disagree, that clash and dissolve to reemerge in another language. It is also an act of transgressive eavesdropping, as the poet and her translator let readers in on their intimate discussions about their craft (the book’s subtitle is “poems and conversations”).

Amang has published several collections, including On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002 (2003), No Daddy (2008), Chariots of Women (2016), and As We Embrace Thousands Are Dying (2016). In addition, she is a filmmaker and blogger, and her eclectic interests are clearly reflected in this new translation of her work. A couple of themes, however, seem to be especially prevalent throughout.

First, as the poet discloses (incidentally explaining her collection’s English title), she was raised mostly by her grandmother, who “was quite a character. She was very powerful and courageous. A she-wolf. She would do or say whatever she wanted. None of th[at] Confucian nonsense for her.” In line with this almost feral sentiment, many poems include raw images celebrating nature or the vibrance of the human body. In one, for instance, Amang writes: “Thrusting your hand down a tiger’s throat / to tear out his heart  / so, too, I / cut from a book a sheet of / ice.” And elsewhere: “I can give you anything / . . . / except that puny little stick / they call a prick / and is that worth making a fuss about?” READ MORE…

Our Enduring Fascination: On Patrik Svensson’s The Book of Eels

August 3, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Eva Wissting

Turning eels into an interesting read may seem challenging to some, but it’s exactly what Svensson accomplishes.

The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson, translated from the Swedish by Agnes Broomé, HarperCollins, 2020

The full English title of Swedish arts and culture journalist Patrik Svensson’s debut book is spot on: The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World. The original Swedish subtitle lacks “Our Enduring Fascination” and simply states “The Story of the Most Mysterious Creature in the World.” I like the English title better, because it’s that detail, the fact that the book is not just about eels, but also about us humans, our interest in the eels, and why they should matter to us, that makes this book about a slimy, snake-like water-creature relevant. 

Maybe you don’t think that you could be interested in a full-length book about every conceivable fact about eels. I certainly didn’t know I could be that interested until the buzz hit the Swedish literary scene last fall. It wasn’t just the book reviews, the author interviews, or the literary podcasts that kept turning their attention to The Book of Eels—Svensson was also awarded the August Prize, Sweden’s most prestigious literary award. And it didn’t stop there; even before the year ended, The Book of Eels had been sold to over thirty other countries. When I first heard about The Book of Eels, I could see why it stirred interest, because the subject matter is unconventional. So, what is the buzz all about? Well, for being a book about scientific, historic, and philosophical facts, it’s put together and presented in a prose that is easy to follow, even if you don’t typically read about the science of the bottom of the ocean or the ancient Greek origin of the scientific method. This is how Svensson depicts the Sargasso Sea:

The water is deep blue and clear, in places very nearly 23,000 feet deep, and the surface is carpeted with vast fields of sticky brown algae called Sargassum, which give the sea its name. Drifts of seaweed many thousands of feet across blanket the surface, providing nourishment and shelter for myriad creatures: tiny invertebrates, fish and jellyfish, turtles, shrimp, and crabs. Farther down in the deep, other kinds of seaweed and plants thrive. Life teems in the dark, like a nocturnal forest.

And so, with that nocturnal forest, Svensson establishes the centre stage for the Anguilla anguilla, the European eel, while simultaneously teaching us about the natural world and drawing us into his narrative. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

June 26, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Daniel Persia and Eva Wissting

Literary news from Brazil and Sweden!

As countries around the world are grappling around the walls of our new reality, their literatures respond in turn to the urgency of contemporary matters and the necessity of recognizing history. In this week’s dispatches, our editors report on publishers in Sweden taking on climate change and the world welcomes new translations of a canonical Brazilian author, among other noteworthy news. Read on to keep up!

Eva Wissting, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Sweden

Publisher Natur & Kultur announced in their most recent sustainability report that they aim to become Sweden’s first climate neutral book publisher. The goal is to become climate neutral within 2020, which means that firstly, they will do what they can to minimize climate changing emissions, and secondly, they will compensate for any emissions from their activities or production. Their printing house, located in Estonia, will switch to ecofriendly electricity and they are investigating how to minimize transportation within the publisher’s business. Authors published by Natur & Kultur include historian and former Swedish Academy Permanent Secretary Peter Englund (The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War) and writer, columnist and August Prize winner Lena Andersson (Wilful Disregard and Acts of Infidelity).

Another reminder of the importance of action on climate change arrived recently with the fall edition of the triennial book catalogue from the Swedish book industry organization Svensk Bokhandel. This fall, Sweden’s most prominent environmental activist, and possibly most well-known person overall right now, Greta Thunberg, is having another book published by Polaris Publishing. Last year, photographer Roger Turesson and journalist Alexandra Urisman Otto travelled with Thunberg through Europe and the United States and the book is their depiction of the young environmentalist. Previously published works by Thunberg includes Our House is on Fire, written together with her parents and sister, and No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, which is a collection of her speeches.

Daniel Persia, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Brazil

As Brazil continues to grapple with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, its literary community perseveres. With the recent cancelation of the 26th International Book Fair of São Paulo, originally slated for October 30 to November 8, 2020, publishers, writers, and reviewers have carried the conversation to online platforms such as YouTube, Facebook Live, and Instagram. Despite current flight restrictions and limitations on travel, Brazilian literature continues to cross new frontiers, garnering new readers across the globe. READ MORE…

Why Living Is Not the Same as Life: Yan Lianke’s Village Memoir

June 4, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty.

Three Brothers by Yan Lianke, translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas, Grove Press, 2020

One of the most translated contemporary Chinese authors, Yan Lianke, has become quite the celebrity: he is featured in interviews in global media, invited to international literary festivals, and quoted on the coronavirus pandemic. Yet, despite this fame and international image, he remains fiercely loyal to his roots—the Chinese village where backbreaking hardship was the common lot until the 1990s. As he admits in his latest book to be translated into English: “I grew up in a household full of poverty and warmth.”

In this piece of non-fiction called 我与父辈 (first published in China in 2009) and rendered as Three Brothers in English through Carlos Rojas’ faithful and vivid translation, Yan pays tribute to the generation of his father, who survived an era of famine, political upheavals, social discrimination, and self-reliance in the 1960s and ’70s. By remaining faithful to their rock-solid values of decency, sacrifice, and stoic acceptance of life’s unfairness, this generation was able to provide better lives for their children. Yan, who belongs to the bridge generation, still remembers his early life of “吃苦” (chi ku, or literally, “eating bitterness”), whilst he has also directly experienced the benefits of China’s economic and social reforms that started in the 1980s but affected life in villages much later, around the late 1990s.

The book, which is subtitled Memories of My Family, describes the lives of three men: Yan’s father, Yan’s father’s second brother (called Second Uncle), and his cousin (called Fourth Uncle). All of them share similar characteristics: they are illiterate, extremely hard-working, and they all die as a result of the physical abuse that their bodies experienced in order to meet their most important obligations towards their families.

Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty. In this world of harsh masculinity—there are very few mentions of women in the book—life consists of the most important stations in life: giving birth, building houses, feeding and marrying off one’s many children (this was before China’s one-child policy started being implemented in 1979), providing education for the happy few, and ensuring a decent funeral. This is all accomplished through a philosophy that Yan describes as the difference between living in the village and in the city:

“ ‘Living’ suggests a process of enduring day after day, with each day being the same, and implies a kind of monotony, boredom, hopelessness, and idleness. ‘Life,’ on the other hand, conveys a sense of richness, of progress and the future. It has color and vitality and calls to mind the act of walking down a broad road illuminated by bright lights.”

READ MORE…

Coming Home to Everywhere: On Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara

March 9, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Defamiliarisation leads to an ecstatic shattering of past lives, and she emerges, proudly, in her otherness.

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated from the Chinese by Mike Fu, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020

One of the most beloved characters of most Chinese children born after 1940 is the infamous Sanmao (三毛 / Three Hairs), an orphan so impoverished that he could only manage to grow, well, three hairs. Set largely in nationalist Shanghai, the narrative of Sanmao detailed his nomadic wanderings, often involving ignominious miscarriages of justice, teetering hunger, and desperate, one-yuan schemes. Round-headed, ribcage-baring, picking up cigarette butts on the street, Sanmao was adored by children like myself—poor but not destitute, bred with an uncertain yet determined idea of the world’s cruelties, cultivating a helpless, weary sort of empathy for a two-dimensional friend.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 14, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Barbara Halla, Nestor Gomez, and Shelly Bhoil

This week's latest news from Tibet, El Salvador, and France!

This week our writers bring you the latest news from Tibet, El Salvador, and France. At Indiana University, a new Tibetan translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night sparks discussion; in El Salvador, the contemporary poet Vladimir Amaya gives an interview about his poetic decisions; in France, the accusations of sexual assault in the literary establishment ignite urgent discussion about French law and the #MeToo movement. Read on to find out more! 

Shelly Bhoil, Editor-at-Large, reporting from United States

There was a powerful coming together of two exile stories—the Tibetan and Jewish—at the Central Eurasian Studies Department of Indiana University through a panel discussion—The Tibetan Translation of Elie Wiesel’s Night—on January 29. The Nobel Peace Prize-winner Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night (1960), discussed by the distinguished Jewish literature scholar Alvin Rosenfeld in the panel, has been translated into more than thirty languages, its Tibetan version being the most recent. Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor upon whom the Dalai Lama conferred the International Campaign for Tibet’s Light of Truth award in 2005.

Wiesel’s Night is the first work to be translated into Tibetan under New York-based Latse Library’s 108 translations project and made available for free here. According to Latse’s statistics, “In the first two weeks alone [since the book’s publication in Oct 2019], there were 3,300 downloads of the ebook and PDF, and countless more instances of sharing and forwarding on social media and email.” Gendun Rabsel, the Tibetan language expert, spoke in the panel about the welcoming reception of Night among Tibetan readers. Pema Bhum, Night’s translator and a leading Tibetan intellectual, discussed his meeting with Wiesel and the challenges and choices in translating this work into Tibetan, including his consultations with the celebrated historian on Tibet, Elliot Sperling, and with IU Jewish Studies faculty. READ MORE…

Other Worlds: Engaging Rajko Grlić (Part II)

February 6, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by Ellen Elias-Bursac

At the airport, Honorio confesses to his wife that he has neither the strength nor the enthusiasm for new revolutions.

This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Yesterday in Part I, we featured an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs. Today, in Part II, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from that memoir, from a section called “Festival Selector.”

Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.

Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Asymptote contributing editor Ellen Elias-Bursać. Elias-Bursać spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short, an interview that was published yesterday as Part I of this series. In the excerpt that follows, “Festival Selector,” Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.

Festival Selector: the person who chooses the films, conceptualizes and shapes the festival creatively.

Cannes, 1981

In the hall of Palais des Festivals in Cannes, someone taps me on the shoulder and, before I have a chance to turn, starts talking about my movie You Love Only Once, in a jumble of Czech, Russian, and Spanish.

“Honorio Rancaño, selector for the Valencia Film Festival,” the man finally introduces himself, unshaven and chewing on a long, wet cigar. READ MORE…

Translating Grief and Silence: Denise Newman on the Work of Naja Marie Aidt

December 18, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Nataliya Deleva

Translation is for me both stripping down and holding open to possibility.

Denise Newman is a poet and translator based in San Francisco. She has published four collections of poetry, and translated two novels by Inger Christensen from the Danish—The Painted Room and Azorno—as well as the short story collection, Baboon, by Naja Marie Aidt, which won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize, and most recently, Aidt’s memoir, When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book. The memoir, a semi-finalist for the National Book Awards and a finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize, is saturated with the trauma experienced by a mother grieving her son. Nataliya Deleva recently spoke with Newman about her approach to translating this deeply personal narrative across various cultural contexts, her proximity to the text and its author, and the role of rhythm in conveying silence on the page. 

Nataliya Deleva (ND): Translating is often co-creating, as it is not only the words and sentences of a text being translated, but also their meaning in a different cultural context. How did you find this process, considering this book is so painfully personal? Is grief universal?

Denise Newman (DN): Yes, the translation process touches on the mystery of language. I’ve often marveled at how translations of Bashō’s haikus seem to connect me directly to the moment of his observation. It doesn’t matter that the poem has traveled centuries, oceans, and languages. Maybe this is mostly possible when something is experienced and communicated directly, without any interference—then the original energy, which is outside the conditions of ordinary time and space, stays vital. I think this is what makes translating compelling; you have to go so deeply into a text that you depart from linear time and space. Working on Aidt’s book was hard, though, because of my own interference. She’s my friend, and my sorrow and concern for her sometimes got in the way, particularly while working on the passages that describe the last hours of Carl’s life. Her writing in this part is so direct, I felt as though I were actually present in the nightmare, and often needed to take breaks to clear my head. To get back to your question, I think all emotions are universal; we sense this when they are expressed directly, without any interference, as Aidt is able to do. Translating requires the ability to access those original emotions; they are what electrifies the language.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2019

November 11, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, Alyea Canada, Daljinder Johal, and Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

November’s best new translations, chosen by the Asymptote staff.

November brings plenty of exciting new translations and our writers have chosen four varied, yet equally enriching and timely works: Bohumil Hrabal’s memoir that is at once a detailed study of humans’ relationship with cats and an exploration of dealing with mounting pressures and stress; a debut collection of Chilean short stories which explores social and economic difficulties and sheds light on some of the causes behind Chile’s recent social unrest; Hiromi Kawakami’s follow-up novella to the international bestseller, Strange Weather in Tokyo; and a novel set on the Chagos Archipelago which recounts the expulsion of Chagossians from the island of Diego Garcia and examines cultural identity and exile. Read on to find out more!

hrabal_all_my_cats_jacket

All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson, New Directions, 2019

Review by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, Educational Arm Assistant

Bohumil Hrabal’s All My Cats is not for the faint of heart. Though fans of the author will recognize and appreciate the quirky humor and lyrical melancholy, one must also be prepared to take on the harsher aspects of the story, and I suspect that the uninitiated may find the descriptions of cats being murdered a bit much to take. The short memoir documents the author’s relationship to the feral cats living in his country cottage in Kersko, and his anguished labors to brutally limit their number. It is a lovely homage, and a richly evocative account of the pleasures of feline companionship, with lush descriptions of their delicate paws and velvety noses. We become acquainted with each individual kitty and their distinctive markings, habits, and personalities, but these rhapsodic stories are punctuated by episodes of grim slaughter that are depressingly specific—a morose account of an awful deed. And so, gradually, horrifyingly, this becomes a book about guilt and how it shapes one’s worldview, producing a strange reckoning of crime and punishment that reads retribution in the random alignments of events.

Witnessing Hrabal shuttling back and forth between his life in Prague and Kersko, we begin to notice that his concerns about his cats are combined with a steadily accumulating sense of anxiety and torment about his work, neighbors, and life. “What are we going to do with all those cats?” his wife asks, in an echoing refrain, as new litters of kittens, inexorably, arrive. The book is about the cats, but we start to realize that it is also not about the cats, not really, but rather, about how Hrabal struggles to manage the various stresses of his life more generally as he gains success and recognition as a writer. Haunted by his guilt over the murdered creatures, he surveys the world around him, reflecting on the relationship between art and suffering, and increasingly begins to feel that he is a plaything of fate, doomed to unhappiness, with no choice but surrender. READ MORE…

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Fall 2019

October 21, 2019  |  in News  |  by Andrea Blatz, Rachel Allen, Sarah Moore, and Xiao Yue Shan

Our blog editors pick their favorite pieces from the Fall 2019 issue!

Another issue, another record broken: Asymptote’s Fall 2019 issue features work from an unprecedented thirty-six countries. Looking for a point of entry? Consider our blog editors your guides. Their selections here, which range from Korean poetry to Russian drama, will set you off on the right foot. 

“Why do I think October is beautiful? / It is not, is not beautiful.” So goes a poem by the late Bill Berkson. It is not—as we know when the grey settles and looks to stay—a particularly delightful month, but if all the poems featuring October attests to something, it is that this time, its late and sedate arrival, is one that enamors poets. So it is that a vein of poetics runs through our Fall 2019 issue, and the poetry section itself is one of tremendous artistry and vitality. From the stoic and enduring lines of Osip Mandelstam to a brilliant translation of Sun Tzu-Ping’s strikingly visual language, Asymptote has once again gathered the great poets from far reaches. 

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2019

October 14, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon, Garrett Phelps, and Shelly Bhoil

October's new translations, selected by the Asymptote staff to shed light on the best recent offerings of world literature.

A new month brings an abundance of fresh translations, and our writers have chosen three of the most engaging, important works: a Japanese novella recounting the monotony of modern working life as the three narrators begin employment in a factory, the memoir of a Russian political prisoner and filmmaker, as well as the first comprehensive English translation of Giorgio de Chirico’s Italian poems. Read on to find out more!

the factory cover

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2019

Review by Andreea Scridon, Assistant Editor

Drawn from the author’s own experience as a temporary worker in Japan, The Factory strikes one as being a laconic metaphor for the psychologically brutalizing nature of the modern workplace. There is more than meets the eye in this seemingly mundane narrative of three characters who find work at a huge factory (reticent Yoshiko as a shredder, dissatisfied Ushiyama as a proofreader, and disoriented Furufue as a researcher), as they become increasingly absorbed and eventually almost consumed by its all-encompassing and panoptic nature. Coincidentally wandering into a job for the city’s biggest industry, or finding themselves driven there—against their instincts—by necessity, the three alternating narrators chronicle the various aspects of their working experience and the deeply bizarre undertones that lie beneath the banal surface. READ MORE…

All That Makes a Life: Jennifer Croft on Writing Her Memoir

September 2, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sohini Basak

Translation requires striking a balance between two people’s voices that can be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

From being the co-winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize alongside the writer Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft has just been announced as a judge of the 2020 International Booker Prize. Croft works across Polish, Ukrainian, and Argentine Spanish, and is currently translating The Book of Jacob, a nine-hundred-page epic by Olga Tokarczuk. She is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize.

In Homesick, Croft’s memoir, words and their meanings shift and shine through in unusual, tender, and life-transforming ways as the subject moves from a family home, to being the youngest person to be enrolled in her undergraduate class, to going through tragic heartbreaks. A most engaging read, the memoir itself has shape-shifted in interesting ways, having started as a Spanish novel and as a blog. The English-language version (Unnamed Press, September 2019) too is accompanied by photographs, which operate as their own language system, bringing, by turns, softness and sharpness to the storytelling. On the occasion of the release of Homesick, poet and previous Social Media Manager of Asymptote, Sohini Basak, spoke to Jennifer Croft over email.

Sohini Basak (SB): I want to start with the photographs. Could you tell us a bit more about the role of photography in childhood and consequently in your memoir?

Jennifer Croft (JLC): Although photography played an enormous role in my childhood and adolescence, I didn’t really remember that until I started writing Homesick. Because I was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina when I wrote the book, I wrote it in my strange Spanish, which is both foreign (since I started learning Spanish only in my late twenties) and very local (since I’ve only ever studied and spoken porteño Spanish in Buenos Aires). In that first Spanish-language version (called Serpientes y escaleras, coming out next year with Entropía), that language provided a sense of suspense about where this character from Tulsa, Oklahoma was going to go next, and how she was going to end up speaking the way she did. READ MORE…

Imagining Truths: In Conversation with Gabriela Ybarra

June 20, 2019  |  in Interviews  |  by Sarah Timmer Harvey

I always feel that I’m a detective of my own life.

“The story goes,” begins Gabriela Ybarra’s novel The Dinner Guest, “that in my family there’s an extra dinner guest at every meal.” This guest, Ybarra writes, occasionally “appears, casts his shadow and erases one of those present” and forms part of the complex family mythology that Ybarra seeks to unravel in her stunning documentary-style debut. The Dinner Guest is a free reconstruction of the events surrounding the kidnapping and murder of her grandfather in 1977 and the death of her mother in 2011. Ybarra deftly combines collective memory, media reports, photographs, Google search results, and instinctive imaginings to unearth her family’s traumatic past. Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, The Dinner Guest, flawlessly translated by Natasha Wimmer, has just been released in the U.S. by Transit Books. On the eve of publication, we spoke with Gabriela Ybarra about writing grief, playing detective, and finding freedom in a photograph of Robert Walser.

—Sarah Timmer Harvey

Sarah Timmer Harvey (STH): When did you start writing The Dinner Guest, and was it always intended to be the novel it became?

Gabriela Ybarra (GY): I started to work on The Dinner Guest shortly after my mother died in September 2011. Her illness went by so fast that, when she passed away, I felt the need to write down what I had lived through during the previous months just to make sense of it all. During the process, I got stuck several times. In the beginning, I thought that this was because I was a novice writer and still lacked experience, but as time went by, I realized that there were some behaviors in my family that I couldn’t explain. For example, during my mother’s illness, my father kept talking about a rosary covered in blood, which I thought was very weird, but couldn’t find an explanation for it. As I started to look back, I realized that many of these behaviors were related to the kidnapping and murder of my grandfather by the terrorist group ETA in 1977. In grieving my mother, I stumbled upon the unresolved grief related to my grandfather.

STH: The Dinner Guest is a fascinating blend of fact and fiction. The framework of the story is undoubtedly factual; the kidnapping and death of your grandfather, your mother’s illness, and her subsequent passing are all real, and yet, there are also parts that are pure fiction; imagined events, conversations, and connections. Is it important for you that readers view The Dinner Guest as a novel?

GY: Genre isn’t so important to me. I consider the book a novel because I believe that memory is always fiction and, in the case of my grandfather, I had to make up big parts of his kidnapping because nobody in my family would tell me anything about it. For many years, my family lived as if these traumatic events had never happened. I could infer their pain through their silences, but lacked a story; the only information that I had came from the newspapers. In the case of my mother, I did know the events quite well, but reality is often too complicated to make believable, so I had to twist it.

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