The Vertigo of Blue: On Mariette Navarro’s Ultramarine

June 15, 2023 | in Reviews | by Annilee Newton

With Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro gives us an eerily beautiful portal into the submerged depths of our own interior worlds. . .

Ultramarine, by Mariette Navarro, translated from the French by Cory Stockwell, Héloïse Press, 2023

“There are the living, the dead, and the sailors.”

From the very first words of her short, poetic novel Ultramarine, Mariette Navarro restructures our expectations. We are entering another place where the rules of existence have changed. By challenging one of the most ingrained dichotomies of perception that we have—a person is alive or a person is dead—she begins to weave the shroud of mystery that is cast over the entirety of Ultramarine. The introduction of the sailor sketches out a third liminal space between our assumptions, destabilizing us and setting a tone of wonder and dread that will carry throughout the text. What could it possibly mean to be a sailor?

Our main character is an unnamed female captain of a cargo ship crossing the Atlantic, her life fractured into two pieces. In one part, she lives on solid land, waiting uneasily for the moment when she will be reunited with crew and ship. The second part of her life is spent traversing the water, navigating the places between chunks of earth. Strict adherence to protocol has brought her success in a male-dominated career. She now manages a crew of twenty men and the portable world of her metal ship.

Then, one day, she briefly abandons her own protocol. The crew asks her to stop the ship for a few moments in the middle of the crossing so that they can swim naked in the deepest blue of the ocean. She doesn’t know why she agrees, but she agrees, and this one strange acquiescence sets off a chain of inexplicable events.

Hope and Money Unites Us All: On The Hand That Feeds You by Mercedes Rosende

February 9, 2023 | in Reviews | by Chinmay Rastogi

. . .the visceral, gripping event only serves as backdrop—like the mentions of unusual weather—never bursting to take centre stage.

The Hand That Feeds You by Mercedes Rosende, translated from the Uruguayan Spanish by Tim Gutteridge, Bitter Lemon Press, 2023

The Hand That Feeds You is Uruguayan author Mercedes Rosende’s sequel to Crocodile Tears, the thriller that won her the prestigious German literary award LiBeraturpreis in 2019, and it continues the author’s track record of bringing powerful, darkly comic crime novels to her readers. The duo of Rosende and translator Tim Gutteridge work together to fill these pages with characters both strong and deeply flawed—none more so than the protagonist Ursula López—living in the Old Town of Montevideo which, similar to its inhabitants, hides more than it shows.

The high octane beginning nails the reader into their seat in Rosende’s theatre; the narrative feels cinematic throughout, with the author always adept in choosing what to spotlight, what to lampshade, when to pan out, and when to zoom in. The narrator is all-knowing, telling us what is happening and what will happen in the same sentence, but also proves adept at knowing when to let the characters speak for themselves for the benefit of the reader—a mark of Rosende’s command over her prose’s flow. There are many places where the focus shifts from the action to the characters, integral in showing the individual states of mind:

We see her face in close-up: she is flushed, and perspiration is starting to accumulate around her open, smiling mouth. She is lightly made up, just enough to accentuate her beauty. She has taken great care over her clothes, loose black garments that suit her, even if many people, slaves to ideals of beauty imposed by some mysterious criterion, would say she is a few pounds overweight.

The people of The Hand That Feeds You are involved in a bank heist gone wrong, and by writing such vivid personal presences, Rosende allows readers time to catch breath between tense moments, all playing out amidst the backdrop of commentary on society and life in Montevideo—the author’s own hometown. In the crime’s aftermath, the robbers, the cop, and the lawyer who is behind the whole thing become engaged in a game of cat and mouse with Ursula—who drops in at an opportune moment to make away with the money.

The language does not try to override the plot in importance and impact (there isn’t much need for ornate style in a page-turner that has one holding one’s sides and breath in equal measure) but it has peculiarities that again, draw the eye to certain elements that Rosende and Gutteridge want us to focus on. For instance, there is something off about most of the characters that populate the novel. Ursula’s companion Diego, always at the mercy of the people around him and his own fears, “opens his eyes like a ventriloquist’s dummy”; his lawyer, Antinucci, has an unnatural smile and eyes like hard-boiled eggs. Our protagonist Ursula has schizophrenic conversations with her dead father. All these elements lend their characters something unnatural, broken. A touch of the preternatural also hangs over them, be it a haunting, a religion, or a reversion to superstition and a desperation for signs to aid decision-making in moments of stress. READ MORE…

Contributor:

Chinmay Rastogi

Languages:

Place:

Uruguay

Writers:

Mercedes Rosende
Tim Gutteridge

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On Żanna Słoniowska’s The House with the Stained Glass Window

November 1, 2017 | in Reviews | by Victoria Miluch

A strikingly crafted window into how our lives are a mosaic of the things that happened before us.

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. London, England: MacLehose Press, 2017. 240 pages. £12.99.

Toward the middle of The House with the Stained Glass Window, the Ukrainian-Polish writer Żanna Słoniowska’s debut novel, the unnamed narrator tells us that her great-grandmother occasionally falls into fits of hysterical sobbing, which her grandmother explains as having to do with “the past.” “I imagined ‘the past’ as an uncontrolled intermittent blubbering,” the narrator says. This definition is not a far cry from the idea of the past portrayed in The House with the Stained Glass Window: not blubbering, but certainly not controlled by human forces, intermittently entering the present day until it infiltrates it, saturates it, and finally becomes indistinguishable from it.

The novel centers around four generations of women who live under the same roof in Lviv, in a house noted for its enormous stained glass window. The window sets the present-day plot in motion: it is because of the window that the novel’s narrator, who we only know as Marianna’s daughter, meets Mykola, her mother’s former lover, and begins an affair with him herself. A relationship like that would provide enough internal and external conflict to fill a novel to its brim, but Słoniowska does not dedicate much page space to it. Instead, if anything, the affair serves as a springboard to the past, to exploring the irresistible pull of it.