Posts filed under 'reality'

Here There Be Monsters: Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Books I and II

December 4, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Matt Seidel

On the Calculation of Volume is a mix of pensive reflection, scientific reasoning, and bone-dry humor. . .

On the Calculation of Volume (Books I and II) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024

Tara Selter, the narrator of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, takes a Roman coin out for walks and believes that a refrigerator is capable of sobbing: “It is quite permissible for a fridge that cannot hold onto its Christmas food to laugh—or cry—like a human being if it wishes.” A reader might reasonably infer that Tara has lost her mind, but there is a method to Tara’s madness, as her thoughts and behavior stem from wholly rational attempts to make sense of her absurd condition: each day, she wakes up on the morning of November 18.

On the Calculation of Volume is a septology, the first five books of which have been published in Balle’s native Denmark. This fall, Books I and II had their English debut in Barbara J. Haveland’s elegant translation from New Directions. The work begins in medias res—as much as is possible for a plot in which time fails to advance—the narrator having already lived with her curious predicament for 121 days. The first sentence is a tonal feint that wouldn’t be out of place in a suspense novel, but, here, primes the reader for the sense of estrangement that plagues Tara’s recounting: “There is someone in the house.” Identified solely by the sounds he makes, that someone is not an intruder but her husband, Thomas, with whom she runs a rare books business. By the time the novel opens, Tara has abandoned explaining her predicament each day and opted to avoid him, thoroughly estranged from a man to whom she once felt molecularly bonded:

Our love has always been microscopic. It is something in the cells, some molecules, some compounds outside our control, which collide in the air around us, sound waves that form unique harmonies when we speak, it happens at the atomic level or even that of smaller particles…

After four months of November 18ths, her husband has been abstracted into a “someone” and reduced to mere noise, “just sounds in the house.”

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Blog Editors’ Highlights: Spring 2024

April 22, 2024  |  in News  |  by Bella Creel and Xiao Yue Shan

A deeper look into our latest edition!

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

In a Bethlehem of the future, no one is left. Some undetermined ecological catastrophe, shown only through a black, viscous flood tiding over the narrow alleyways, had sent volcanic streams of smoke up through the minaret and the turreted roofs, obliterating the limestone, the arched windows, the indecipherable urban folds. This is where Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s 2019 film, In Vitro, takes place: a world where two of the last remaining survivors of the human race meet in an abandoned nuclear reactor. One of them is dying, and the other seems to be a designed individual, a living archive. In the dialogue that unites the disparate scenes—some archival, some distinctly futuristic, some shimmering with ghosts—the woman lying in the hospital bed says to her visitor: “Your memories are as real as mine.” The younger woman gets up and walks to the other side of the room. “I disagree,” she replies brusquely. “The pain these stories cause are twofold. . . because the loss I feel was never mine.”

Living within an increasingly crowded media landscape, combined with modern technology’s dissolution of physical distance, the significance of these lines from In Vitro do not escape most of us. The theorist Alison Landsberg called it “prosthetic memory”: a phenomenon in which recollections are lifted from a cultural landscape and implanted almost seamlessly within an individual consciousness, culminating in a psychic patchwork that does not distinguish between what has happened to us, and what was simply witnessed. Uban Cristina Ali Farah’s “Three Short Pieces”, in a delicate and tender translation by Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen, sees the Somalian-Italian author picking over such stitches in her own life, examining what has been lived and what has been given; what has been inherited and what has been picked up along the way. Some of the memories she discusses, as in a shared experience of migration, have slowly unwound inside her by way of language, and others, as in the first three years of her life, are echoed into the body through photographs, tastes, trails, stuttering fragments that she pieces together into a portrait of lineage, a half-there origin story. 

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The Tragedy of the Present: Bryan Karetnyk on Translating Yuri Felsen

April 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Though his writing may well ostensibly shun the “outside world”, Felsen was acutely conscious of what he termed “the tragedy of the present”.

A perilous question always hangs over the works of exiled writers: travelling amidst the turmoil of history, where is their place? For the Russian novelist and critic Yuri Felsen, who perished in Auschwitz in 1943, the Anglosphere’s answer only recently emerged by way of translator Bryan Karetnyk, who has lifted Felsen’s works from obscurity and translated them into English—for the first time into any language other than Russian. In a challenging, original trilogy that employs modernist aesthetics, intercultural crossroads, linguistic experiments, and the soul within time, Felsen layered a masterful prose over reality, beyond singular country or era. His place, it appears, can be located within the complexities of any contemporality intersecting with literature. The first novel of the trilogy, Deceit, was published by Prototype in 2022, and the second, Happiness, is due out in 2025. Karetnyk was awarded a PEN Translates award for the latter, and in this interview, he speaks to us on Felsen’s Proustian style, what these works demand of their translator, and how they resonate through the English language.

Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): One of the most striking aspects of Yuri Felsen’s work is his wield and command of the long sentence and his elaborate, crescendo-ing clauses. While translating, was there any element you prioritised—rhythm, texture, balance—in order to maintain the delicate construction and dexterity of the lines? What do you feel is the most important aspect to preserve in the movement from Russian to English?

Bryan Karetnyk (BK): I’ve lived with Felsen’s prose (and been haunted by it) for almost a decade now, and one thing I continue to be struck by, whenever I return to any one of his works, is his keen ability to make every sentence tell a story in itself. Russian literature of course is no stranger to long sentences, but what sets Felsen’s prose apart from others is the degree to which all his cascading clauses are so interdependent on one another. You just cannot break them down into smaller units, so he necessarily asks his readers to hold a considerable amount of information in their consciousness over the course of a single period. No matter whether he’s describing external events or the narrator’s inner world, each of his sentences has, as it were, a distinct, baroque narrative arc that follows the narrator’s intense ratiocination—the result of which is that his lines twist and turn in unexpected ways, creating a dynamic tension that is as much psychological as it is rhetorical.

As a translator, the primary duty, as I see it, is always to reproduce that carefully crafted narrative-psychological arc—the exposition, the conflict, the climax, the denouement, the segue into the next thought—all in a way that brings life to the soliloquy. Structurally speaking, one has to emulate the architecture of his phrasing by paying attention to rhythm, tempo, poise—the point and counterpoint of his rhetoric; yet, at the same time, that cannot distract from the demands placed on word choice, which presents its own set of challenges and is so vital in creating texture as well as meaning. Felsen’s narrator is always in search of the mot juste, and, together with a fondness for abstraction, he has a habit of using words idiosyncratically—impressionistically even, rarely in the straight dictionary sense. So often, the texts seem to strain at the limits of what is articulable (he seldom seems to find that mot—if it even exists), and you can never quite escape the sense that some shade of nuance remains forever just out of reach. But I think there’s a profound beauty in that. READ MORE…

Announcing our November Book Club Selection: At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović

November 30, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

One could spend a pleasant hour wandering inside nearly every evocative sentence of At the Lucky Hand.

As we inch towards the end of a year that has tested in turn the limits of our imagination, the capacities of our patience, and the extent to which we indulge our escapist tendencies, we have been encouraged to examine closely the narratives that perpetuate contemporary existence: narratives that not only exist within the pages of books, but that also thread our day to day, commanded by something as curious as it is unknown. So, in our second-to-last Book Club selection of 2020, we are thrilled to introduce a complex, mysterious, and commandingly beautiful novel by Serbian master Goran Petrović, which inquires into the infinity of literary invention in order to infer how fantasy contributes to reality.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović, translated from the Serbian by Peter Agnone, Deep Vellum, 2020

Goran Petrović’s At the Lucky Hand, translated from the Serbian by the late Peter Agnone, flatters the sensibilities of those enamored with the written word—within its pages, we become romantic leads and daring detectives. Our quality of “mild presence or mild absence at the same time” becomes a virtue, nearly a superpower, highly valuable to various profiteering types. In fact, the novel is Petrović’s contribution to what might be considered the devastatingly nerdy genre that animates literary theory. And yet, this is only one face of a multifaceted work. Irresistibly engaging and virtuosically crafted, At the Lucky Hand marries high theory with high drama in spaces so quiet and invisible, that their liveliness takes one completely by surprise.

Petrović strikes a winning balance between imaginative extravagance and sober social criticism. Adam Lozanić, a somber, lonely philology student and part-time proofreader, receives a lucrative job offer from a mysterious couple; he must revise a memorial already long out of print. The book, expensively self-published, contains six hundred pages of description with no plot or characters to speak of. Adam and his employers are practitioners of a sort of reading analogous to lucid dreaming, in which they can meet other readers enjoying the same book at the same time and explore the universe of the text in all the richness suggested, not explicated, by the words. The elaborately described estate, imagined by the deceased author in a state of devotion to a love no less real for having never escaped the page, provides a ripe stage. Adam and the few other readers, thrown together by happenstance, fill in the vacuums where conventional literary elements were missing. Love, murder, mystery, power, and ambition electrify places that tremble on the edge of existence and people who, by all appearances, sit in chairs moving nothing but their eyeballs.

Jelena, characterized mainly by her pleasant smell, fervent desire for escape, and careful companionship to an increasingly senile woman, unwittingly enchants the innocent Adam. But they are only the latest lovers to inhabit the home and garden. As the stories of their predecessors unfold, frustrated precisely because of the disjunction between the realities on and off the page, one yearns for Adam and Jelena to reconcile the two. However, the more decidedly a character chooses to exist inside the literary imagination, the more they develop a noble purity outside of it. Adam and Jelena learn what the more seasoned readers already know: that they neither need nor want anything of “real” life. The very food that nourishes them is cooked in fictional kitchens and the money they exchange in long-shuttered shops appears from memories of long-defunct banks. Using nothing, they are useful to no one, and the talismans that give them access to their imaginations are the only means one has to influence them. READ MORE…

Where Theater Starts and Reality Ends: A Review of Fernanda Torres’s Glory and Its Litany of Horrors

October 10, 2019  |  in Reviews  |  by Clayton McKee

When does fiction stop and reality begin? What is theater’s role in the production and perception of reality?

Glory and Its Litany of Horrors, by Fernanda Torres, translated from the Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker, Restless Books, 2019

“When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”
—William Shakespeare, King Lear

You just sat down, opened up your internet browser—Chrome, because any other browser is just subpar—went to asymptotejournal.com, and finally stumbled across this review of Glory and Its Litany of Horrors by Fernanda Torres. Before reading, you had decided to go for a run, five miles through the woods behind your house that looked similar to the Brazilian backlands. As you ran, you saw a group of soldiers dressed in camouflage about to fire at each other. Without knowing it, you were running through a paintball match; but, thinking it was real, you hit the deck and waited to see what fate would bring you, allowing you to identify with Mario as he struggles through the theater, his acting career, and own reality.

For some of you, this story could be completely true—all details being events that may have occurred throughout your day; for some, bits and pieces were true, while for others, only the act of reading this review is true. These levels of the “you” in reality and the fictional “you” in the above story are the same levels that exist throughout Mario Cardoso’s life in Torres’s work. Published by Restless Books in 2019 (originally published in 2017), Eric M. B. Becker renders Torres’s blurred lines of the protagonist’s fiction and reality (narrated in the first person) in a prose that flows like the action and lines of a play, drawing the reader even further into the scene.

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