A Year of Reading the World

December 14, 2023 | in Essays | by Xiao Yue Shan

Sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart.

Every month, the Asymptote Book Club shares a newly published, translated title with readers and subscribers. From Nobel laureates to electrifying debuts, this selection features some of the most powerful voices writing in any language, opening up an entry into the immense archives of wold literature. In this essay, we look back on the books of 2023 thus far.

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Whenever a major event transpires, anywhere in the world, the instinct of many is to reach into the annals of writing—for explanation, ruminations, solace, transcriptions of history, glimmers of what’s to come, stories of people and their ordinary or extraordinary lives. . . On January 1 of this year, Croatia officially joined the Schengen Area, making it the twenty-seventh member to benefit from the region’s removal of border controls—and the search for Croatian books and literature went up 30%. During the surprising and intermittently absurd “Chinese balloon incident” in early February, searches for books on Chinese espionage went up a full 100%. Interest for Ukrainian literature stayed at a high amidst the ongoing conflict, and peaked when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin for committing war crimes regarding the illegal deportation of children. As a devastating civil war broke out in Sudan in mid-April, the world immediately sought out writing from and about the region, and when Niger’s government was overthrown in a military coup on July 26, searches for Nigerien books and authors also saw a significant surge. And as writers from Palestine and Israel continued, over the decades, to release texts around nation, land, exile, occupation, humanity, and violence both physical and psychological, we all watched in horror as the devastation grew almost unimaginably—and we looked for those books.

Books and the world they’re written in, books and the worlds they give us—sometimes reality would seem unbearable if literature were not there to decipher it, to give it heart. As the poet Adonis said, “My homeland is this spark this lightning in the darkness of the time remaining. . .” (translated by S.M. Toorawa); with language, such texts lend us that brightness, and we are rendered able to discover the many narratives and landscapes of our long, shadowy era.

In this year’s Book Club, we’ve thus far featured eleven titles: eleven authors, eleven countries, eleven languages, and eleven translators. Each brought their own entrancing energy of storytelling, whether taking history or the human psyche as material, building on myth or fearlessly experimental. There were titles that sought to give us a vivid portrait of a certain neighbourhood, a certain period. Others dove into the intricate channels of thinking to paint a picture of the mind. READ MORE…

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Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

September 28, 2023 | in Book Club, Reviews | by Thuy Dinh

To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion. . .

In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.

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.

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023

Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.

Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.

The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:

Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.

Translation Tuesday: An excerpt of Kruso by Lutz Seiler

February 7, 2017 | in Translations | by Tess Lewis

If he were lucky, no one would take exception to his disappearance.

Today, we’ve partnered with Scribe Books to introduce the majestic German Book Prize winner Der Spiegel calls “the first worthy successor to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to appear in contemporary German literature.” It is also the debut novel of Lutz Seiler, a major German poet we’ve published in our pages before. In the novel excerpt below, our protagonist has just arrived at a seaside town after an unspeakable tragedy. The true subject of this chapter is revealed to be Ed’s unsettled inner state—dive in and read all the way up to its heart-stopping end.

He smelled the sea even before he got off the train. From his childhood (memories of their only trip to the Baltic Sea), he remembered the Hotel am Bahnhof. It lay directly across from the station, a big, beautiful attraction with oriels built as round towers, and weather vanes in which the numerals of the years crumbled.

He let a few cars pass and hesitated. It wouldn’t be wise, he thought, especially as far as money was concerned. On the other hand, there was no point in arriving on the island in the afternoon, since there probably wouldn’t be enough time left to find a place to stay—if he could find one at all. He had about 150 marks on him; if he were careful, he could make it last for three, maybe even four weeks. He had left ninety marks in his bank account for rent transfers, enough until September. If he were lucky, no one would take exception to his disappearance. He could have fallen ill. Summer holidays would begin in three weeks. He had written his parents a card. They believed he was in Poland, in Katowice, for the so-called International Student Summer, as he had been the year before.

The reception desk was built unusually high and looked as if it had been swept clean, no papers, no keys; but what did Ed know about hotels? At the very last moment, the heads of three women appeared, rising like the pistons of a four-stroke motor in which the fourth spark plug has failed to ignite. Impossible to discern from exactly which depths the receptionists had suddenly surfaced; maybe the high shelf of the desk was connected to a back room, or maybe over the years the women had simply got used to staying under cover as long as possible, quiet and still, behind their dark veneered barrier.