Reviews

‘Lost and Found in Maps of Wandering’: A Review of Bothayna Al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca

Lost in Mecca is not a one-dimensional story; it is paradoxical, repelling readers while captivating them.

Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Nada Faris, Dar Arab, 2024

Best-selling Kuwaiti author Bothayna al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca —first published in Arabic in 2015 as Maps of Wandering/خرائط التيه—is more than just a literary crime thriller; it’s a journey through Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, as well as into the minds of its protagonists. Al-Essa moves from a mere personal incident to a human plight and the global crisis that is human organ trafficking, resulting in an expansive narrative and a much welcome addition to the growing list of modern Arabic fiction available in English.

Lost in Mecca opens with the ordeal of a couple on Haj. As a flood of pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, al-Essa focuses on a Kuwaiti woman, Sumaya, holding the hand of her seven-year-old son, Mishari—who she has brought along even though it’s not obligatory for children to participate in this annual journey. Sumaya’s husband, Faisal, is also performing the same ritual nearby. All of a sudden, a group of Africans rushes forward, holding onto each other, and in the chaos, Mishari’s hand slips away from Sumaya’s. In this human flood, Mishari is lost.

The spiritual scene soon fades away, and the flooded square transforms into an empty place filled with the echoing cries of a grieving mother, repeating, “Mishari! Oh God! My son!”, over and over again. The bodies diminish, the crowd thins, the distances shorten, the gaps decrease, and Mecca itself becomes a maze. How could a child possibly vanish in all this confusion?

From that point onward, the tragedy truly begins with the search for Mishari, a pursuit that transcends the boundaries of pages to become a terrifying nightmare. The ensuing chapters chronicle Mishari’s wanderings between the 7th and 29th of Dhu al-Hijjah, continually being confronted by the ‘forgotten’ worlds and stories of human negligence taking place across the Middle East. Al-Essa stretches out his challenging storyline from Mecca to ‘Asir, Jazan, and the Red Sea coast. Eventually, Mishari’s parents will even cross the sea towards Sinai through restricted maritime routes. The narration covers the Sinai desert and its vast expanses, up to the borders of Al-‘Arish in the north. It also highlights the geographical boundaries of occupied Palestine, and sheds light on what the Western media has reported regarding human organ trafficking, and secret deals involving Israeli and Egyptian officials.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2024

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

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The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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Riveting Banality: On Rebecca Gisler’s About Uncle

It’s the pungency of this story—the characters, the house, Uncle’s habits—that keeps us locked in tight.

About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler, translated from the French by Jordan Stump,  Two Lines Press, 2024

About Uncle is Swiss writer Rebecca Gisler’s debut novel, translated by Jordan Stump—a dazzling and intoxicating story that takes a microscopic view at the banal and unnerving details of family dynamics. A love letter to the oft hidden odd and grotesque mannerisms of our family members, About Uncle boils over with emotional distress, set just on the verge of the first COVID lockdown in spring of 2020. But, it’s not COVID that sets the tone, it’s everything else: family at its most banal, at its most crude, with an emotional tinge humming with tenderness.

At the center of the story is the unnamed narrator’s uncle, a 52 year-old recluse who seems to thrive among the squalor and filth built up over 30 years of hygienic apathy. In an unkempt house in the Brittany region of France, Uncle lives with his niece and nephew as “a congregation of do-nothings.” The siblings struggle to balance their personal struggles with their shared concern for Uncle’s health and lifestyle, and the “involuntary flatshare” is the centerpiece of a claustrophobic world that quite literally reeks of death and decay. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

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. 

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

‘Obliged to Serve a Memory’: A Review of Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem

Cem . . . is silent, an inanimate object in his own story, only moving when and where other powers will him.

The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Sandorf Passage, 2024

Cem—born in the burgeoning Ottoman Empire, the second son of the legendary Mehmed the Conqueror, and in the eyes of history, the exiled prince. In his time, Cem was lauded by storytellers the world over for who he might become and what he might accomplish, until finally he was pitied for all that he endured. But these portrayals of Cem, some true and others exaggerated, have all but faded from the public eye over time—a fact that renowned Bulgarian author and historian Vera Mutafchieva sought to remedy with her comprehensive account of his struggle in her novel, The Case of Cem.

Mutafchieva’s works have been published in nearly a dozen languages, the most recent being Angela Rodel’s English translation of The Case of Cem. Originally published in Bulgarian in 1967, the story follows Cem as he tries and fails to usurp his older brother at the behest of some of his countrymen. He is forced into years of exile that take him far from home, from Rhodes to France to Italy. His imprisonments—though those holding him would call it refuge—turn the almost-sultan into an unwilling pawn and bargaining tool for European powers, and eventually lead to his tragic downfall. 

The Case of Cem is a daring blend of court intrigue, tragedy, and historical fact that masterfully captures complex layers of history in its prose and reads like an epic. Just as prevalently, though, it is a reflection on memory, identity, homeland, and what it means to lose them.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2024

New writing from Etel Adnan, Satish Alekar, and Djamila Morani!

This month, our selected titles of new publications carry wisdom, mystery, and humour. Below, find reviews of plays by one of India’s most accomplished and innovative playwrights; a compilation of interview with the inimitable Etel Adnan, conducted by Laure Adler; and a PEN Translates Award-winning novel of revenge and self-discovery, set in the Abbasid period.

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Two Plays: The Grand Exit and A Conversation with Dolly by Satish Alekar, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, Seagull Books, 2024

 Review by Areeb Ahmad, Editor-at-Large for India

This nifty volume of plays collects two of Alekar’s works, “Mahanirvan” and “Thakishi Samvad”, written forty-six years apart—Born in 1949, Satish Vasant Alekar is a Marathi playwright, actor, theatre director. He was a founding member of the Theatre Academy of Pune and is well-known plays such as for Mahapoor, Begum Barve, Atirekee, and Pidhijat. He is considered among the most significant playwrights in modern Marathi and Indian theatre, along with Mahesh Elkunchwar and Vijay Tendulkar, and lately, he has come to be recognised for his acting in Marathi and Hindi feature films.

“Mahanirvan” or “The Grand Exit” was first performed in 1974, and is a play where a dead man has more dialogue than any living character. The description on the cover is not wrong to equate the character with Sophocles’ Antigone, for he also strongly insists on the method of his last rites; Bhaurao wants to be traditionally cremated at the shamshan ghat, but the cremation ground is in the process of being privatised. Thus, the dead—or rather their relatives—are now being redirected to a new facility which uses electrical incineration.

So Bhaurao lingers around as his body malingers, rotting and fly-infested, while his wife Ramaa grieves intensely, coming to terms with the sudden loss, and his son, Nana, tries to convince him to just go ahead with the cremation, and pass on. While working on the play, Alekar had realised that a dead man cannot speak prose, so Bhau’s dialogues instead take the poetic form—one resembling keertans (religious recitations). READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: The Singularity by Balsam Karam

Karam stretches the limits of conventional narrative writing. . . the result is a work of true formal experimentation without . . . artifice.

With inimitable lyricism and an impeccable sense of balance, Balsam Karam’s The Singularity addresses some of the most complex elements of contemporary social reality. Yet, even as the thrilling narrative is intricately braided with the brutal realities of loss, displacement, motherhood, and migration, the novel’s innovative structure and bold, surprising style elevates it beyond story, revealing an author who is as precise with language as she is with illustrating our mental and physical landscapes. In starting off a new year of Asymptote Book Club, we are proud to announce this work of art as our first selection of 2024.

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.  

The Singularity by Balsam Karam, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel, Feminist Press/Fitzcarraldo, 2024

Meanwhile elsewhere—two women perched on the precipice in a tangential encounter, spun together by forces outside their control, as if in the singularity of a black hole. One woman is about to jump off the edge, bereft after the loss of her teenage daughter; the other will frame this moment as the beginning of the end for the child in her womb. No need for spoiler alerts here: what might feature as the climax in a more conventional narrative is laid bare in The Singularity’s prologue. That it nevertheless remains absorbing to its very end is a testament to the depth of feeling and dexterity with which the Swedish-Kurdish novelist Balsam Karam orchestrates the rest of this novel about grief, loss, migration, and motherhood.

Given this jarring beginning and its atypical (or absent) narrative arc, it is perhaps no wonder that as the rest of this novel unwinds, we are met with multiple displacements in time and perspective, echoing the geographical dislocation of the two central figures—both of whom are refugees—and the all-encompassing, omnipresent nature of the trauma they experience.

Before throwing herself off a tourist-thronged cliff in a bullet-ridden city, the first woman has been searching for The Missing One­: her seventeen-year-old daughter, who never came home from her cleaning job on the corniche a few months earlier. After fleeing from their home, receiving scant help from the relief organization that occasionally visits with a “hello and how are you all then here you go and we’ll be back soon, even if it’s not true,” and finding little sanctuary living in a tumble-down alleyway at the fringes of this unnamed city, the mother seems to experience the disappearance of her daughter as the final loss that makes her lose herself. “What mother doesn’t take her own life after a child disappears?” the first woman asks the universe, or “when a child dies?” the second woman asks her doctor. READ MORE…

Narrator as Narcissus: A Review of Hanna Johansson’s Antiquity

The textual body of the novel is a monument to the clash between the natural flow of life and its narrativized counterpart.

 Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson, Catapult, 2024

“Where were they?” asks the nameless protagonist of Antiquity, Hanna Johansson’s gorgeous, lacerating debut novel, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson. She is interrogating the lack of cemeteries in Ermoupoli, a luxurious Greek city where she spends her summer with Helena, a chic and volatile artist with whom the narrator is infatuated, and Helena’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Olga. In a city where “the dead should be more numerous than the living”, there seems to be no trace of “such monuments, not even a site for simple graves, no memorial grove in the little park in front of Saint Nicholas Church where the cats slept in the shade of the pine trees.” “Where are they?” she asks of both cemeteries and the dead, not realizing that it is she who haunts the suggestively-named Persefonis—“the short street where Helena’s house was wedged between an alley and a ruin”. Ever on the margins of life, of human relationships, the spectral narrator might touch other things and people, but she never leaves a trace. Throughout the novel, the wounded lament of this reluctant nomad begins to haunt us, too. And this is not only because she is undone by the very skill that enables her to tell a story—narrating—but because Johansson’s creation, in Josefsson’s translation, reminds us of our own tendency to narrativize life, to write ourselves out of the intimate joy of immediate experience by stepping back and fiddling with the details, fashioning an ideal self.

Antiquity feels destined to be a classic, as multifaceted, revealing, and transformative as works by Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Nabokov. Its power comes from its vulnerable, gorgeous prose, replete with lush images, and also from its structural sophistication—a complete convergence of shape and themes. The textual body of the novel is a monument to the clash between the natural flow of life and its narrativized counterpart, felt through the temporal textures of the story, its narratological conflict. In narratological terms, the novel’s fabula—its narrated structure—opens at the end of its syuzhet—its chronological timeline: the narrator, Helena, and Olga are leaving Ermoupoli, heading towards an inevitable separation. As they depart in a ferry, the narrator says: “I could hear my own voice narrating: the sun was so strong you always had to squint a little. I felt reality take its leave of me. I wasn’t there.” From the very start, it is clear that the novel’s tension will emerge from the ebb and flow between the lived truth and the narrator’s censorial customization of real experiences as a constructing of the self. This becomes especially palpable in the chafing of the chronological flow of events against the narrator’s private perception of time. Her narration moves backward and forward in time, then further backward still, only to reemerge somewhere after the middle and then proceed all the way to the end—that is, the beginning. The unpredictability of the temporal jumps precludes anticipation but heightens the sense of foreboding with which the beginning’s manifestly melancholy departure taints all subsequent pages; as in a Greek tragedy, the reader can sense the protagonist hurtling towards a bitter end. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2024

New titles from Japan, France, and Mexico!

The new year is all dressed up with a powerful display of voices in translation: a Japanese epic, a tri-lingual edition of Mexican poetry, and the latest collection of prose from one of France’s most spiny and entertaining voices. Read on to find out more!

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Marshland by Otohiko Kaga, translated from the Japanese by Albert Novick, Dalkey Archive Press, 2024

 Review by Iona Tait, Copy Editor

In a 1986 article published in Japan Quarterly, the Japanese psychiatrist-turned-novelist Otohiko Kaga wrote about his captivation with the Japanese marshes, describing them as “a wasteland, totally resistant to human attempts at exploitation.” These same untouched regions make up the setting of his novel Marshland, originally published in 1985 and translated now into English by Albert Novick. In this sprawling epic, the marshes, as a virgin land, act as a counterpart to the oppressive state structures of the metropolis. They—being of no use—allow Kaga to explore his central theme: space, and the reclamation of space for freedom and freedom of thought.

Hailing from the marshes, the protagonist, Atsuo Yukimori, is a middle-aged former convict whose job as an auto-mechanic in Tokyo keeps his life together—but only barely. Spending the majority of his life “as a slave to the state,” he lives in fear of the army and the police, and his job security depends on the whims of his boss, to whom the former speaks “like a puppy dog.” All the while, Atsuo’s criminal past lingers in close quarters, with a burn on his finger (punishment for stealing as a child) standing as a reminder. The delicate order of this life—his tidy bedroom, his punctuality—soon begins to unravel, however, when he meets a young student called Wakako Ikéhata at an ice rink. The pair develop an intense relationship, and eventually find themselves entangled in the violent student protests of 1968. Falsely accused of placing a bomb on a train, Atsuo and Wakako are detained by police and imprisoned, spending ten years in prison waiting for a judicial appeal.

Spanning over eight hundred pages, Marshland details governmental abuses of power in post-war Japan through various narrative perspectives, various institutions, and across a vast period of time. Kaga masterfully demonstrates the grueling legal process that kept Atsuo and Wakako in prison, including their detention before being forced to give a confession (detaining individuals before they were sentenced was a feature of Japanese criminal law until it was overturned in 2023). Repeating the details of the trial throughout the majority of the novel, Kaga shows the mentally and physically taxing effects, ranging from psychosis to suicide, of institutionalization and detention on every victim involved—which include Atsuo’s nephew, Yukichi Jinnai, and Wakako’s former lover, the radical student Makihiko Moroya. Whilst this technique does result in a few tedious episodes in which legal particularities are rehashed at length, the approach heightens the all-consuming nature of the trial for the convicts, and succeeds in conveying the lengthy passage of time; the novel alternates between the day-to-day pace of scenes in Tokyo, visits to the marshes, long periods in prison, and swift logs or diary entries which reveal the laboring process of the trial and work done by Atsuo’s lawyers.

READ MORE…

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf

[Maalouf] offers us a human way to experience cataclysm without masking the confusion and desperation that takes hold. . .

For our final title of 2023, we are proud to present the latest novel by acclaimed French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf, whose extraordinary work weaves fantasy and history with a powerful reckoning of contemporary issues. In On the Isle of Antioch, Maalouf turns to dystopian narrative to explore the frailties and failures of human empires, drawing a surreal evolution of events that escalate from the very real threat of total global destruction. With a philosophical richness that finds footholds in Maalouf’s elegant, nebulous depictions of desire and connection, the novel is a beautiful, necessary rumination on what survival means on the precipices of so much devastation.

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.  

On the Isle of Antioch by Amin Maalouf, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer, World Editions, 2023

There is something eerie about reading Amin Maalouf’s On The Isle of Antioch during the same days described by its narrator’s journal entries. In four sections, or “notebooks”, that date from November 9 to December 9, Maalouf’s surreal, thrilling novel is told through the experiences of Alexander, an artist and one of two inhabitants on the titular island of Antioch, as he travels in this brief window of time through isolation, doom, communion, and the unexpected orders and disorders of a dying world.

Having inherited the land from his father, who had refused to sell the deed despite financial difficulties, Alexander decides, in the wake of his parents’ death, to change his life. He begins drawing, releasing work under the pseudonym Alec Zander, and moves to Antioch in a reprieve of his childhood fantasies, calling it his “ancestral island.” Believing himself to be the only inhabitant and sole owner, he’s surprised to find, while waiting for his house to be built, that a woman and writer by the name of Ève had long ago purchased the remaining portion of the island that he did not own, and, being “eager for solitude”, she too has made it her home. Ève’s been in a rut, having published one masterpiece—a novel titled The Future Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—before losing her job and retiring to Antioch, where she sleeps all day and is awake all night, trying to work.

What drives these two loners together, after months of avoiding each other’s company, is a sudden blackout. When all the lights and appliances in Alexander’s house turn off, and even the radio plays only an ominous whistling on every station, he goes to see Ève, suddenly overwhelmed by a solitude that now weighs more heavily on him than ever, and feeling “for the first time in twelve years, [that he] slightly regret[s] not living in a town or a village like an ordinary mortal.” Having previously thought of Ève only as a “silent, ghostly, almost nonexistent” presence, it is only after this incident—which turns out to be a full blackout of all communication systems—that Alexander and Ève are able to find themselves in one another’s company. READ MORE…

Hope: A Review of Faruk Šehić’s My Rivers

From these unlikely pairings emerges a soul-shredding collection that is nevertheless immensely hopeful.

My Rivers by Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by S.D. Curtis, Istros Books, 2023

In his native Bosnia, Faruk Šehić is known for his poems and the regular opinion pieces he writes for the weekly magazine BH Dani [Bosnia-Herzegovina Days], but he first came to the attention of English-language readers with a novel, Quiet Flows the Una, published in 2016. A second fiction work, Under Pressure, followed in 2019, and both books were widely reviewed and praised for their poetic narratives—a difficult task when writing about the Bosnian War of the early 1990s. He achieved this by participating in, witnessing, and describing those events, restoring human dignity to the neglected living and the memory of the dead.

My Rivers is Šehić’s first collection of poetry to be translated into English, in an excellent rendering by S.D. Curtis. Here, the imagination and the presence of dignity continues simply and powerfully through his subjects and settings, crafting a postwar future shared by the survivors of all sides. The resulting collection is an act of amazing meliorism and reconciliation that summons the strength of the “Mangled Generation,” as they are known in former Yugoslvia. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2023

New titles from Italy, Hungary, and Cuba!

In our final round-up of the year, we’re presenting a selection of titles that capture the human condition with various, masterful depictions and incisive intelligence. From Italy, the first volume of artist and writer Guido Buzzelli’s collected works present scrupulous and unwavering critiques of society; from Hungary, the master poet Szilárd Borbély writes the life of Kafka in relation to his father’s; from Cuba, a stunning bilingual collection from Oneyda González explores the surreal nature of the mirror.

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Buzzelli Collected Works Vol.1: The Labyrinth by Guido Buzzelli, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards, Floating World Comics, 2023

 Review by Catherine Xin Xin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

What happens if, at the end of a normal workday, a sudden blast razes the world to the ground and you become one of the few survivors? Or if, waking up on an ordinary morning, you find your head and limbs dissociating from your torso and taking off on their own? Setting the scene with these Kafkaesque premises, Italian comic master Guido Buzzelli explores the monstrosity and power of dystopian societies in his graphic novellas, The Labyrinth and Zil Zelub, with a compelling visual language that is dense yet dynamic.

Buzzelli stands apart from his peers in every way—style, form, and theme. Born into a family of artists and trained in figure drawing, he is lauded as both “the Michelangelo of monsters” for his naturalism, and “the Goya of comics” for his chimeric blend of the real and the fantastical (as pictured below). He was also one of the first Italian comic artists to tackle complex literary subjects in uncommissioned, standalone works, counter-current to the Italian comics industry of the 1960–70s that pumped out commercial series with fixed characters and simplistic plots. As a self-proclaimed “man in doubt,” Buzzelli also rebelled against the progressivism of 1960s Italy, satirising the hypocrisy of political discourse and the violence of utopian mirages while alluding to the political upheaval at the time, from terrorist bombings to murky electoral campaigns. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Kinderland by Liliana Corobca

Kinderland contains its call for kindness within concentric circles of humor, irony, and tragedy. . .

First published in 2013, Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland links modern Moldova to the metaphysics of magical thinking, bridging the chasm between socio-political reality and children’s play. The second novel to emerge from Corobca and Monica Cure’s writer-and-translator duo, Kinderland follows the acclaimed The Censor’s Notebook, which earned Cure the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize; it colors in The Censor’s Notebook’s negatives of political repression, probing the social legacies proliferating in the long shadow of communism through the tangential prism of a young girl’s imagination.

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. 

Kinderland by Liliana Corobca, translated from the Romanian by Monica Cure, Seven Stories, 2023

From the German, Kinderland: children’s land, land for children, the country of children, the children’s state. But also: winterland, wonderland, Alice, wanderland. Liliana Corobca’s original Romanian title for Kinderland refracts its light onto the novel’s substance, and Monica Cure’s English translation draws on an exquisite textual structure, sensitively conveying its narrator’s preternatural style of creative contemplation.

Beyond the third person opening sequence, no section of the novel is over six pages long; they follow the irreverently earnest voice of Cristina, a young girl caring for her two siblings in her parents’ absence, and is directly addressed to a shifting “you”. Throughout, page breaks are forfeited, constructing a visual configuration that reposes on Corobca’s and Cure’s craft as writers and sustaining an undialectical, seemingly uncontrolled style that recalls the meanderings—and moral certitude—of one’s own twelve-year-old introspections. These ruminations and recollections are a succession of light exposures, spanning the summer of Cristina’s thirteenth year, and each resembles a photograph, a vignette of latent action that flows into the memory or emotion at its blurred peripheries. Kinderland’s loose-limbedness articulates Cristina’s coming-of-age in limpid textuality, impressed on a textual emulsion milky with village childhood.

Kinderland’s omniscient “proemium” also preaches on speed, instructing the reader on how to plumb Cristina’s fragmented essence from the novel’s brevity: “Quickly, everything’s done quickly. Wash it quickly. . . if you wash the stain quickly, it comes out easily.” And Cristina, in particular, inhabits the same spiritual and wondrous landscape as Lady Macbeth (she and her brothers play in woods as otherworldly as Birnam Wood). From a cinematic, bird’s-eye view, Kinderland’s incipit glides the reader over the country of children. With her parents elsewhere, she looks after “two brothers, a dog, a cat, a pig, ten chickens, a scrappy rooster. . . the last thing I needed with this entire army was a bunch of goats.” She, Dan, and Marcel live in an atavistic, almost pre-technological village of wells and wool and walnuts, but beneath their daily corporeality flower a sensuous realm of fleawort, wounds, and witchcraft. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2023

Discover new work from Brazil and the Basque Country!

In this month’s round-up of new and noteworthy titles from around the world, our editors dive in to a lyrical, transcendent, and multidisciplinary collection from the founder of neoconcretismo, Hélio Oiticica, and a sensuous, genre-bending queer love story of from José Luis Serrano. Read on to find out more!

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Secret Poetics by Hélio Oiticica, translated from the Portuguese by Rebecca Kosick, Winter Editions/Soberscove Press, 2023

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

How can we eternalize the moment without petrifying it? How can words convey its temporal unfolding while retaining the anatomy of that process, a duration that has no discernible borders? A possible answer can be found in Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics, translated from the Portuguese by Rebecca Kosick. In this collection, the reader is invited to experience a gallery of the ephemeral: the motion of a plunge into water; the cold, vexing, soon-to-be-over wait for the arrival of a lover; the tidal separations and interlacings of limbs and lips in an amorous embrace… Like a gifted translator, Oiticica recasts the transient into another medium—words and silences—while remaining true to that fleeting essence: to, in his own words, “immediacy that becomes eternal in lyrical poetic expression”.

In the preface, where she thoroughly examines the correspondences between Oiticica’s poetry and his visual work, Kosick reveals that his output has been termed “unclassifiable”. Its hybridity goes deeper than the blurring of genre distinctions (Oiticica’s practice “included painting, sculpture, installation, performance, filmmaking, and writing”), and this artistic output itself constitutes moments of coalescence and transformation. While his earlier pieces, a series of paintings, contained “a suggestion of movement, even dance,” Kosick notes that his “later artworks would literalize this proposition”. In 1959, Oiticica and a group of his contemporaries launched the “neoconcrete” movement, creating three-dimensional art installations designed to be interacted with by the audience. Composed of objects that could be rotated, worn, opened, and reached into, these installations “not only dissolved the distance between spectator and art object but collapsed the very binaries structuring the differentiation of subject and object”. Kosick explains that the experiences of the pieces redefined “the work of art as ‘a being’ whose meaning would ‘flourish’ via phenomenological encounter with its audience-participants”. READ MORE…