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.
We began in January with Brazilian author Stênio Gardel, translator Bruna Dantas Lobato, and The Words That Remain. The novel—Gardel’s debut—has at its centre a letter, kept unread in its receiver’s possession for over half a century. Written to a gay man, Raimundo, at age seventeen by his lover, the letter is the throughline in Raimundo’s life as he struggles against the homophobia of his surroundings, a legacy of violence, an entrenched sense of shame, and the inability to articulate what he feels—or who he is. Having been illiterate for most of his life, Raimundo has a troubled relationship with words, and their capacity to both alienate and connect are explored with tender, brutal clarity as Raimundo survives an existence on the margins, gradually uncovering the possible ideas of what writing can contain. It was a delight when last month, The Words that Remain won the National Book Award for Translated Literature—an extraordinary achievement that further emphasises the ever-expansive power of an individual who takes charge of their language.
In February, we featured Ten Planets, the latest collection from beloved Mexican writer, Yuri Herrera—a voice fearless both politically and stylistically. Having previously written on the US-Mexico border, the drug trade, and organised crime, Herrera took a different turn with this Borges-esque compilation of speculative fiction that ranges across extra-terrestrial life, apocalyptic earth, and errant technology. What could be tired tropes in the hands of less skilled, astute writers are here newly inventive vehicles for emotion and social plagues, used to investigate the slightly surreal nature of contemporary existence with humour, wit, and Herrera’s singular linguistic playfulness—translated with equal innovation by Lisa Dillman. The universe may be largely careless, and our reality might seem somewhat dystopic from certain angles, but Herrera’s stories are crafted to invoke both curiosity and recognition of humanity. They follow in that courageous lineage of the essential humanist storyteller, Ursula K. Le Guin, and when Ten Planets was shortlisted for her namesake prize this year, it was a wonderful reminder that great writers, and their best ideas, are always with us.
In March, we partnered with Transit Books to bring readers the first English-language translation of Brigitte Reimann’s fiction: Siblings. A well-known documenter and social realist writer of East Berlin, Reimann has long been considered one of the boldest, most perceptive voices of her time, candidly shedding light on daily life in the GDR with lucid examinations of the self, its passions, and the dark side of socialist idealism. In Siblings, translated brilliantly by Lucy Jones, Reimann captures the titular relationship between a sister who still believes and a brother who’s long seen the dark side of orthodoxy—and in doing so, brings another dimension to both the physical and psychic walls that ideology builds. Based on her own experiences of “losing” a brother to the West, the novel does the essential work of merging history with intimate knowledge, investigating the strange, mystifying construction of identity along with the strange, mystifying constructions of ideology. Deservingly, Siblings was named just last week as one of the best books of 2023 by the New Yorker.
For April, we selected a title by the award-winning author Hwang Yeo Jung. Translated by Yewon Jung, The Specters of Algeria is a mysterious, generation-spanning narrative of aesthetic repression and its long-lasting reverberations. Stemming from a period of military dictatorship in South Korea, a play perceived as criminally subversive (e.g. supposedly written by Karl Marx) brings an influx of punishment onto a small group of friends. Deftly weaving between fact and fiction, past and present, trauma and its afterlives, The Specters of Algeria is an interrogation of how reality can continually undergo distortions and manipulations—how fractured, corrosive channels can explode between consciousness and memory. As one of the characters says: “Every story is a mixture of truth and lies.” In layers and layers of illusion and intrigue, Hwang draws the reader through the absurdities of authoritarianism and the unpredictability of its consequences, challenging readers with the instability of truth under dictatorial rule.
May saw the publication of Thai master Saneh Sangsuk’s Venom, a lush, existential fable that does away the borders between human and animal—or between society and the natural order. Taking place against the rich verdure of a rural Thai village, Sangsuk writes idyllically about a young boy who spends time with his family’s oxen, puts on puppet shows, and makes poetry out of the world around him. Throughout, the gorgeous pastoral is braided with mysticism and an abundance of symbols, unveiling the richness behind everyday objects or places, and capturing both new and ancient world orders. One day, when the young boy encounters a fierce opponent in the form of a giant cobra, a thrilling, perilous battle transpires between them; as the fight between the two intensify, Sangsuk, through Mui Poopoksakul’s skillful translation, subtly extends the fable to reflect on the artificial hierarchies of our own production—and its equally dangerous threats. Without indulging in overly simple moralisations, Venom combines a poignant incursion on power with a potent lyricism—a fairy tale with bite.
Dana Shem-Ur’s Where I Am was our selection for June—a sharp, psychologically intuitive novel of selfhood and its multiplicity, translated by Yardenne Greenspan. Centred around Reut, an Israeli translator living in France (with a very “French” husband and son), the prose draws attention to the strange discordances and tensions that emerge in the intersections of different cultural and linguistic modes. In its sensitive, heartrending considerations of placeness and systems of belonging, Shem-Ur travels into the modern condition of displacement, describing how the individual psyche translates the world through a shifting system of passions, intuitions, and longings. Familiar with the intricate and mutable capacities of language, both Shem-Ur and Greenspan are able to capture the sometimes-awkward, sometimes-euphoric, and sometimes-hopeless range of language exchange, and ultimately it is in this aspect of communication that Where I Am is most affecting. To translate a sentence, to translate an idea—but how to translate oneself, ghostly, wandering, into a place?
If thus far, we’ve seen stories of alienation, of secrecy, and of loss, our July title, Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About, refracts those themes into a bittersweet, contemplative narrative of grief. In the aftermath of her twin brother’s suicide, a surviving sister attempts to reconstitute the reality of being half of a whole that no longer exists. Having slowly drifted apart in adulthood, the twins’ dual lives illustrate the conundrum of how an individual can at once be defined by the presence of another—yet remain persistently unknowable. The ghostly idea of a true self is thus refracted through a series of recollections and obsessions as the sister (known only, painfully, as “Two”) wades through the fragments of journal entries, childhood memories, and evidence from the continual fascination and symbolism of twinship throughout history. Crafted by Posthuma and translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey through precise, pensive vignettes, the novel leads one to consider the ways that loss can also give way to creation: a formation of new patterns, new ways of relating to the world. How something as unchangeable as death can be constantly reconstructed and re-navigated.
In August, we were introduced to a mesmerising, almost hypnotic voice in Ebru Ojen’s Lojman, a novel that takes place in a small Kurdish village at the edge of Lake Van. With the narrative barely moving beyond the walls of a minute dwelling (provided by the state as teachers’ lodgings), Ojen delves into the warped psychology of a family on the precipice of self-annihilation, unleashing all of the fear, savagery, and rampant desires that are buried under the edifices of modern life. Reminiscent of Clarice Lispector or Ingeborg Bachmann, Ojen’s rendition of fantasy and its madness is uncontainable and phantasmagoric, boldly unafraid of the grotesque, running on and on in lines of scathing beauty translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökcesu. “Among the lakes, the desire to blossom into oceans”, the book begins, and all throughout Lojman is this agony of forcibly constrained largeness, this sense that one is more than the small space they’ve been given to live in—a feeling both shocking and familiar.
Birth Canal by Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri is, as its title suggests, a book of transformations. Our selection for the month of September, this profound, layered novel braids together the disparate storylines of six women as they change and are changed, confronted by gendered expectations, political repressions, and colonial legacies. Wuri’s characters are comfort women, mothers, porn stars, and office workers, connected to form a multi-dimensional constellation of sexuality, mother/daughterhood, societal and domestic abuses of power, and how one moves through it—how one adopts an event, whether it’s of an abortion or a war, into a sense of self. Translated by the author herself, Birth Canal is lucid and evocative, extending the image-concept of birth into broader channels of metamorphosis, and thus investigating how pieces from various lives are passed down or passed through. Here, aliveness is not a singular mode of existence, but an endlessly interactive form of mutualities and possibilities.
The Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Jon Fosse on October 5, and luckily enough, just a few weeks earlier, we had selected one of his novels as our tenth book of the year. A Shining, a novella as radiant as its title, engages many of the Norwegian author’s recurrent themes—spirituality, purpose, the mystery of the divine. Translated with poetic prowess by Damion Searls, the story is the simple encounter between a man and an entity: a meeting between the mind and everything that it does not and can not know. In Fosse’s work, there is always a strange beauty in attendance, an attention paid to the luminous act of thinking, of working towards a thought, and A Shining follows in that introspective vein. Written with the clear, resonant detail that marks Fosse’s work as immediately recognisable, the text is an incursion through the miraculous puzzle of consciousness, and as with the best of writing, it offers us no answers but threads to follow, images to keep, and a sense of wonder and intrigue that carries on beyond the page.
Last month, we revealed our latest Book Club title: Liliana Corobca’s Kinderland, translated by Monica Cure. Where A Shining had presented a more stoic, meditative incarnation of magic, Kinderland is exuberant, generous with sensual visions and teetering on that sometimes-disappearing line between life and dreaming. Written from the perspective of a young child, Cristina, who is now responsible for taking care of her even younger siblings when her parents are swept up in the European economic migration, Kinderland is woven with the oddly veracious logic and unexpected, moving perceptiveness of an innocent gaze, but beyond this exquisite charm, a determination in the prose gets to the centre of what it means to live precariously, to live without knowing what the context of tomorrow will be, and to somehow still have moments of humour, affection, and joy. Unsparing as it is about the poverty and the desperations of growing up, Kinderland—the land of the children—is a dimension of wonders, a conjured realm of hope.
There’s that old adage of Flaubert’s, often quoted out of context: “read in order to live”. Left alone, it might be interpreted as reading as a replacement for experience: of books as outlets towards a different life, different sensations, different views. Read so that you can imagine what it’s like to be someone else, one might say, or to walk in lands you’ve never been, to live out any and all out-of-body fantasies. But immediately after “to live”, Flaubert continues: “Make an intellectual atmosphere for your soul, which shall be composed of the emanation of all the great minds.”
For language never truly takes us anywhere, especially not out of ourselves. The places and people, conjured and implanted in our minds with such enthralling definition, aren’t inviting us to inhabit their realities; instead, we invite them—and the brilliance behind them—into our own mental topography. And the value of this exchange is not to simply indulge curiosities or to expand horizons; it’s not to familiarise the exotic or to understand simply for the sake of understanding. The gift of storytelling is always towards multiplicity. In its offerings of alternate freedoms, choices, values, and interpretations, we are able to live in a more variegated, intelligent world than the one as we can see and know alone. Whether it’s amidst the silent monuments of socialist Berlin or the neon blinking of Osaka, in the lush jungles of Praeknamdang or the sterile confines of a spaceship, the company of the great minds are with us, not as guides or authorities, but as guests who have come to stay with us awhile. We sit together with them at our table. We listen for as long as they have to tell, sharing by the light of their spark—a small but eternal fire which gives the night, the “darkness of the time remaining”, its dreams.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, editor, and translator. shellyshan.com
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