Book Club

Ordered Chaos: Katy Derbyshire on Translating Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish

March 20, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Matthew Redman

[M]ountains implicitly divide . . . the way we speak, so that people on different sides of the mountain will have a different words for ‘brother’.

Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a folding of dreamscape into landscape—a study of some of earth’s most majestic topographies through the discursive, vivid wanderings of a mind led by its own fascinations. Made up of just over five hundred notes, this compilation of observations, narratives, fantasies, and contemplations track a journey through the Alps in colours, in flanks and peaks, hearsay and memories, macabre moments of comedy, and a continual rumination on the crafting of writing and composing. These deft workings of language have been rendered into a fluid and chimeric English by Katy Derbyshire, and she speaks here of Mountainish’s scepticism of mountains, the beauty and comedic tone of the prose, and ‘little narrative islands’.  

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.    

Matthew Redman (MR): One of my favourite aspects of Mountainish is when the narrator talks about the mountains and her fear of them; there is a kind of a mistrust of the mountains poking through a lot of the time, expressing itself in a lack of awe, a lack of overwhelm. When she’s faced with these mountains, it’s more like she’s peering at them, or stealing glances.

Katy Derbyshire (KD): Well, the narrator gives us that in the very first of her notes, when she starts off with this drive through the Alps and is terrified that they’re going to collapse onto her—and I think that continues all the way through. It really endeared me to the book, her scepticism. We, the two of us, between ourselves, we called ourselves ‘mountain sceptics,’ because Zsuzsanna doesn’t just accept this Swiss myth of the mountains’ magnificence. She sees the beauty, very much so, but she also sees the insularism—which she calls racism sometimes—and she sees the expectations and the narrow-mindedness that comes along with the landscape. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse

February 27, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Matthew Redman

One of the pleasures of Mountainish is how its fragments flow together according to an obscure, free-associative logic.

Wandering, dizzying, echoing, gorgeous—spending time with Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is not unlike being four thousand metres above sea level; the book conjures both the vastness and the minute details of the Alps with lyrical intuition, while constantly introducing surprising insights into the peaks’ social presentation. Through both a study of mountains and a poetic testament of the mind inside all that landscape, Gahse takes us across what it means to look, listen, feel, and think—with all the awe, fear, beauty, and inequity that is inseparable from our regard of worldly wonders. We are delighted to introduce Mountainish as our Book Club selection for the month, and to be travelling together along the excursions and perceptions of this singular work’s pursuit.

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.    

Mountainish by Zsuzsanna Gahse, translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire, Prototype, 2025

At some point while reading this strange, moreish book, one is likely to suddenly snap out of the trance it has induced, prompting a question into what this work does, and how it exerts its mesmerising effects.

Zsuzsanna Gahse’s Mountainish is a series of numbered notes, 515 in total. Certain sections appear to have come from a diary, while other parts resemble the scrambled embryo of a more substantial literary project—a travelogue, perhaps, or a parody of one. But very often, the notes never coalesce into anything; Mountainish might be best understood as the miscellaneous lint of a compulsive writer, a hodge-podge of scenes, sketches, proddings and testings of turns of phrase. This is not to say, however, that the book is lost to chaos. The numbers appended to the notes provide a semblance of order, and oblique patterns slowly emerge and disperse along the reading. Brief, slight, and faintly whimsical, the notes float by like cloud puffs, and if you look at them for long enough, they take on vaguely recognisable shapes. Within its diaphanous structure, the usual anchors to time and place—chronology, for instance—are done away with completely, leaving the book hovering ambiguously over its subject. READ MORE…

Play as Criticism, Curiosity, and Sense-Making: An Interview with Ena Selimović and Maša Kolanović

February 20, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

The world of grown-ups is so violent and boring, with nothing but news and politics, and [the children are] resisting this absurdist language. . .

In the wartime world of Underground Barbie, our January Book Club selection, Croatian writer Maša Kolanović vivifies another realm that is both an escape and a radical interpretation of daily horrors: the playtime conjurings of children. With its many inventions playing out in the basements of houses and the corners of rooms, the scenarios of childhood imagination both mirror and refract the way conflict and nationalism intercept daily life, articulating a more intuitive, unfettered interpretation of ongoing events. The novel is translated with a deft attention to the prose’s texture and humor by Ena Selimović, and in this interview, both author and translator speak to us on working with this text and its singular voice, the transformation of pop objects across cultural divides, and how the language of play can speaks to its context.

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.   

Junyi Zhou (JZ): I’d like to start us off by asking you, Ena, about your history with Underground Barbie. How did you come across the book, and what drew you to translate it?

Ena Selimović (ES): The book and I share a ten-year history. Back when I was finishing my dissertation in comparative literature, a lot of the books that I was working from were not translated into English, so I found myself having to translate all these passages that were in my chapters. Underground Barbie, for me, was such a no-brainer because my dissertation was on the relationship between American and Balkan racialization—in other words, putting the perception of race in both places in dialogue with one another. In the Balkans people tend to think there is no such thing as race, but there very much is, and Underground Barbie really shows how race functions in times of war, because it depicts how children are remapping what it means to be pure Croatian.

Everything started there, and in 2019, Maša came to a conference in San Francisco, where I was then living. At that time I had written a plea for other translators to translate the book, but not thinking of myself as a potential translator at all. I didn’t think that was a career or something that I could pursue, because I’m not a native speaker of English. I also had the experience going back to Bosnia as a child and a teenager, and everyone would make fun of me for my American accent in Bosnian. It just felt like I couldn’t win. READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović

January 30, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Junyi Zhou

[W]ith their youthful waywardness, the children in the novel subject their dolls to some of their most whimsical and anarchic impulses.

In the evocative, unexpected world of Underground Barbie, Croatian author Maša Kolanović merges the technicolor hues of childhood play with the startling and violent reality of her nation’s War of Independence. Instead of portioning imagination and historical fact as discrete realms, Kolanović aptly maps the whimsical trajectories of youth as they blur and subvert the sights and sounds of conflict, plotting out a sensitive, humorous, yet undoubtedly grounded view of how toys can give reign to both conscious and subconscious knowledge. We are proud to present this thought-provoking work as our Book Club selection for February, telling as it is about those phantasmagoric, shifty early years, where we all commence our becoming.

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.   

Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović, translated from the Croatian by Ena Selimović, Sandorf Passage, 2025

“Until that day I thought you could only hear such a sound at an air show, when the planes in the sky left blue, white, and red trails and the pilots performed breakneck stunts like Tom Cruise in Top Gun,” so the narrator in Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie marvels at hearing and seeing planes whirring past her roof. Yet, on that particular day, “all the Tom Cruises were wearing the olive-green uniform of the Yugoslav People’s Army.” As the narrator observes the transformation of the “Tom Cruise” figure—the unruly, rough-edged aviator and his indelible presence—into a token of power and destructiveness, her readers are asked to assume the perspective of a country on the precipice of seismic change.

Croatia in the 1990s held war at its epicenter, and the narrator—anonymous throughout—was then a young girl living amidst intermittent air raids, political campaigns, and displaced communities. Accumulating Barbies, whose glamor and rarity constitute a source of longing, she and her friends often took them to play in the underground basement of her apartment building, and soon enough, the narrator’s reflections turn to the various scenes that had been staged by the children. The romantic escapades of the Ken doll Dr. Kajfěs (who is named after an anti-snoring aid commercial) aside; a Barbie presidential election featuring a standoff match between Dr. Kajfěs and the much-coveted Barbie of the narrator’s friend; and more. The imitation and invention present in the girls’ everyday games gesture toward a world-making in which the old rules are dismantled, recalibrated, and improvised upon—a world in which nothing yet everything is at stake, because it is at once rooted in and removed from the material reality. Translated into English for the first time by Ena Selimović, Kolanović’s novel offers an incisive reflection on childhood play, whereby the act embodies the power of imagination that transcends socio-political codes in times of violence, uncertainty, and scarcity. READ MORE…

Voiding the Ego: Charlotte Mandell on Translating Paul Valéry

January 22, 2025  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Mia Ruf

It doesn't interest me, what [authors] did as people—it's the texts that really matter.

The body of work comprising Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste manuscripts represents some of his most illuminating and challenging ideas, condensed into an alter ego who could articulate an evolving analysis of poetry’s intellectual mechanisms, multivalent origins, and immovable rationality. In reflecting on the character’s origins, Valéry had pointed to sudden, surging, “strange excesses of self-awareness,” a rousing that stirred newfound doubts and investigations into his chosen craft, and thus a renewed inquisition into the very acts of thinking, imagining, and inventing. Monsieur Teste became then a companion that would walk alongside Valéry for the remainder of the poet’s life, leaving impressions and musings in the stray forms of philosophical texts, brief aphorisms, and fictional letters. An encompassing collection of these works are now available in a luminous translation by Charlotte Mandell, which we were proud to present as our December Book Club selection. In this interview, Mandell speaks to us about the challenge of working with Valéry’s occasionally-lyrical, occasionally-bareboned style, and what it means to meet translation as its own form of creation.

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.    

Mia Ruf (MR): I want to first talk about Valéry’s own notes in the preface to Monsieur Teste, where he discusses the difficulty of translating this text—in part because of the language he talks about devising. He refers to it as “forced and vigorously abstract” and “with a few traces of that vulgarity or triviality we allow ourselves.” Did you feel that way in translating it? And did you find those aspects to indeed be difficult?

Charlotte Mandell (CM): Yeah, because a lot of the aphorisms are so short. There’s not a lot of context to base the translation on, so you sort of have to guess what Valéry is trying to say. Also, when he talks about abstract words, you have to resist an urge to just be easy and translate whatever you think it is; you have to try to put yourself in his mindset, which is really hard—to see what he meant instead of what I thought he meant. It helped a lot to have the Jackson Mathews translation [Princeton, 1989], so I consulted that, but you made a good point in your review, which is that I tend to make the sentences a little bit longer than Mathews did. He often attempted to make the text a little bit “easier,” and shortened some of the sentences, but I tried to just stay as true as possible to the original—both in terms of the sentence length, and also the way by which the thought unfolds.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our December Book Club Selection: Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry

December 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Mia Ruf

What Valéry set out to accomplish with his Teste project was . . . a blueprint for intellectual liberation.

Perhaps for most of us, the idea of a poet still confers an indelible sense of the romantic, with odes and music and beautiful abstractions. For Paul Valéry, however, this association was at best weak, and at worst a diminishment of language’s complex facilities and capacity for precise worldly evaluation, never satisfying the sublimity and intensity that he sought in his writings. Thus, in 1896, he introduced an incarnation of reason and his “infinite desire for clarity” in a character named Edmond Teste, and this alter ego would remain one of the most enduring vehicles of thought throughout Valéry’s life. Now, in our December Book Club selection, Monsieur Teste, we are offered a fascinating collection of writings that track the poet’s evolving mode as he pursues his own consciousness in search of pure intellect and reason, puzzling out the dazzling relationship between language and existence. They are the imprints from a modernist icon’s search for self-knowledge.

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.    

                 Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry, translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, New York Review Books, 2024

At first approach, it’s tempting to interpret Edmond Teste, Paul Valéry’s brainchild, as an embodiment of the poet’s own curmudgeonliness, as the character’s appearance roughly coincides with Valéry’s early renunciation of poetry and recession from the public eye. In 1892, shortly after launching into the Parisian literary scene and positioning himself as Stéphane Mallarmé’s successor—as well as being in the wake of a bad breakup—Valéry seems to have had enough of the bullshit. His frustrations with literature in the afterglow of Romanticism, with writers’ delusions of grandeur and pretensions of divine inspiration, prompted a sharp pivot toward the sciences. Heavily inspired by Cartesian philosophy, Valéry came to embrace a highly empirical, mathematical approach to creation, eschewing the abstractions and vagueness he’d found so tiresome in poetry. His primary focus shifted inward, and he became chiefly interested in the mechanism behind creative construction, the series of mental operations occurring within the creator’s mind, and in testing the outer limits of human capability. In his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (1894), Valéry marvels at the polymath’s ability to intake external data and investigate it with the utmost rigor in order to produce works beyond our fathoming—creations so staggering that the common man, the unenlightened thinker, could only attribute them to flashes of inspiration, invocation of the Muse, or some other abstract force that Valéry so disdained. In Leonardo, Valéry found an ideal creative archetype—the “universal man”—who “begins with simple observation, and continually renews this self-fertilization from what he sees” in contrast to the lesser, unempirical thinkers who “see with their intellects much more often than with their eyes.” Valéry remarks that “when thinkers as powerful as the man whom I am contemplating through these lines discover the implicit resources of the method . . . They can, for the moment, admire the prodigious instrument that they are.” Shortly after publishing this study, Valéry continued on this theme with the first instalment of the Teste cycle, The Evening with Monsieur Teste (1896). This and the subsequent works and fragments of the cycle have now been arranged in a single volume: Monsieur Teste, a luminous new translation by Charlotte Mandell. READ MORE…

The It Girl in Her Own Words: Helen O’Horan on Translating Izumi Suzuki

December 19, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Bella Creel

I wanted the translation to feel more emotionally driven, and that’s what I prioritized.

In her first novel to be published in English, the counterculture icon Izumi Suzuki draws from her real-life experiences to craft a musical, vulnerable portrait of nonconformism during a tumultuous era in Japan. From passion to nihilism, dreaminess to self-destruction, Set My Heart on Fire is unafraid of contradiction in its approach to the self, inscribing mind and body in all of its varying desire and directions. As our final Book Club selection for November, Suzuki proves to be a particularly resonant writer for contemporary readers in her audacious pursuit of pleasure and mutability in identity, all told in a vivid voice conjured by translator Helen O’Horan. In this interview, O’Horan speaks to us about how Suzuki channels a sense of disconnection, her knack for performativity, and the centrism of human relationships in her literary work.

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.   

Bella Creel (BC): How did you initially discover Izumi Suzuki’s work, and what drew you to her writing?

Helen O’Horan (HOH): I first worked on a short story for Suzuki’s collection, Terminal Boredom, just before the pandemic. I joined the project relatively late; by then, the reports had been written and the research done, so I want to credit the other translators and the publisher. That’s how I first learned about her work.

After that story, I really got into her writing—the timing was significant too. During the pandemic, I found myself feeling increasingly disconnected from my mind and body. My work as a translator wasn’t disrupted much since most of my clients are outside the United Kingdom, and it’s all online, but I started feeling like my mind and body were splitting apart.

That sense of disconnect reminded me of Suzuki’s writing—she often describes her body as something separate from her mind. Her work resonated with me at that moment, though of course, that’s just my interpretation. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki

November 28, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Izumi feels emotions at their extremes, and she considers ideas to their ends.

When the cult writer Izumi Suzuki debuted in the English language with stunning, subversive short stories of counterculture and fantasy, critics and readers alike were astounded by her utterly individual voice, speaking candidly about emotional heights and lows, womanhood, and the chaotic world of drugs, music, and dreams in which her narrators found themselves. Now, we are given the chance to learn more from Suzuki’s own tumultuous life in the newly published autofiction, Set My Heart on Fire, written in the same mesmerizing, phantasmagoric tone of brusqueness and vulnerability that gave reality to her imagination. As our November Book Club selection, this novel enlivens the sharp mind, loves, and frivolities of a woman who sought and fought for her individuality, as well as the decades in which Japan was also undergoing changes of both revel and 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.   

Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Helen O’Horan, Verso, November 2024

Strung-out bass, clunky keys, psychedelic vocals. Abundant patterns, colors, and substances. Dancing, libating, popping, fucking. The groovy, knocked-out backdrop to 1960s Japan. In Honmoku, a district in Yokohama known for its American military base, Japanese youth had reveled in the abundance of American-influenced music, rock and roll, and rebellion, fueled by the financial prosperity of the “Golden Sixties” and its reigning youthful, nonconformist spirit. Izumi Suzuki, a prolific science fiction writer in the late 1970s, moved to Tokyo in 1969 with a year remaining to soak in that rhythm, as in the following decade, Japan would face the first hint of its coming economic breakdown as GDP growth slowed significantly during the global oil crisis. The former revelers, strung out and blissed out, were suddenly thrust into a decade of fading glory and no direction.

Izumi Suzuki’s latest work in English, translated by British linguist Helen O’Horan, is a novel titled Set My Heart on Fire—a notable deviation from the original title’s reference to The Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Song-inspired titles are a near-constant in Suzuki’s oeuvre, and her first novel in translation is no exception, with each chapter taking its name from a track from the sixties. While the references are upheld throughout much of the translation, O’Horan’s choice to alter the title better reflects the broader, underlying sense of desperation—for a dying age, a lost youth—and self-destruction that runs through the novel. READ MORE…

By Way of Dreams: Annie McDermott on Translating Mario Levrero

November 21, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

One of Levrero’s first publishers described him as a realist writer who lives on another planet.

The world is strange, and we make it stranger by living here. Uruguayan author Mario Levrero knew that better than most, and in his debut collection of short stories, The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, one is guided by extraordinary vision and delightful humour along the writer’s gallery of fantasies and absurdities, impossible events and otherworldly journeys, all of which are made real and cemented into reality by thought and emotion. In this interview, translator Annie McDermott speaks about being drawn into Levrero’s singular voice, working with co-translator Kit Schluter, and distinguishing imagination from invention.

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.   

Georgina Fooks (GF): How did you first encounter Mario Levrero’s work, and what drew you to his writing?

Annie McDermott (AD): It was through a series of strange coincidences—which seems fitting. I was living in Brazil at the time, and I happened to go for lunch with a Mexican writer called Juan Pablo Villalobos, who was also living in Brazil at the time, and he is a great fan of Levrero. He wrote a great piece for Granta about how he became a fan before he’d even had the chance to get his hands on any of Levrero’s books—because they used to be so hard to get hold of—and he became a fan based on the titles alone.

He recommended him to me, and I happened to be going to Uruguay on the way home from Brazil, and I picked up a copy of one of Levrero’s novels. I remember that as soon as I started reading it, I realised that I’ve never read anything else like it. He has this amazing voice, this kind of strange, absurd, quite deadpan voice that is like nothing else. It’s also very warm, and also really engaging, and also very companionable and a really pleasant narrator to spend time with.

At the same time, Juan Pablo Villalobos had also been enthusiastically recommending Levrero to Stefan [Tobler] from And Other Stories, so it all happened in parallel in a very pleasing way, and that was how I came to end up doing some samples and eventually translating Levrero’s books. READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine by Mario Levrero

October 31, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks

Life, as Levrero’s literature evidences, is richer and more beautiful when we follow our whims.

In The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, the idiosyncratic wonderments of Mario Levrero are exhibited in a dazzling array. This first collection was, as the author tells it, ‘turned back into pulp’ in its first print run, but has since grown with tremendous repute, leading into a dedicated following in both its native Uruguay and neighbouring Argentina. It’s easy to see how these tales enthrall; each sees Levrero pushing the narrative form ever further into the enigmatic and the expansive, and any subject, object, and space is rendered as capable of endless transformations, creating portals at the seams of experience for the reader’s own marvelling journey. On live the bizarre, the mysteries, growing and multiplying at the non-existent borders of 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.   

The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine by Mario Levrero, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, And Other Stories, 2024

What does reality look like? Might it in fact be more dreamlike than we assume? Does true madness lie in the acceptance of daily routine? All these questions ricochet throughout the stories of The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine, a dazzling array of imaginative exercises from the eclectic Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero. The simplest beginnings—the daily rounds of a bedtime ritual, the anxieties of being late for work—take unexpected turns, leading us to places we never could have imagined. Along the way, chance is revealed to be the dominant factor in reality, rather than routine. Levrero is a dizzying stylist and he is matched with aplomb by translators Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter, who evidently share the author’s passion for imaginative play.

The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine is both a product of the imagination and a book that mirrors it; just like the human psyche, the diverse stories of the collection record both our meanderings and our obsessions. Often, our narrator is a Levrero-like figure: a good-natured, comedic man (prone to yearning for women, as the title attests) who follows his flights of fancy to their utmost ends. He is a charming narrator, skilled with wry turns of phrase, and his inability to leave any stone unturned takes him down curious paths. Whether it’s the miniature world hidden within a lighter in ‘Beggar Street’, or the young boy who grows old searching for a key in ‘The Basement’, Levrero plays with absurd economies of scale by stretching out both space and time. Reality and matter are his playthings, but the ensuing absurdity leads to some profound truths. Life, as Levrero’s literature evidences, is richer and more beautiful when we follow our whims. READ MORE…

A Gazan Woman’s Voice: Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah on translating Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza

October 23, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

. . . even in the face of oppression, Arab women . . . take a role in constructing their realities, demonstrating agency despite what they endure.

When it was first published in 2019, A Long Walk from Gaza resounded with Asmaa Alatawna’s evocative descriptions of girlhood, migration, and life under occupation, gathered in an acute testament against the societal and political repressions of a woman’s liberties. Today, in light of the events over the last year, it also preserves a city that has since been overwritten with violence, layering the streets, neighbourhoods, and homes of memory over the present map of destruction. In this following interview, translators Michelle Hartman and Caline Nasrallah discuss their process in translating this nuanced portrait of Palestinian life, the element of double marginalisation within the narrative, and the emotionality of working with a story that evokes the now-gone.

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. 

Ibrahim Fawzy (IF): How did you come across A Long Walk from Gaza?

Michelle Hartman (MH): I have a relationship with Interlink Publishing. It’s a smallish, independent publisher based in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the only Palestinian-owned publisher in the United States. It’s committed to doing many different things, particularly bringing fiction written in Arabic to English readers—and it’s been doing this for a very long time. There’s a significant list of Arab writers whom the publisher wants to bring to life in English. They occasionally send me novels, and A Long Walk from Gaza was one of them. As Caline and I were working on another project at the time, I sent this book to her for her opinion.

Caline Nasrallah (CN): As Michelle said, we have already worked on several things together, so we have this relationship of her sending me books to read. I’ll then go through these books and decide if we could continue working on them. Once she sent me Asmaa’s novel, I was so taken by it, and I thought it was an important project we had to work on. I felt a duty. I read it, then we discussed it more, and we went ahead.

IF: That’s great. As a literary translator, I usually read a book and find something that speaks to me, motivating me to translate it. What drew you to this book? What are the elements that convinced you to spend much time with it?

CN: Asmaa’s novel is a must-read because of the way it describes life under occupation and all of the hardships that come along with that, specifically in Gaza. There’s little that comes out of Gaza because of the situation on the ground, so the book felt like a lens into something we had never really seen before—that made it feel more relevant. Asmaa reveals this double layer of life under occupation, tracing life as a girl and a woman under occupation, the reality of occupation and internal issues impacting the society in which she lived. While united within a cause, women were also affected by society’s actions. It’s imperative to recognise this aspect, even though it’s often overlooked in literature focusing on a common enemy. Calling out injustice wherever it exists is essential.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna

September 30, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Alatawan’s novel is both personal and political; at its heart, it’s a story about freedom.

In Asmaa Alatawna’s mesmerizing and clear-sighted debut novel, A Long Walk from Gaza, the long journey of migration is revealed as a dense mosaic of innumerable moments—a gathering of the many steps one takes in growing up, in fighting back, and in learning the truths about one’s own life. From the Israeli occupation to the daily violences of womanhood, Alatawna’s story links our contemporary conflicts to the perpetual challenges of human society, tracking a mind as it steels itself against judgment and oppression, walking itself towards selfhood’s independent definitions. We are proud to present this title as our Book Club selection for the month of September; as Palestine remains under assault, A Long Walk from Gaza stands as a powerful narrative that resists the dehumanizing rhetoric of war.

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. 

A Long Walk From Gaza by Asmaa Alatawna, translated from the Arabic by Caline Nasrallah and Michelle Hartman, Interlink Publishing, 2024

There are some books that grab you from the very first line and hold your attention tight, right through every single word to the end; even once you’ve finished reading them, they keep delivering with their exquisite phrasings and stunning imagery, their deft, original storytelling. Asmaa Alatawna’s A Long Walk from Gaza, co-translated by Caline Nasrallah and Michelle Hartman, is one such novel. Through her enthralling and thoughtful prose, Alatawna unfolds idea after idea, fact after fact, emotion after emotion, recounting a tumultuous upbringing and journey that moves with both personal and universal resonance.

A Long Walk from Gaza is Alatawna’s debut in both Arabic and English—a semi-fictionalized, coming-of-age novel. Originally published in 2019 as Sura Mafquda, it explores the struggles of a teenage Gazan girl as she rebels against her surroundings, both at home and at school, and her heartbreak as she leaves Gaza for a new life in Europe. Her escape doesn’t resolve her problems but instead introduces new challenges, revealing the persistent, ongoing internal conflict of exile. While portraying life and a childhood under Israeli occupation and oppression, Alatawna also takes an incisive, knowing look at the patriarchal system of her own people. READ MORE…

Every Word Translucent: Julia Sanches on Translating Eva Baltasar

September 26, 2024  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

I think Eva is still trying the novel form on for size, figuring out what suits her.

In Mammoth, our Book Club selection for August, Eva Baltasar masterfully builds a sensually invigorating, intensely lucid character study of a woman that follows desire to its most extreme ends, drawing on the author’s cultivated themes of rebellion and self-liberation to lay wreckage to social norms, sexual standards, and the pretense of civility. Translated with finesse and lyric precision by her long-time English voice, Julia Sanches, the novel is by turns thrilling and disturbing, meticulously structured in its lines and its narrative; in line with Baltasar’s work as a poet, every word serves a purpose. Here, Sanches speaks to Hilary Ilkay about working with such fine prose, the necessary care taken on both linguistic and musical levels, and moving between strangeness and sense.

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. 

Hilary Ilkay (HI): Mammoth is the last of Eva Baltasar’s trio of novels that reflect uniquely on motherhood and maternity—and you’ve been the translator of all three. I’m wondering how you see Mammoth fitting in with the other two, Boulder and Permafrost?

Julia Sanches (JS): I’m still working through my views on that. Eva has said in the past that Mammoth crystallizes her work in the triptych, and the more I’ve thought about the book, the more I’ve realized that their defining tension is between the societal expectations of motherhood and its instinctual, more primal side. If I’d read Boulder and not known Eva had children, I’d have found it impossible to believe that this woman—who’d written a character so allergic to motherhood—could be a mother, too. But from her position as a mother, Eva is always questioning the push and pull of norms and expectations, asking: what is motherhood for human beings as animals? And what is motherhood for human beings as part of a social fabric? I think this is what the triptych is exploring.

HI: In Baltasar’s work, I find the blurring between animal and human to be so striking—and that tone is set right from the beginning, so you see both the loss of self and the finding of oneself in that slippage. That tension, exactly as you describe it, is so alive in her novels. Did Mammoth in particular pose any unique challenges as a translator that the other two didn’t?

JS: Mammoth was slightly easier to translate because it’s the third book I’ve worked on by Eva, so I’ve become used to her style. She’s very, very controlled. The three sections of Mammoth are practically the same length, and her sentences are nearly all constructed in the same way. I had to play a little bit with the structure, because in Romance languages you can start a sentence with a verb, so the repetition of “I” doesn’t grate as much; that’s not the case in English, and I had to find a workaround.

I also struggled with some of the more agricultural terminology. Eva, who is an endlessly fascinating person, worked as a shepherd for at least one year (possibly as many as three) in the Pyrenees, and so in the novels, she uses some of the offhand language of a shepherd who knows the ins and outs of lambing, as opposed to the technical terms. The British editor and I discussed these sections in detail. For example, at some points, she refers to the sack that the lamb is birthed in as the placenta, but I thought English lay readers like myself might get confused because we have a very specific idea of what a placenta is.

While Permafrost has these intricate, paragraph-long metaphors that are difficult to unwind and render in English, Mammoth is a lot more pared down. So it was a matter of dialing things back and making sure the language remained very clear. I wanted no spare words whatsoever, and I don’t know if I succeeded in being as ascetic as I intended. It was a challenge. I am not terse by nature, so I had to go against the grain of my usual writing. READ MORE…

Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Mammoth by Eva Baltasar

August 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Hilary Ilkay

The spirit of the zoo has entered her bedroom: sex without pleasure, purely for the sake of regeneration, a blind but demanding impulse.

In the latest from lauded Catalan author Eva Baltasar, an animal desire is on the rise. Tired of the city, her studies, and the vacuity of contemporary life, the young protagonist of Mammoth seeks out a supposedly simpler provincial existence, and is willing to do anything to get there. Through both physical and psychological extremes, Baltasar’s heightened portrait is both shocking and absorbing, reflecting the chaos of an ego that vibrates with desire and spirals against expectation. The prose shivers with sensuality as this journey inward and outward carves its remarkable procession—the rampage of an unencumbered self, raging against the presumptions of civilised life.

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. 

Mammoth by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches, And Other Stories, 2024

Following on the heels of the 2023 Booker-shortlisted Boulder, Eva Baltasar’s latest novel, Mammoth, seizes the reader in a vice grip from the opening page and doesn’t relent even after its final words; the ending, in fact, delivers the sharpest blow of all. The narrative is a raw and visceral exploration of a young woman who shatters the routine of her daily life, learning to dwell among the shards of a new form of existence. Using a rich vocabulary of metaphors and similes, Baltasar creates a fictional space that is confrontational, explosive, and evocative, demonstrating her masterful ability to delve into the psyches of queer women who find themselves on the fringes, and Julia Sanches’s translation from the Catalan deftly captures the novel’s unique tone and voice.

Through its title, Baltasar thematically links Mammoth to her other two novels translated into English, Permafrost and Boulder: all three suggest weight, immovability. The unnamed protagonist in Mammoth is twenty-four years old and dissatisfied with her life, especially her research job at a university, which involves interviewing residents in nursing homes. “I hated my tool,” she reflects, “the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people.” This threat of dehumanization threads its way through the prose, hovering beneath the surface of every encounter. It’s telling that on the first page, the narrator reveals that her bedroom window faces a zoo, establishing a proximity to an animalistic wildness that has been broken and contained, on display for public consumption and enjoyment—a metaphor for her perception of her own existence. Returning to the zoo later, she thinks, “The animals didn’t live there, they rotted there—just like the visitors and no more nor less than the zookeepers.” READ MORE…