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Announcing Our December Book Club Title: Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe
To open up poverty is to open up migration is to open up blackness is to open up the love between two men.
For our final Book Club selection of the year, Asymptote is proud to present a work emblematic of how writing can transform, subvert, and negate borders. In Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, Swiss author Max Lobe traces how the complex factors of race, class, sexuality, and migration can cohere in a single life, and how nationhood can be refracted and reinterpreted by those who refuse to be defined by the standard. Speaking in the extraordinarily vivid voice of his protagonist, Mwana, Lobe balances tragedy with joy, freedom with entrapment, and home with home.
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.
Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside? by Max Lobe, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, Hope Road Publishing, 2022
As in love, mystery, and metamorphosis, the name of country draws a long throughline in our world of stories. Add to it a possessive—my country, your country—and the resulting narratives are instantly elaborated with the ontological intersections, demarcations, and dialogues that enmesh our landscape. Through this simple addition, a life is juxtaposed with a society, a single act comes to emblematise a culture, and an experience constitutes an identity—not necessarily out of any active political consciousness, but simply from having left, at some point, that arbitrary and mutable shape of one’s birthplace. Paul Gilroy, in conceptualising diaspora, described it as positing “important tensions between here and there, then and now, between seed in the bag, the packet or the pocket and seed in the ground, the fruit or the body.” To move across our jigsaw world is to know the fluid weight of difference and sameness—that they can be at once interchangeable and oppositional. These shifts from strangeness to familiarity do not begin with the boarding of a plane or a boat, but occur in minute swatches of conversation, in the passing from one minute to the next, between two people looking out at the same scene, not knowing what the other sees.
In Max Lobe’s Does Snow Turn a Person White Inside?, translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, country is introduced by the most immediate and intimate of desires—food. Our narrator, Mwana, is lugging “two huge sugar-cane bags” across Switzerland, with all the provisions and gifts of another nation inside: “Fumbwa, saka-saka, makayabu, okra and dried impwa.” The list goes on, rich with sugars and starches and svelte oils. Wrapped meticulously by his mother, the treasured packages have been carried by his sister Kosambela, across the continental divide from what Mwana calls Bantuland, to the nation where they both now reside: Switzerland of the Grütli Meadow and the Rütli Oath, of white-out peaks and lakeshore villas.
A recent graduate of the University of Geneva and a settled Swiss resident, Mwana is black, queer, and unemployed; it is this lattermost factor that rules his life, his daily preoccupations, and his physical and mental wanderings. With repeated trips to the unemployment office, small yellow coins dug out of household crevices, kindly deceptive calls to his mother—this scarcity is the precipice that Mwana dangles from, and as such it is the swinging, breakneck angle by which he interprets everything. The two bags he drags onto the bus from Lugano to Geneva contain emblems of home, of care, and of a beautiful eradication of distance, but most importantly, they are an antidote to hunger. Amidst Lobe’s warm, loquacious prose, we first see the dissipation of difference into sameness, the shift from displacement in country to immediacy in the body. In all the discursive paths the mind takes to arrive at a single place, we see the need to live. READ MORE…
Everything Is in the Atmosphere: David Boyd on Translating Hiroko Oyamada
For me, the best way to approach idioms is to live with them for a really long time.
Hiroko Oyamada is a master of the uncanny. Though she made her English-language debut in only 2019, her surreal atmospheres and psychological insight has gained significant traction and acclaim, and we were delighted to introduce her third and latest work, the collection Weasels in the Attic, as our book club selection for the month of November. In the interconnected series of three narratives, Oyamada explores parenthood, fertility, and the demarcation between human and animal worlds with signature precision and intrigue, rendered into a graceful English by her long-time translator, David Boyd. In the following interview, we speak to Boyd on his relationship with Oyamada’s works, the challenge of idioms, and his approach to her singular style.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.
Laurel Taylor (LT): David, this is technically the third title from Oyamada you’ve translated into English, but the stories in this volume originally appeared separately—did you translate them all in one go?
David Boyd (DB): No, definitely not. In Japanese, the stories in Weasels in the Attic can be found in the book versions of The Factory (Kōjō) and The Hole (Ana). They were written around the same time as those novellas — between 2012 and 2014, I think. In 2019, when we published The Factory in English, Oyamada came out to New York and Boston to support the book. At that point, I was already working on The Hole, and New Directions wanted to know what was going to come next. When we talked to Oyamada, she told us that she’d always considered these three stories—“Death in the Family,” “Last of the Weasels,” and “Yukiko”—to be a trilogy. It was never printed as a single book in Japan, but that doesn’t mean Oyamada didn’t view it in that way. Anyway, that was where we got the idea to collect the stories into a single volume: from Oyamada herself.
LT: That’s fascinating to hear, because I was very curious about whether these stories were originally meant to go together.
DB: Absolutely. Oyamada wrote them that way. In my mind, too, they form a single novella, just like her other two books, even if there’s no single volume in Japanese that contains all three. Novellas in Japan are usually published with accompanying shorter stories, and that’s how “Death in the Family” ended up as part of The Factory and “Last of the Weasels” and “Yukiko” ended up as part of The Hole.
I translated them in the order that they were published in Japan—“Death in the Family” right after working on The Factory. That had to be around 2018, or maybe early 2019. It was kind of refreshing, because “Death in the Family” feels nothing like The Factory. Then, after I translated The Hole in the summer of 2019, I came back to Saiki and the others, working on “Last of the Weasels” then “Yukiko” back-to-back. I didn’t mean to do it that way, but it worked out well to have some space between the first story and the other two. A fair amount of time passes in the narrator’s world; he’s older in “Last of the Weasels,” and even older in “Yukiko.” That being the case, I didn’t go back to make sure that they sounded identical. I didn’t feel like there was any need. READ MORE…
Announcing Our November Book Club Title: Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada
. . . the tension of the story's thread does not snap; it remains taut and coiled, hinting but never giving.
After a long history of marginalization, unconventional narratives of gender, parenthood, and conception are coming to the forefront, representing a pivotal step forward as our conversations around these foundational matters continue to be rife with tumult, tensions, and inquiries. In this month’s Book Club selection, Weasels in the Attic, award-winning Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada confronts the murky subject of family and childbearing with her signature command of the strange, weaving a narrative that encapsulates the surreality of these societal pressures. In her questioning of gender stereotypes and heteronormativity, Oyamada’s novella is a fascinating, disarming path through the psychology of not-yet parents, casting a dark suspicion onto the bright facade of nuclear familyhood.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.
Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada, translated from the Japanese by David Boyd, New Directions, 2022
Though Japan is famed for horror films of unsparing gore, I feel that the nation’s best stories of the uncanny are found in quieter narratives. Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic, translated by David Boyd, joins other globally famous Japanese authors like Yoko Tawada, Yukiko Motoya, Sayaka Murata in delivering a chill, caused not so much by overt implications of a world gone sideways than by the uneasy feeling that something is deeply wrong—something you can’t quite put your finger on.
Weasels in the Attic, Oyamada’s third volume from New Directions, also shares with Tawada, Motoya, and Murata a preoccupation with fertility and childlessness, two physio-sociological conditions gripping contemporary Japanese society as the population continues to shrink. While some politicians have acknowledged that reforms in work life and childcare are necessary to encourage population growth, blame is still often laid at the feet of women who supposedly prioritize career over family. In Weasels, however, the women of the story seem desperate to have children, while men are the ones expressing reservations or shock at the thought of starting a family. The narrator and his wife haven’t yet gotten pregnant, and she is increasingly frantic for a child while his interest is lukewarm at best. “I always tell her it’s her call,” the narrator explains to his male friends. “Then she comes back with all these pamphlets and websites . . . It’s the same thing every night. Then she asks me: ‘On a scale of one to ten, how badly do you want kids?’” The narrator’s qualms are further hampered by his possible impotency, something he refuses to investigate even when his wife hands him a sample cup point blank.
During a visit to friend-of-a-friend Urabe, the narrator holds Urabe’s newborn daughter and narrates her appearance: “The baby’s face was small and red. Her shut eyes looked like knife slits. I could feel her warmth and dampness through the layers of cloth.” In such a small child, there are already hints of the uncanny, of something lurking in the humid, murky depths. The moment the narrator relinquishes the baby to her mother, he becomes preoccupied with Urabe’s extensive exotic fish collection. Tanks fill Urabe’s home, and he and his wife breed the fish selectively, carefully—yet at the same time, unpredictably. “We still don’t fully understand the relationship between genotype and phenotype,” Urabe’s wife tells the narrator. “We haven’t been able to confirm which genes lead to which patterns. He says that’s why we need to experiment with different pairings—to see which combinations they produce.” In the course of rereading (which I would highly recommend with this text), this sentence rings differently, terrifyingly. Who precisely is experimenting with whom? And to what end? Is it Urabe experimenting with fish worth hundreds of dollars, or is it his uncanny wife—or more accurately, the mother of his child—experimenting with potential mates? After all, as we soon learn, she might possibly be the same girl he discovered in his storeroom dressed in nothing but underwear and a slip, eating bags of dried fish food. The reader, however, is never given clear confirmation of this fact; the shadowy depths of Weasels refuse any straightforward details. READ MORE…
Illness in the Mirror: An Interview with Senka Marić and Celia Hawkesworth
I want to take on the subject of my personal journey—to maybe find some truth in it, or even just to ask the right questions.
Our October Book Club selection, Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, is a profound documentation of the author’s fight with cancer, and as such it is also an interrogation of time, of physicality, and of transformations. In writing of illness’ warping effect on reality, Marić broadens the claustrophobically private experience of disease and recovery to address universal themes of loss and survival. In this following interview, Carol Khoury talks to Marić and her translator, Celia Hawkesworth, about the immediacy of the text, the mirror image, and how powerful emotions can be distilled into text.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.
Carol Khoury (CK): Despite the narrative of Body Kintsugi not being contemporaneous, it’s written with such an engaging power that it feels as though it is happening in real time. So my first question to you, Senka, is about your relationship with time. Is it really as you say in the book—that it has no meaning?
Senka Marić (SM): In a sense, I have told the story of a distinct experience—that of suffering from breast cancer—in a relatable way. Within those moments dictated by illness, time becomes really relative; it doesn’t flow as it normally would, as it is directed or determined by check-ups and operations and chemotherapies. All other matters really cease to exist in the reality of the person who is sick, and as such, time becomes relative, because everything that life normally contains is no longer present. For me, personally, that was the case.
CK: Celia, how did you experience time while you were translating this?
Celia Hawkesworth (CH): Because I had to spend a lot of my own time physically putting myself in the place someone who was going through such hell, I was always quite relieved to get to the passages where the protagonist was remembering her childhood, or other parts that took us a bit away from that continuous, strange world where time didn’t have the same meaning. It’s a bit like in Shakespeare, when you have high drama and high tragedy, and then occasional moments of release. I thought that aspect was very important for keeping one’s attention, but also giving one a bit of a break from the real horror of the suffering.
CK: Senka, one other element in the book that caught my attention is mirrors. There’s something like fifteen mentions—all of which refer to physical mirrors. Yet, the whole narrative is about another mirror. Might I say there was some sort of a mental mirror, one that you used not only to see and show the “you” and the “I”, but also to negate other existences.
SM: Frankly, I was trying to play with the idea of reality in its most basic sense: how we take things for granted, and how a sense of reality can be distorted when catastrophe occurs. That’s the background for the whole story—not being able to believe what reality is, and how we then perceive it. When everything is slipping out of our hands, time and space and mirrors in general are our checkpoints. We can be spiritual, we can be this and that, but in the most basic sense, we are physical beings, and we identify with the image of ourselves. We need the acknowledgment from the mirror that we are who we are. That’s why I wrote the moment in which the main character loses her hair, and she starts to cry. That’s the only time she actually really cries. READ MORE…
Announcing Our October Book Club Title: Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić
Marić has honored the vibrant, silent energy that the body contains, bringing it to the page in its truest form.
This month, the Asymptote Book Club is proud to present Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, a moving and lyrical documentation through a woman’s interrogation of her own body as it undergoes disease, fracturing, and metamorphosis. Tracing the lineage of her physical fracturing through a fight with cancer, Marić reconstitutes the ideas of bodily fault lines and ruptures to conceive of a new wholeness, addressing the rifts and traumas of life to incorporate loss as an essential fact of survival.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.
Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić, translated from the Bosnian by Celia Hawkesworth, Peirene Press, 2022
We don’t like to think of ourselves as a collection of fragments, but it is in our nature, as humans, to be cleaved into pieces by time and death—into “corpses strewn over the pages of history,” with nothing but the remnants of stories to tell of our struggles and victories.
Out of this nature of fragmentation arises Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić, a daring, visceral meditation on the female body and its reckoning with loss, fear, and mortality. A “story about the body” and “its struggle to feel whole while reality shatters it into fragments,” the book centers on Marić’s experience with breast cancer, a vehicle by which she uses to explore self-perception, self-preservation, and relationships. Although Marić begins with her singular, personal history, her discursive space gives birth to an ambiguous “you”; the narrative quickly evolves into a discourse on the collective reality of shreds and patches, enticing a metaphysical reconciliation of impermanence—our own and of those closest to us.
The protagonist’s rupture begins with the loss of her husband to adultery, followed by a more visceral loss: that of one breast, then the other, and finally her hair and life force through the traumatic process of chemotherapy. Although the protagonist loses her former self piece by piece, she comes to reassemble it through surgery, treatment, and radical acceptance, focusing not on the disease itself, but what remains in lieu of it. This theme blossoms to take hold of the entire text—that of physical and spiritual kintsugi. READ MORE…
Every Word Counts: Chip Rossetti on Translating Diaa Jubaili’s No Windmills in Basra
Flash fiction is more like someone grabbing you by the lapels and then sending you on your way.
For the month of September, our Book Club selection Diaa Jubaili’s No Windmills in Basra, a visionary collection of short fiction that works from Iraq’s expansive folktale tradition to create vivid, surprising portrayals of the country’s complex present. In precise, yet fantastic prose, Jubaili jumps rope with the tight limits of short story to range from humour to darkness, from imagination to reality, from violence to tenderness. In the following interview, Laurel Taylor speaks to the translator of No Windmills in Basra, Chip Rossetti, on formalism, intertextuality, and the use of symbolism in Jubaili’s 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 USD15 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.
Laurel Taylor (LT): You’ve mentioned that Jubaili’s work was the first flash fiction you had read in Arabic, and also that the genre is still very new in Arabic. To what extent are you thinking about formalism as you translate something that is a known genre in English but perhaps less so in Arabic?
Chip Rossetti (CR): It’s interesting, as the short story’s both a very old and a very new phenomenon in Arabic. The earliest form of prose narrative in Arabic is the khabar, which is a very short sort of text. One example of its earliest use is the hadith, accounts of things the Prophet Muhammad once said or did, and a khabar could be a paragraph long, or a few sentences. Khabar were always preceded by a citation of its oral sources, such as “I heard this account from someone, who heard it from somebody else who heard it from somebody else.” So there’s a chain of transmission, and that’s what scholars always point to as the very core, the oldest examples of prose texts in Arabic. Of course, that’s fourteen hundred years ago. That’s a far cry from modern short stories.
There are, as I think I mentioned in the introduction to No Windmills in Basra, some other practitioners of flash fiction in Arabic—notably the Syrian author Zakariya Tamer who is, I think, in his nineties now. He’s also done very short stories, but the contemporary boom in flash fiction started making its way into Arabic much more recently than in English. The challenge, as I understand it—and I’ve tried my hand at writing English-language flash fiction—is the intensity required of the writer. The challenge for a translator of flash fiction is to mirror that same intensity in the translation. Obviously, every word counted for Jubaili when he wrote it in the original, so I’ve tried to make sure I’m keeping that emotional punch in a way that inevitably brings you to each story’s end: an ending that comes sooner than you might expect, but is still somehow satisfying. READ MORE…
Announcing Our September Book Club Title: No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili
[Jubaili] departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.
In this fantastic, sobering, and imagistic collection, Diaa Jubaili uses the folktale traditions of Iraq to reflect newly on war, country, and national history. Unlike traditional legends, where magic lives in the world as phenomenon and circumstance, the characters of these stories defy their grave realities with feats of imagination, in bold and moving demonstrations of how the mind can transcend matter. In humanizing the struggles of Iraq across its conflicts, Jubaili addresses the horrors of war with philosophical wit and metaphysical possibility.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.
No Windmills in Basra by Diaa Jubaili, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti, Deep Vellum, 2022
On the surface, fairy tales should theoretically be easy to translate (if there is a world in which translation is easy); they’re usually simplistically narrated, lexically limited, and short. But of course, texts that seem simple on the surface can often turn out to be immensely difficult, and in the case of fairy tales, perplexing questions arise almost immediately, because so much of what they impart depends on a reader’s pre-existing cultural knowledge. Can any of us remember a time when we didn’t know the story of Little Red Riding Hood?
The challenges of translation are made even more evident when the fairy tales are intended for adults, as is the case with Diaa Jubaili’s stories in No Windmills in Basra, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti. In this collection of tales—some less than a page long, some ranging over several pages—Jubaili engages slantwise with the history of Iraq and Basra over the past seventy years. Rather than writing a collection of realist fiction, the author departs from reality and time to scratch at those seemingly eternal themes so often associated with fairy tales.
In the opening story of the collection, “Flying,” for example, a security guard named Mubarak thinks often of launching airborne as he guards the chickens at a poultry plant south of Basra.
. . . he flew twice—not on a plane, or by means of a hot air balloon or parachute, and not even on a giant demon’s wings or a magic carpet as happened so often in the tales from the Thousand and One Nights. Nor was he an admirer of the medieval scientist-inventor Ibn Firnas, who dreamed of flapping wings and soaring heights, since Mubarak knew that with that sort of thing, he would eventually end up a pile of broken bones on the side of the road.
There is no magic in this story—at least not the kind we associate with fairy tales—but that does not stop Mubarak from experiencing a journey from the everyday to the cosmic. In his first experience with flight, As an infantry soldier whose company is targeted by bombing, he is tossed into the air after a detonation, being sent briefly into a world where a man airborne is not shorthand for a fighter pilot honing in for the kill, but instead a miracle that allows for deferred violence and peace accords. Of course, Mubarak’s flight comes at the expense of his company, all of whom die in the explosion. Fairy tales are fantastic things, but they’re also dangerous things, and miracles usually have exacting prices. In fact, in this story, American munitions are the only means by which Mubarak can again take flight. The djinns and magicians of the Thousand and One Nights have been replaced by the darker realities of modern warfare. READ MORE…
In Good Company: Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall on Translating The Left Parenthesis
[B]eing able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.
Muriel Villaneuva’s The Left Parenthesis takes place by the sea, a fitting setting for a story that weaves in-between motherhood and mourning, loss and reinvention, the mind and the body. In the stunning autofictional tale of a recently widowed mother attempting to piece together her shifting roles in the world, Villaneuva merges the surreal and the intimately physical to chart the mystifying journey one takes back to get to oneself. In the following interview, Rachel Farmer talks to the co-translators of The Left Parenthesis, Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall, about the book’s feminism, Catalan specificity, and its “uncomplicated” representation of motherhood.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.
Rachel Farmer (RF): First of all, before we dive into The Left Parenthesis, I’d be really interested to hear about your process as co-translators. In the brilliant conversation recently published in the Oxonian Review, the pair of you talked about working together on another co-translation of Montserrat Roig. Can you tell us just a little bit about this relationship?
Megan Berkobien (MB): Well, my dissertation is about co-translation, especially as a socialist and ecological phenomenon; it really came from the fact that basically all my translation experiences have been collaborative. I went to school at the University of Michigan for both my PhD and undergrad, and in the translation workshop there, everything was done together. So, it came naturally when I met María Cristina. The first thing we worked on as a team was a little anthology on women writers in Catalan—that’s when I realised we were really on the same page. We wrote the opening essay together, and it just really worked. We just feed off one another’s poetic creativities, I guess.
María Cristina Hall (MCH): For us, having the interaction of editing together was a way to build trust, to understand that our voices were similar enough to co-translate. Our process involved dividing the book up, each doing fifteen pages, then looking at each other’s version and editing it as if it were our own piece—so there’s never that feeling of holding back. It seems very natural to edit, sometimes heavily and sometimes not. If ever a word comes up where we think, “how should we translate that?”, we have a back-and-forth, and it goes smoothly from there. It’s very enriching, and I think something Megan touched on in her dissertation was the importance of working in a community and having company. Translation is usually very solitary work, so it’s very different to have this practice.
MB: In a lot of ways, the fact that translators are artists insinuates at the worst part about being an artist: that you have to work by yourself, and that you have this “grand genius” inside you. I just don’t think genius is never located in one person, and being able to share genius in whatever way or form is the most beautiful thing there is.
RF: Was there anything in particular about The Left Parenthesis that needed a different approach?
MCH: Well, it was our first project together, and then we did Goodbye Ramona by Montserrat Roig. In that book, the voices are so distinct that we divided it by character, so I worked on the one from the 1900s and Meg did the one from the 1960s—and the one from the 30s, we shared between the two of us. Because Meg is more active in the Socialist party, she could be the character who was politically involved, while I took on the conservative one since I live in Mexico and I have more of a background in Catholicism. But The Left Parenthesis is just one character talking about herself.
MB: We did have to attend to making sure it was all one unified voice, and as such it made a lovely first project because it’s almost as if our voices were weaving together. If we take a cue from the book to describe this, it’s kind of like waves were flowing over us, and each new wave made us come together a little bit more. READ MORE…
The New “Destination Unknown” for Adventurous Readers
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls."—Anais Nin
Who says you have to push pins into maps to plan your next travel destination?
The Asymptote Book Club delivers a monthly journey built around surprise and discovery. It’s the new “destination unknown,” where each month’s book is a surprise selection curated by Asymptote’s award-winning editorial team in partnership with leading independent publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Since 2017, more than 500 subscribers all around the world have toured 40 different countries in books, immersing themselves in exclusive features like Zoom Q&A interviews and discussion groups—all from as low a price as USD15 a month.
Whether you’re an immersive explorer, a casual reader, a solo traveler, a group traveler, or a pin pusher, you too can sign up for our next great journey.
In fact, if you subscribe by today, September 4th, you’ll receive your first title in your mailbox this very month! So, don’t wait! Read the world today with our Book Club!
Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: The Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva
As the novella progresses, there is a blurring between author and protagonist, between the author’s writing and the writing within the writing.
In Muriel Villanueva’s poetic, undulating The Left Parenthesis, a young mother works towards repair and reinvention, threading together the disparate reflections of selfhood. Under the guise of notes on reprieve, Villaneuva delves into surreal ascriptions of consciousness, of a psychological journey that braids together experience and fantasy. In beautiful, spare language, The Left Parenthesis is an open punctuation, seeking outwards to define that which is in constant flux—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 USD15 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 Left Parenthesis by Muriel Villanueva, translated from the Catalan by María Cristina Hall and Megan Berkobien, Open Letter, 2022
I knew you weren’t well, but I pretended it wasn’t true, because the whole thing made me sick, too. If you died, so did I. If we were a pair, what would that make me afterward?
What do you do when you define yourself by your relationship to another person, and that person ceases to exist? How do you go about allowing the self that you have become to crumble away, making room for a new self to grow? Muriel Villanueva’s The Left Parenthesis—a slim, surreal novella tracking a woman’s trip with her young baby to a small beach town—examines precisely such questions in sparing, direct prose.
The narrative follows the inner life of a woman seeking to understand herself. Throughout the novella, the protagonist, also named Muriel, unpacks and dissects her three selves: the self that is a mother to her daughter Mar, her wife-self (she tells us at the start that she is a widow), and the self that acts as a mother to her own husband. She grapples with the fact that she was never sure which of her selves would emerge when she opened her mouth, a response to her husband’s oscillation between his child-self (the one she felt compelled to mother) and his burgeoning man-self. This three-week excursion, a brief parenthetical phrase within the novel that is her life, is something she undertakes to hopefully catalyse a transformation within her, a process of purging and healing.
Threaded through this book is the eponymous theme of an opening parenthesis, an explanatory and exploratory phase of existence that is separate—parallel—to the day-to-day. “At the beginning of my stay here I thought the cove with the shape of a waning moon. Now I think it’s only a parenthesis. It opens over here and I don’t know where it closes.” The cove to which the protagonist retreats is curved like a parenthesis, simultaneously opening out and welcoming in. This symbolic shape is mirrored in the curve of her arm as she breastfeeds her infant daughter, nurturing her baby as she herself is being nurtured by this trip, this secluded spot to which she has retreated. READ MORE…
Sculpting Words: An Interview with Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles and Paul Filev
In these conversations with characters, I build imaginary convictions.
In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’ startling and tender work of speculative fiction, The Lisbon Syndrome, a comet has demolished the city of Lisbon to nothing, leaving people on the other side of the globe—in Caracas—to reconstitute the erupted world with only a strictly regulated stream of news, an overarching cloak of localized violence, and an unshakable faith in the potentials of storytelling. Translated expertly by Paul Filev, The Lisbon syndrome presents a powerful, telling perspective on the Venezuelan struggle against a repressive regime. In the following interview, Book Club manager Carol Khoury speaks to Sánchez Rugeles and Filev on the unique journey of this text, the learned method of its translation, and the courage and necessity of literature.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.
Carol Khoury (CK): Eduardo, how was the novel received when it came out in Spanish—in Venezuela and elsewhere?
Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles (ESR): It’s strange—the novel wasn’t published in the usual way because the English translation came out before the Spanish edition. The Spanish edition will come out later this year, in October, with the independent publisher Suburbano.
I began writing the novel in 2019 and finished it in 2020, and I showed it to a few publishers here in Madrid. It was during the middle of the pandemic, things were really intense at the time, and they told me, “Well, we like the book, but we can’t publish it until 2025, or at the earliest in summer 2024 maybe. If we take it on, you’ll have to wait in line.”
And I was very impatient to have this book published, because the novel was very emotional for me, given that the events in the novel mirrored what was actually happening in Venezuela at the time. I can usually be more patient with my work, but I felt a little anxious to get this book out. A friend read the manuscript—a movie director—and he told me, “I want to turn this into a movie. What do you say—do you want to work on a script with me?”
And I said to him, “Yeah, we can write a script and turn it into a movie, but let me publish the novel first.” But with the pandemic going on, the whole process of getting the book published was very slow. I felt a little sad about having to wait so long to find a publisher, so I started talking with the director, Rodrigo Michelangeli, and one day I said to him, “You know what? I’ll self-publish the book with Amazon. Forget the traditional publishing route. Let’s make this happen.” READ MORE…
Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: The Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles
[T]he past and present histories of Venezuela and Portugal intertwine in this moving story about art and human resilience.
In The Lisbon Syndrome, Venezuelan writer Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles movingly navigates the intricate conflux of tragedies both far away and close to home. Juxtapositioning the cities of Lisbon and Caracas as each is underlined by its own catastrophe, Rugeles positions a human perspective amidst events far beyond a single individual’s control, offering a glimpse at singular agency and narrative power behind greater systems of repression.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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 Lisbon Syndrome by Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles, translated from the Spanish by Paul Filev, Turtle Point Press, 2022
If a comet were to wipe away a major city, leading to the economic and political collapse of an entire continent, would it radically change how we live? It seems impossible to imagine a disaster of such proportions leaving us unaffected, but it depends on where you’re standing. After all, the apocalypse can take many forms; it’s not always as swift and ferocious as a comet. In Eduardo Sánchez Rugeles’s The Lisbon Syndrome, the eponymous catastrophe happens off-stage. The central locus of the story is Caracas, set in an alternative 2017 where the knowledge of Lisbon’s disappearance is scarcel the only wisps of information are those that manage to escape media and internet channels tightly controlled by the government. These crumbs, as well as a dark cloud enshrouding the sky over the Caribbean, are the only sure signs of a catastrophe big enough to arguably recalibrate how we think about human life and the universe. But if “discontent, hunger, and humiliation” is already part of the daily agenda in a world always at the brink of complete destruction, how can an apocalypse an ocean away be more pressing that that which is outside your door?
Nevertheless, the past and present histories of Venezuela and Portugal intertwine in this moving story about art and human resilience. The novel centers around Fernando, a high school teacher, and his benefactor Moreira, an elusive Portuguese immigrant. Alongside Moreira and his students’ involvement, Fernando has established a ramshackle theater company where—at the former’s explicit request—they perform only classics like Shakespeare and Brecht. The company sells tickets at a loss, and students, as they are disappeared one by one, replace each other in key roles. Fernando also brings his love for theater to the classroom, pushing his students to new, ever more daring heights—even when a particularly unorthodox take on Dante’s Divine Comedy (already dripping in political significance) lands them all in hot water with the government, setting the stage for future tragedies.
Both the preparation of performances and the theater space where they rehearse and dream (called La Sibila) come to be a sacred slice of space and time that anchors Fernando and his students against the rising tide of violence and repression sweeping Venezuela. As a literal war between the Venezuelan government and its citizens unfurls outside the walls of La Sibilia, inside the conversations are far more tender. Amid rehearsals, students drink and dream of becoming reggaeton superstars or classic ballerinas, but the discussion of dreams—a rehearsal in its own way—extends the students into a future so uncertain that Ferando feels guilty for even encouraging the possibility of such fantasies turning to reality. READ MORE…
“Vulnerable” Languages: An Interview with Jim Dingley and Petra Reid
The journey of working on this text has led me to look at the whole field of literary translation much more widely than I ever had before.
The translators of Alindarka’s Children, our May Book Club selection, had good reason to think of the text as an enormous challenge. Alherd Bacharevič’s subversive take on Hansel and Gretel is written in a musical tangle of two languages: Russian and Belarusian, addressing the conflict of Belarus’ languages in a powerful tale of intimidation, suppression, and postcolonial linguistics. Now released in a brilliant medley of English and Scots, the Anglophone edition adds new dynamism to the politics and cultures at work, immersing the reader in the complexities of what language tells and what it holds back. In the following transcription of a live interview, translators Jim Dingley and Petra Reid discuss their process, the pitfalls of classifying a language as “vulnerable”, and the creative potentials of dissonance.
The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, 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.
Daljinder Johal (DJ): What were your first impressions of Alindarka’s Children? And what did you consider when making your respective decisions to work on its translation?
Jim Dingley (JD): Alindarka’s Children was published in 2014, I first read it in 2015, and my immediate reaction was: how on earth could anybody even begin to translate this? Then, when I was in Edinburgh with Petra, another Belarusian author began talking about this book with great enthusiasm. It suddenly occurred to me then that there is much being said about Scots being a language—distinct from English—and therefore a source of real national identity. With Scotland’s movement towards independence, it seemed to me that we could try to do something by contrasting English with Scots. I found working with Petra very rewarding as well, because she had an innate feeling for what we were trying to do, putting Scots up against “standard” English.
I think this adds a whole new dimension to the book, which is what any translator does when the process is not purely technical. You’re trying to get the sense of something. When you’re translating a book written in two languages, you can only get to the dynamic between them by introducing some realia from a country where another two languages are spoken. That’s why, in Alindarka’s Children, you feel as though you’re both in Scotland and Belarus at times.
Actually, I hope people experience some confusion with this book. It sounds very strange to say, but I think a lot of language is about dissimulation, confusion, leaving the reader to work it out at every stage.
Petra Reid (PR): Jim and I had very different experiences, because he speaks and writes Belarusian, while I have no knowledge of that language. So when I was reading the novel, I was reading Jim’s translation—that was the first time I’d heard of the novel or the author. In a way, I was reading it through Jim’s filter, and in that, it gained the context of a relationship between the English and the Belarusian.
I also came to it as a third party, as a Scot who doesn’t speak Scots—I was frank with everybody from the beginning, I warned them! I’ve got a strong accent, but I don’t speak Scots. The translation, and my work on it, is a personal explanation of my attitude towards Scots.
DJ: Could you expand on how that exploration went and what you got from it?
PR: What I like to do when I’m reading a translation is to try and imagine how the original sounds in my head, so even if you don’t have the exact vocabulary, you can approach the rhythm of it, and different nuances become available.
That’s what I found interesting about Jim’s translation; I was beginning to feel the Belarusian nuances through Jim. It was a two-way mirror, because Jim and I have our own dynamics in terms of how we speak English, and Jim has his own dynamic in terms of how he speaks Belarusian. It was a multidisciplinary, 3-D process, holding all these nuances in your head and trying to find a way to express that on the page. READ MORE…