Reviews

Agustín Fernández Mallo’s The Things We’ve Seen Holds a Trick Mirror up to History

April 15, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Maddy Robinson

The writer proceeds as though attempting an exorcism, dragging flesh and blood relics to the present.

The Things We’ve Seen by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated from Spanish by Thomas Bunstead, Fitzcarraldo, 2021

In 1989, an extraordinary exhibit opened at the Zoology Museum of Barcelona. Visitors flooded the unveiling of a retrospective on the work of German zoologist Peter Ameisenhaufen, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1955, and his assistant, Hans von Kubert. The exhibit consisted of the meticulous field notes, drawings, photographs, and x-rays of the rare animals the scientists discovered on their travels: Perrosomus, a desert rabbit with exaggerated incisors, Squatina squatina, a leathery sea creature with grotesquely humanoid features, and Solenoglypha polipodia, a snake with birdlike legs running along the length of its body.

If this is starting to sound far-fetched, it’s because it is.

Ameisenhaufen and von Kubert are the alter egos of Catalan photographers Pere Formiguera and Joan Fontcuberta, and the exhibition was, in fact, an artistic one. Designed to question the intentions of photography and its rich potential for deception and fakery (around 30 percent of those attending the inauguration with university degrees said that they believed the animals were real), the exhibit asked visitors to examine the blurred line between fact and fiction and see what truth they could extract.

In much the same way, Agustín Fernández Mallo’s latest novel in three parts, The Things We’ve Seen, sets the mind racing with blurs and glitches—periodic and perturbing reminders of just how malleable our reality, both past and present, can be in the hands of an expert. The English title of the book is taken from a line of poetry by Beat poet Carlos Oroza, which serves as one of the epigraphs to the novel, and subsequently appears with mantra-like regularity:

It is a mistake to take the things we’ve seen as given

With this as his cornerstone, Fernández Mallo creates an intricate network of information and stories, which sprawl outward and intersect seemingly at random, to form a vertiginous commentary on history, war, memory, and our interconnected, twenty-first century lives. In the first part, a writer not unlike Fernández Mallo himself attends a conference on the small Galician island of San Simón, where a group of Twitter-obsessed creatives and thinkers reflect on digital networks. He is accompanied by Julián Hernández, a real-life man who is part of a real-life punk band, Siniestro Total. With the mention of actual people, places, and events so early in the novel, it is tempting to think that what follows will be a species of essay. However, The Things We’ve Seen is published by Fitzcarraldo, whose color-coded covers give the game away (white for essays, Klein blue for fiction). Far be it from me to judge a book by its factuality, but in this case, it is as though the author is daring the reader to believe, to latch on to the recognizable markers of our shared world. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: April 2021

April 12, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Charlie Ng, Marina Dora Martino, and Rachel Stanyon

New work from Japan, Denmark, and Germany!

Our chosen texts from around the world this month denote a certain defamiliarization with one’s environment, whether due to an intrinsic sense of alienation, or an enforced strangeness by a world unexpectedly altered. In literature, disparity is a powerful, effective motif for both the urgency of social commentary, and the exploration of the personal psyche, and the works presented here are exemplifications par excellence in both respects. From a collection of short science fiction tales from a Japanese counterculture icon, to a dual text of two poetry volumes by acclaimed Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, and a harrowing tale of exile and forced peripatetics in the immediate fallout of Kristallnacht. Read on to find out more!

terminal boredom

Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2021

Review by Rachel Stanyon, Copyeditor

Terminal complicity. Terminal addiction. Terminal jealousy. Terminal resignation. Terminal self-deception. Terminal love. Any of these could have been the title of Terminal Boredom, this engrossing first collection of short stories by Izumi Suzuki to appear in English translation. Given how prescient and succinct these tales are, it is surprising that they have taken this long to become available in English. With their worlds full of disillusionment and disaffection, youth unemployment and apathy, they will certainly strike a chord for modern readers interested in the emotional and societal effects of late capitalism, along with fans of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

In Japan, Suzuki is better known; there is even a novel (Endless Waltz by Mayumi Inaba, 1992) and a film (Koji Wakamatsu’s 1995 adaptation Endless Waltz) about the relationship between her and her jazz-musician husband, Kaoru Abe (Suzuki’s daughter sued over invasion of privacy at the book’s release, so read and watch as your conscience dictates). Suzuki, born in 1949, had a varied career, working as a key-punch operator, bar hostess, model, and actress, finding success as a writer before committing suicide in 1986, eight years after her then newly ex-husband had died of a drug overdose. These biographical details suggest that she understood intimately the sometimes hapless jobs, dependencies, and loneliness of the characters she depicts.

The scenarios constructed in the collections’ seven stories are varied enough to maintain interest, while the themes of apathy and detachment bind them together. “Women and Women” (tr. Daniel Joseph) describes a world plagued by resource scarcity in which men have been carved out of society and sent to a cunningly translated “Gender Exclusion Terminal Occupancy Zone” (GETO for short). This society is controlled through a sort of Orwellian erasure of history, and maintained by the complicity of the vast majority of its female inhabitants. Although the same-sex relationships are cast sympathetically, and, indeed, androgyny seems to be idolized throughout the collection, the story seems ultimately to condemn this ghettoized, vapid world. There does, however, remain a degree of ambivalence. The narrator soon comes across an escaped boy and “learn[s] the unexpected, dreadful truth about human life” before discovering that her mother was disappeared because she had fallen in love with a man and conceived naturally; in the end, though, our protagonist opts back into ‘normal’ life:

When I returned to my room, I noticed that my anguish was almost entirely gone. Women and women. Just as it should be. (. . .)

And yet . . . I put the pen down again before I was done. Now that I know about that thing, how can I ever be happy? To doubt this world is a crime. Everyone but everyone believes implicitly in this world, in this reality. I and I alone (well, probably not) know the great secret of this existence, and I’ll have to live out the rest of my life keeping it at all costs.

Right now, I have no intention of sacrificing my life for some underground resistance movement. But who knows, it might come to that someday.

The reader cannot, however, help but feel that it never will. READ MORE…

Anger, Sorrow, Compassion: On Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy

April 1, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Strange that to learn about one’s life, it is not sufficient to only live; one must also wander the halls of the past.

The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen, translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

When I was a young girl, when beginnings were pure and brute in their unknowing, my mother ruled alone over the great realm of truths. There was the education in sensual matters (the fragrance of her unfettered in the mornings, porcelain spoons filled to overflow) and the introduction of worldly wonders (mittens, pinwheels, rock sugar), but mostly she was the insistence of one, axiomatic certainty: no one will ever love you the way I love you. She said it often, matter-of-factly, without any cadence of sentiment or tenderness, to comfort just as well to condemn—no one will ever love you the way your mama loves you. This line never wavered. It never tarnished. And it has stayed with me my whole life.

The memoir can be a baffling genre, and the writer’s memoir most of all. One spends their whole life under the thrall of converting subjectivity into objectivity, studying the essence of things and their multiplicity, studying the losing journey living matters embark on in order to arrive at the page—at the culmination of such a discursive, cognitive, and all-bearing life, what is left for the private language to make public?

“a whole person / is too much to take,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in her ninth volume of poems, Det runde vaerelse. Yet in her memoir, The Copenhagen Trilogy, she still commands the facts of her life with that same prolific, torrential force that has sprawled through dozens of texts, telling of madness and poverty and femininity in the various violences they enact upon a single body, all in a fastidious discernment of what can be made material by ink and paper. In the reading of this monument to a life of letters, one is left with the sense that yes—a whole person is too much to take, in the way that anything, forced to be seen with such unimpeded clarity, is.

To tell the story of a life, there is always the light shone into the intimate, unthinking crevices of origin. Before Tove Ditlevsen was a woman, she was a daughter. The excavation of memory is a conscious act; some things may rise to the surface in gasps and startles, but in Childhood—the first act of the trilogy—the author is herself grasping the glimmers of what can be told to make sense of the now. In the way of Hayden White, who said, “What is at stake is not, ‘What are the facts?’ but rather, how are the facts to be described in order to sanction one mode of explaining them rather than another.” The first fact then, is that there was a girl, and there was her mother. It is the people who know you from your first moments who hand you the legends by which the world can be deciphered, and this, as Ditlevsen goes on to tell, is the making of a tragedy. READ MORE…

Chile’s Millennial Revolution: Bruno Lloret’s Nancy Faces Forward

March 24, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

The novel heralds a vanguard in Chilean letters and, despite its local roots, belongs to a burgeoning international literature of shared crises.

Nancy by Bruno Lloret, translated from Spanish by Ellen Jones, Two Lines Press, 2021

Death haunts the pages of Nancy, Chilean author Bruno Lloret’s 2015 debut. When we meet her, the eponymous heroine is dying of cancer, a painful end to a painful life. The novel—structured as a series of recollections with verses from the Old Testament prefacing most chapters—is written sparely, subdued in tone if not in depth of feeling. Scattered across each page are bold X’s, a mark of punctuation that carries more weight than the period. They don’t impair comprehension of the narrative but rather cast a subtle shadow, calling to mind a graveyard of nameless crosses, or marks on a map—death as the ultimate destination. The first and final pages of the novel feature these marks in a half-hourglass and hourglass pattern, and the shape of each individual X, as they stalk the story and linger between thoughts, echoes the notion of convergence and divergence, time left and time lost. (For a sense of how the marks function in the text, read an excerpt of Nancy in Words Without Borders.)

For Nancy, the point of convergence—the moment of irretrievable loss from which everything then diverges—is when her brother goes missing. Nancy’s childhood in northern Chile, in a coastal town between the desert and the sea, has not been happy. Her mother resents her existence, and Nancy’s girlhood becomes carefully choreographed to avoid inevitable blame and brutal abuse. Her older brother, Pato, is an ally, a friend, a “superhero.” When Nancy turns fourteen, he leaves home to find work at the port in a nearby city. Two years later, he disappears outside a nightclub.

Nancy’s troubles neither begin nor end with Pato’s disappearance, but the family’s grief and misery seem to radiate from this point. The loss doesn’t have the finality of death, and Nancy and her parents find various ways to cope with the pain of knowing he’s gone, but not knowing where. Her mom flees to the port city, ostensibly to look for Pato, and finds instead a way out of her old life and into an abusive relationship. Back in Ch, Nancy and her dad quietly care for each other, Nancy assuming the role of homemaker while her dad works. When he eventually loses his job, he finds solace in Mormonism as the life he built collapses around him—and Nancy.

Nancy heralds a future-facing vanguard in Chilean letters (the novel is set a few years in the future, and Lloret doesn’t overtly grapple with the legacy of Chile’s dictatorship) and, despite its deep local roots, belongs to a burgeoning international literature of shared crises. Born in 1990, Lloret belongs to a generation that must confront rampant environmental destruction and the climate crisis, and contemporary fiction has increasingly taken on apocalyptic motifs. (See, for example, Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance, which takes place during a society-shattering pandemic.) Nancy is not an apocalypse novel, but the environment characterizes the narrative to a striking extent in this story of one northern Chilean woman’s life. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: March 2021

March 15, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alice Banks, Carol Khoury, Maddy Robinson, and Rachel Farmer

The best in world literature from Iceland, Palestine, Algeria, and Japan!

This month, our selection of excellent new publications are representative of literature’s capacity for translating worldly phenomenon into language, converting the lived into the understood. From Iceland, a passionate and intimate call to response on the tragedies of environmental destruction; from Palestine, a monumental work of love and resistance from “the Virginia Woolf of Palestine,” Sahar Kalifeh; from Algeria, a sensual novel that treads the tenuous territory of colonialism’s aftereffects; and from Japan, the English-language debut of Akutagawa-winner Kikuko Tsumura, who with graceful humour and intrigue tackles the toxic concept of labour in the thrive of capitalism.  

on time and water

On Time and Water by Andri Snær Magnason, translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith, Open Letter, 2021

Review by Rachel Farmer, Chief Executive Assistant

When Greta Thunberg addressed the UN Climate Summit in September 2019, she choked back tears as she uttered the now infamous words: “How dare you?” Reactions to this display of emotion were mixed to say the least. Some showed discomfort, others concern for her wellbeing; some dismissed her outburst as manipulative, others ridiculed her. Her face and words were even immortalised in meme format. In displaying her anguish and rage so plainly, Thunberg violated the unspoken rule that seems to underpin much of the communication and discussion around climate change, wherein impassivity, stoicism, and detachment reign supreme.

In On Time and Water—part memoir, part interview, part impassioned treatise on the future of our planet—Andri Snær Magnason follows the young Swedish activist’s example, casting aside convention and delving into the emotional side of the climate crisis. In doing so, he embarks on a deeply humane and vulnerable exploration of what manmade climate change truly means for the planet—and for us. In this compelling hybrid of a book, translated sensitively by Lytton Smith, he explains how, a few years ago, he was called upon to defend a region in his country’s highlands from being destroyed in the name of energy production. Despite his deep admiration for the spiritual fervour with which Helgi Valtýsson, another Icelandic writer, wrote about the region in 1945, Magnason found himself unable to infuse the same passion into his defence. Bringing emotions into the discussion would have risked his arguments being dismissed as hysterical, doommongering, or hopelessly idealistic.

I’d found myself overwhelmed by melancholy at the unruly devastation that washed out this peerless region, yet I chose words that seemed moderate and inviting to readers. I used the prevailing language of liberalism, innovation, utilitarianism, and marketing. I discussed the area’s importance for Iceland’s image, its potential tourist income, the area’s research value, how the highlands were a magnet for foreign currency as a filming location for movies or commercials. [. . .] We live in times when money is the measure of reality. I couldn’t argue nature’s right to exist, its essential value, by saying that we might find God’s all-encompassing expanse there. READ MORE…

The “Untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini’s English-Language Debut

March 8, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Paul Holzman

Lamborghini is all wild and free in his work, and Sequiera corrals it, grounds it.

Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira, Sublunary Editions, 2021

The subject of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s impact on Argentine Literature summons a polarity of responses. The late Leopoldo Marechal, commenting on Lamborghini’s seminal El Fiord, said: “It’s perfect. A sphere. Shame it’s a sphere of shit.” On the contrary, César Aira, Lamborghini’s mentor/curator of sorts, extrapolates his singularity—claiming his work to be unparalleled. Academics of the greatest rigor and other heavyweights of the contemporary Latin American literati—such as Tamara Kamenszain and Roberto Bolaño—have unfettered their comments on the writing of Lamborghini as well: the former finding the need to unabatedly analyze, theorize, and deconstruct the dialectic around Lamborghini’s work, and the latter encouraging the reader to enter with caution. With so much contention surrounding his oeuvre, taking on the task of translating any of Lamborghini’s work is a mighty—even ominous—task. It therefore comes to no surprise that a print translation into the English has taken a relatively long time to reach our hands, but it has arrived: Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, by the intrepid hand of translator Jessica Sequeira.

The written word, for Lamborghini, permeates the conscious with a concise and potent mechanism, boggling the minds of readers with an intelligently savage use of syntax, punctuation, and orthography. I first encountered his antics in El Fiord, his first publication. After quickly scrapping my thesaurus and dictionary, I stumbled between aversion and infatuation, rummaging through a labyrinth of blogs and academic databases for explanations and makeshift guides to the text. After a few years of indulging in the somewhat toxic relationship of attempting to translate El Fiord into English, my notes revealed that a great many elements of his writing transcend conventional translation approaches and decisions, culminating in ever more possibilities for the text. Thus, translation is an important tool for engaging the multifarious nature of Lamborghini’s work, and Two Stories demonstrates that the act of translation proves to be a helpful light while shadowboxing what some call the “untranslatable” Osvaldo Lamborghini.

It is not only Lamborghini’s quirky punctuation and witty syntax that deems his work untranslatable; the challenge lies within his deep plunge into Argentine history, politics, literature, popular culture, and identity at large. Two Stories is no exception. Each story is meticulously laced with gaucho and contemporary slang—not to mention the author’s own neologisms. Jessica Sequiera is to be commended, then, for a translation that does not break or loosen the tensions Lamborghini creates with the aforementioned layers embedded in his work, setting the state for the Anglophone community to consider how Lamborghini has set himself apart, breaking from the established literary scene. READ MORE…

Twenty Poems and Two Women: Kathrin Schmidt and Sue Vickerman

March 4, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Andreea Scridon

Schmidt is determined to use the most searing images to jolt the reader into the reality she has been forced to live in.

Twenty Poems by Kathrin Schmidt, translated from the German by Sue Vickerman, Arc Publications, 2020

Born in the former GDR and now of Berlin, Kathrin Schmidt is a renowned poet and novelist. Notorious in her native Germany as a competitor of Herta Müller (since beating the celebrated writer for the 2009 German Book Prize), she is a strong and serious voice of what translator Sue Vickerman terms “the left-behind east.” Schmidt, who has worked as an editor and a child psychologist, has published six poetry books and five volumes of fiction in German. A versatile author whose own interior and external experience stands at the base of her writings, Schmidt continually broaches contemporary topics, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to migration in the era of the internet, with relentless perspicacity and humor.

An excellent translator doesn’t necessarily have to be a writer, but when an exceptional translator is an exceptional writer in his or her own right, as is the case with poet-translator Sue Vickerman, the experiment takes on a new aura, advancing transcultural dialogue and culture itself. In her introduction to Kathrin Schmidt: Twenty Poems (the author’s first collection in English), Vickerman draws the reader into her own personal experience of translating Schmidt, a project she completed with obsessive attention to detail and superhuman dedication.

READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo

February 25, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

In the Company of Men beautifully articulates the tensions between old and new ways of existing.

Illness as subject is a challenge to writers not only for its dense manifestations and distinct physical consequences, but also for its realization of the physical body within the interconnected terrain of politics, relationships, and community. Originally published in 2017, Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men takes as its subject the West African Ebola epidemic, choreographing a motley of voices in a humanizing portrait of how disease can define and obliterate boundaries both known and unseen. Instead of rendering the epidemic into metaphor, Tadjo realizes its immediate and tangible presence in our lives.

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

In the Company of Men by Véronique Tadjo, translated from the French by the author, Other Press, 2021

Côte d´Ivoire, where Véronique Tadjo grew up, borders two of the three West African nations that suffered the 2014–16 Ebola outbreak. She wasn’t there at the time; she had finished a teaching position in South Africa and began to share her time between London and Abidjan. Tadjo is a chameleon of an artist. She works across genres, speaks various languages, and traverses cultures. At once fact and fiction, myth and reportage, the novel meets this contemporary moment in which borders and boundaries can feel like anachronistic global millstones and “some lives seem as worthless and irrelevant as the bruised fruit left over at the end of a market day.” Her amoebic narrative voice, both one and many, recounts the horrors of the epidemic and its aftermath, singing an ominous warning and calling for a modernized version of our lost solidarity cultures.

Many comparisons come to mind in describing the narration of In the Company of Men, which she recently self-translated from the 2017 French edition: a Greek chorus that guides the reader’s emotional responses, invoking the primordial without entangling itself in the individual; a spirit that possesses one after another; a mycelium with distinct fruiting bodies. We hear from, to name just a few, a Baobab tree, a gravedigger, an NGO volunteer, a woman who adopts an Ebola orphan, a researcher, a bat, and the virus itself. Though the writing inhabits so many different bodies, the voice still feels somehow cohesive, characterized by lyricism and gore, anger and compassion, helplessness and resilience. It rails and it soothes. The gravedigger reports quite literally, “The path ahead of us has been doused with chlorine,” and his words resonate with accounts from other narrators. Disinfectant becomes the flashlight that precedes each step in the dark and unfamiliar wood of the epidemic, the loitering of its scent paralleling most of our own accounts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other features of the metaphorical wood include dangerous rumors. A medic laments, “the President of the Republic had supposedly paid the large sums of money to reduce the local population and thus get rid of the poor. Ebola, they said, didn’t exist.” It is populated by ghosts of the hastily laid to rest: “Actually, they’re lost souls, reluctant to leave the earth, hoping we’ll help them to return.” Resonance between the novel’s narrators replicates the resonance between them and the readers, reinforcing themes of interconnectedness and appeals to solidarity.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: February 2021

February 22, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Andrea Blatz, Darren Huang, and Thuy Dinh

Please join us in celebrating three new translations this month from Russia, Mozambique, and Spain!

Amongst the great gifts that translation brings us is an awareness to the alternation and variegations of perspective, informed by ever-shifting factors of fact, selfhood, relationships, and hearsay alike. In this month’s roundup of excellence in world literature, our selection of texts brings expansive voices to light in exquisite explorations in what it means to remember, comprehend, and believe: a luminous text on family history from Maria Stepanova, the reimaginings of folktales by Mia Couto, and a deft fiction on self-deceptions by Sònia Hernández. 

in memory of memory

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale, New Directions, 2021

 Review by Darren Huang, Editor-at-Large for Taiwan

In W.G. Sebald’s final novel Austerlitz, the protagonist Jacques Austerlitz—an art historian who arrived in Britain as an infant refugee from Czechoslovakia in the Kindertransport—searches for the fate of his parents, who were displaced and lost amidst the Holocaust and the Second World War. The novel is a poetic and digressive excavation of family history through the innovative hybrid of photography, travelogue, history, art criticism, and fiction, as well as a meditation on the horrors of the twentieth century, the unreliability of memory and memorialization, and the weight of the past on the present. This unique, peripatetic narrative method of ruminating over the past, which Sebald described as “documentary fiction,” is adapted by the highly acclaimed Russian novelist, poet, and essayist Maria Stepanova in her autofictional, essayistic memoir, In Memory of Memory, elegantly translated by Sasha Dugdale for New Directions. Like Sebald, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in her multi-genre novel Dictee, Stepanova adopts an oblique, multifaceted approach towards her central project of assembling a family history dating from the late nineteenth century. She lodges memoir like a puzzle box within cultural commentary, historical documents from her ancestors, philosophical discourse, and literary criticism; the result is a densely textured memoir-in-fragments that is alive to the limitations of its project—the lack of historical evidence, the inaccuracies in memory, the fraught relationship between the storyteller and her subjects, and the inevitable incompleteness of the family narrative.

The text is deliberately structured into three distinct portions: the first two sections alternate between cultural criticism, personal anecdotes, and historical documents. Certain “chapters,” wryly entitled “Not a Chapter,” are entirely composed of letters from her forbears, including her maternal great-grandparents, Sarra Ginzburg and Mikhail Fridman, her maternal grandparents, Lyolya and Lyonya, and her paternal grandparents, Nikolai Stepanov and Dora Stepanova, among others. The letters, chronologically arranged from 1942 to 1985, offer intimate glimpses into the personal lives of Stepanova’s family, and serve additionally as pieces of cultural history. They are redolent of a particular place and time, evoking what Stepanova calls “a feeling for the age.” Each epistolary “chapter” is accompanied by minimal context or commentary and separated from each other by essayistic inquiries into memory—ranging from such subjects as the photograph, Charlotte Salomon and her epic novel Life? Or Theatre?, Sebald and his writings on history, and the memory boxes of Joseph Cornell. In the first two sections of the text, this digressive arrangement interrupts the family narrative so that it only appears in decontextualized fragments. The effect of this bifurcated structure is that the family narrative remains mostly unexplored until the end of the second section and the third section, which consist of more conventional biographical accounts of family members. Stepanova’s delay in directly grappling with both her personal and family history reflects her anxieties about writing on the past. For example, she cites Marianne Hirsch’s concern that inserting archival photographic images might de- or re-contextualize them and distort their original realities. Therefore, the sections of cultural criticism represent the author’s hesitant, fitful attempts at approaching the past, which she finally accesses in the final third of the novel. In these critical chapters, Stepanova admits to “picking through different approaches to the past, as one might pick through dried peas, in search of one that might work.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our January Book Club Selection: My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky

January 27, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla

My Grandmother’s Braid . . . takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level.

The intricate latticing of a family’s dysfunctions can provide ample material for any writer, but that is no indication that the material is easy to render in its full complexity. In our Book Club selection for January, however, we are proud to present a text that explores the peculiarities of familial relations to tremendous result. My Grandmother’s Braid, written by acclaimed author Alina Bronsky, tackles the subject(s) with equal parts biting wit and generous compassion, culminating in a subtly sensitive portrait of what happens behind the closed doors of households, and the closed minds of our loved ones. 

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

My Grandmother’s Braid by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr, Europa Editions, 2021

Over the years, I have grown weary of that infamous Tolstoy adage that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mostly because it seems to me that the sources of our unhappiness tend to be often so ordinary (and thus far more common that we’d like to admit); evil can lack imagination, and even the worst of pains can soon turn into dull aches as we get used to almost everything. Dysfunctional families, however, are another story, and the family at the center of Alina Bronsky’s My Grandmother’s Braid, translated by Tim Mohr, takes the idea of dysfunctional to a whole new level. Despite its relative slimness, this book takes the reader on a journey with so many twists and turns that I kept staring at the pages in disbelief.

At the age of six, our narrator Max immigrates from the Soviet Union to Germany with his maternal grandparents, taking shelter in a refugee home. The verb “immigrate” is technically correct, although there is a sense that Max and his grandfather, Tschingis, didn’t immigrate as much as they were dragged to the unnamed German town where the story takes place by Max’s grandmother, Margarita Ivanova, or Margo.

Margo is the driving force behind this story and almost everything that happens in Max’s life (and not only Max’s). Worried that Max’s health is too precarious for Russia, she exploits the family’s threadbare Jewish heritage to gain refugee status. Once in Germany, she seems to suffer from what can potentially be described as Munchausen syndrome by proxy: she is certain that Max is too fragile to live as a normal child would—that he is afflicted by a number of inexplicable maladies. She hauls Max from doctor to doctor, all of whom continually refuse her diagnosis as she grows ever more certain of their incompetence. She feeds Max only steamed vegetables and unseasoned barley and oats and refuses to let him go play with other children. When Max starts first grade, she insists on being seated at the back of his classroom and interrupting his lessons with her often-wrong advice on how to solve his math assignments. The dullness of Max’s school life eventually becomes too much for her, and it is only when Margo grows bored that Max is able to gain a little bit of freedom and agency. And it is here that the narrative begins to speed up, and the years slide by to the point where reader loses track of how much time has passed. READ MORE…

A Postmodern Jouissance: On Douglas Robinson’s Transcreation of Volter Kilpi’s Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia

January 20, 2021  |  in Reviews  |  by Ivan Delazari

Translatory meekness is not for this translator, whose Kilpi speaks so modern by speaking obsolete.

Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia by Volter Kilpi, in a transcreation from the Finnish by Douglas Robinson, Zeta Books, 2020

All reference sources on Volter Kilpi (1874–1939), Finland’s most renowned prose fiction experimentalist from the early twentieth century, will unanimously cite his novel In the Parlour at Alastalo (1933)—with its nine hundred pages conveying just about six hours of story time—as the writer’s main masterpiece. Difficult reading in the original, this modernist tour de force is also deemed untranslatable, with only a Swedish version available to a non-Finnish audience. As a result, Kilpi’s fame does not traverse lingual borders easily, and his reputation as James Joyce’s literary peer is established by proxy: most of us would just take a Finnish professor’s word for it. The arrival of Douglas Robinson’s English “transcreation” of Kilpi’s posthumously published last novel, Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia (1944), indicates a seminal challenge to this status quo.

The original Kilpi novel pretends to be the Finnish-language publication of an English manuscript that a Finnish librarian (presumably, Kilpi himself) happens to discover among old manuscripts in stock, “caked with dust.” It turns out to be Lemuel Gulliver’s own account of the fifth round of his exciting travels, which Kilpi “translates” for his local readership’s convenience. Kilpi began working on the novel in 1938 and wrote twenty-five chapters before suffering a debilitating stroke, but articulated an approximation of his plans for the remainder. Taking up this playful design of a sequel to Jonathan Swift’s 1727 classic, Robinson then develops and intensifies it: not only does he translate the Kilpi text into a stylized version of Swiftian English, with eighteenth century spellings and phrasings to make it resemble the “original” Gulliver manuscript, but he also supplies it with a bunch of metafictional “Introductory Texts” and an ending—another seventeen chapters, an intratextual sequel to Kilpi’s intertextual one. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: January 2021

January 11, 2021  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ah-reum Han, Sabrina Parker Greene, and Shawn Hoo

The latest in literature from South Korea, Italy, and The Netherlands!

Amidst the uncertainty of what the new year will bring, one surety is that wonderful literature remains to be discovered. In our first selections of new translations for 2021, there is a masterclass in historical fiction about a chess champion whose awe-inspiring trajectory was regrettably tainted with prevailing prejudice; a Dutch memoir that reconciles public and private definitions of sexuality, personhood, and recognition; and a Korean novel that beautifully illustrates that median pain between a love of life and an acknowledgement of its ephemerality. Read on to uncover their discrete and distinct gifts!

kim

My Brilliant Life by Ae-ran Kim, translated from the Korean by Chi-young Kim, Forge Books, 2021

 Review by Ah-reum Han, WoW Editor

Meet Areum Han, the sixteen-year-old boy with a rapid-aging genetic disorder that is at the palpitating heart of Kim Ae-ran’s bestselling novel, My Brilliant Life, translated by Chi-young Kim. “This is the story of the youngest parents with the oldest child,” writes young Areum, in the prologue to his own story. Readers learn some simple truths about Areum from the get-go: he has an uncanny way with words, he loves his parents deeply, and he doesn’t have much time left. But don’t be fooled; this story is not about the sick, nor is it about overcoming suffering. This quirky, bighearted book crackles with life on every page.

My Brilliant Life is a bildungsroman in fast-forward. We enter Areum’s life on the cusp of his final act—and, incidentally, at the age that his own young parents had him. What ensues is a tale that is tender and funny, startling and sad. He writes about his condition:

People say it’s a miracle that I’ve lived this long. I think so, too; not very many people in my situation have lived past their sixteenth birthdays. But I believe that the larger miracle exists in the ordinary, in the living of an ordinary life and dying at an ordinary age. To me the miracles are my parents, my aunts and uncles, our next-door neighbors, the middle of summer and the middle of winter. I’m no miracle.

We become familiar with this enviable “ordinary” through Areum’s watchful eyes, meeting his father, Daesu, who is equal parts foolhardy and brash but with a boyish charm, and Mira, his proud, sharp-tongued, and fiercely protective mother. We see how they each grieve privately and publicly; how they fight, curse, and joke; how they keep secrets to be kind. We watch their simple moments of ordinary miracles: eating shaved ice together, or laying on the living room floor with face masks on.

With Areum’s growing medical expenses, Daesu and Mira struggle to make ends meet, and reluctantly agree to let Areum go on a television show. Through this national exposure, Areum has new encounters with the ordinary. For one, he meets Seoha, a seeming kindred spirit and young girl who reaches out to him after seeing him on the show. Their email exchanges soon bloom into something more—the thrill of first love, tempered with the gravity of impending loss. As Areum’s circumstances quickly unravel, we ache for him to be a teenager with teenage-sized problems. We wish him the mistakes and failures, the freedom to pout and sulk.

In all this, Daesu and Mira do what they can to give Areum a normal life, and Areum knows it. This stereo vision—Areum’s awareness of his parents’ struggles and their lives both before and beyond his own—shows us how Daesu and Mira were also unceremoniously thrust into adulthood. My Brilliant Life is a coming of age tale, not just for Areum, but also for his parents, whose stories bookend his. This is a story that is very aware of its own symmetry: the two unlikely seventeen-year-olds who became parents; their child destined never to outlive them; and the stirrings of a newborn as their first slips away. The story folds into neat patterns that amplify life’s indifferent poetry. READ MORE…

Announcing our December Book Club Selection: Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli

January 4, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

Dissipatio H.G. is . . . an opportunity to unspool our own reaction to the loss of mankind—and perhaps find in it an unexpected sympathy.

Quietly, almost as if afraid to disturb, a new year has made its way into the world. The recession of 2020 into the distance of the past presents an opportunity to not only evaluate the changed world, but also to contemplate our responsibilities in readjusting, amending, and moving on. In a fitting selection, our last Book Club title of 2020 is Guido Morselli’s acclaimed novel, Dissipatio H.G., a text that reconciles the stark realities of mourning with poignant examinations of presence in and amidst so much absence. It is a rare feeling that has somehow, incredibly, become common: What is one to do upon waking up to an unrecognizable world? 

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, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli, translated from the Italian by Frederika Randall, New York Review Books Classics, 2020

Near the outset of Guido Morselli’s short and surreal 1977 novel, Dissipatio H.G., the unnamed narrator sits in a cave at the edge of a steep drop into an underground lake, getting up the nerve to end it all. Meanwhile, down in the valley, in the invented, industrious city of Chrysopolis, the economy booms, not unlike the growth Morselli observed in post-war Italy. Leery of society’s so-called progress, the narrator has retreated to an isolated property in the mountains—but even that is threatened; he’s pushed to the lip of nonexistence when he finds a cluster of numbered stakes in the ground “a couple of hundred paces from my mountain retreat.” After a fever and a frantic investigation, he uncovers that a company plans to build a highway there, complete with entrance ramps, a cloverleaf, and a motel. “As Durkheim might say,” the narrator reflects, “there’s your trigger.”

In the end, he abandons his plan after contemplating the quality of the Spanish brandy he’s brought along for liquid courage. His body’s physical matter simply refuses to accede to his will; he bangs his head on the way out of the cave, just as a powerful groan of thunder rolls through the valley. “The truth is,” he thinks, “a man who draws back from killing himself does so (and Durkheim didn’t see this) under the illusion that there is a third way, but in fact tertium non datur—there is no third possibility: it’s either a leap into the siphon or a dive back into daily life, where the rhythm of everything has stayed exactly as it was and you must hasten to make up for the progress lost.”

But when he returns from the cave, the narrator discovers an entirely unexpected third possibility: while he has chosen to live, the human race has vanished. He inspects the newsroom where he once worked as a journalist, placing calls across Europe and across the Atlantic to determine that for all functional purposes, he is the last man alive. “I’m now Mankind,” he says. “I’m Society (with the capital M and the capital S).” He is, he says, “Incarnation of the epilogue.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: December 2020

December 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden, MARGENTO, and Sarah Moore

The latest in literature from Spain, Romania, and France!

Our final selections in excellent translations for the year of 2020 are fittingly full of thought. Throughout these texts, one finds the endless potential roadmaps that chart out from the individual mind’s interrogation and contemplation of their surroundings, and one’s own place within them. From a wandering mind, everything is a pool for endless reflection; a Catalan collection draws from the sea, a Romanian notebook is filled with musings and defiances of authorship, and a French diary novel tells the lives of many through the life of one. 

salt water

Salt Water by Josep Pla, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Archipelago Books, 2020

Review by Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large for Argentina

On a recent virtual happy hour, my friend described a weekend camping trip on a secluded barrier island off the coast of Georgia, in the southern US. My envy verged on rage as I listened from my living room, which doesn’t get enough natural light. He said that after he and his wife kayaked over and set up their tent (annoying a resident heron in the process), they had done absolutely nothing—not even read. They sat on the shore and watched the sea. It’s easy to believe how that could have been enough.

Josep Pla would understand. In Salt Water, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush and released by Archipelago Books this month, Pla writes that “the mere presence of the sea is enough to sink into the deliquescent bliss of the contemplative life.” His curiosity courses through the book, a series of ten sketches that revolves around the coast of Pla’s native Catalonia: he describes shipwrecks, submarines, and harebrained sailing schemes. He relates stories from a salty, one-handed raconteur and imbues the rambling tales with strikingly lifelike texture. Though his plots unfold on or near the sea, human culture is ever present. Pla revels in detail, describing at length the joy of nearly black coffee on a marginally small boat: “That beverage makes an almost immediate impact: your mind projects itself onto the outside world, you are fascinated by everything around and a gleam comes to your eyes.” This book is a product of that fascinated, caffeinated gaze.

In the preface, Pla describes the stories as writings from his adolescence. In the translator’s note at the end of the book, however, Bush clarifies that they were written in the 1940s and hypothesizes that the preface was a canny attempt to evade censorship. He points out that Pla’s “articles containing veiled critiques of the dictatorship made him the most censored journalist in Spain.” Indeed, his biography offers helpful context for the conflicting claims that bookend the collection.

As a university student a century ago, Pla developed a clear, intelligible writing style and deployed it throughout his career as a journalist. He traveled widely across Europe as a foreign correspondent and served briefly as a member of Parliament for the Commonwealth of Catalonia, a short-lived assembly notable for its symbolic value. Over its eleven years in existence, the Commonwealth promoted Catalonia’s unity and identity, and evinced strong support for the Catalan language—Pla’s language. He became a chronicler of Spain’s tumultuous early twentieth-century history and spent multiple stints in exile. In the 1940s, he took to exploring his native coast and writing dispatches for Destino, a Burgos-based magazine at the forefront of the reemergence of Catalan-language culture. Throughout his peripatetic career, Pla never stopped writing: his complete works, compiled shortly before his death in 1981, stretch over thirty-eight volumes. READ MORE…