Reviews

The Shrouded Force of Fate: Anja Kampmann’s High as the Waters Rise

December 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

High as the Waters Rise fills the great blank canvas of loss with a precision that nourishes the fine contours of emotion.

High as the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann, translated from the German by Anne Posten, Catapult, 2020

In the rich silt into which Titusville, Pennsylvania sinks its foundations, there was only one spot where it was possible to strike oil at the extraordinarily shallow depth of sixty-nine feet. On August 27, 1859, a small group of men, at the last-ditch orders of one Edwin Laurentine Drake, sank their pipes into the ground—guided by that unknown intuition which, in retrospect, looks terribly similar to fate—and black gold flowed forth. It is how the world flows forth from a single life, from one man’s fortune to a new forever, a radically altered world.

The idea of fate, its shrouded force, is perhaps the only abiding salve for the more devastating consequences of self-awareness. We look back on our times to construct an architecture of experiences, arranging fragments by our available logic to see what structure rises from the flood—what materializes in the aftermath to become that one reference by which we can define, or justify, our lives. For some reason, we always urge towards a singular narrative, despite sharing in the overarching suspicion that the life one leads is not one, but always many. The salvaging of this steadfast, solitary lesson is a comfort—that it indeed has all been for something. Without it, there would be only darkness, that eternal torrent, that deafening collapse.

Because Anja Kampmann begins High as the Waters Rise with an ending, we arrive at the temporary space between the shock of happening and the proceedings of salvage. Waclaw and Mátyás are longtime companions working on an oil rig, sharing in a rare and profound intimacy that dissipates the customary subscriptions of male camaraderie. When Mátyás vanishes from the ship in an incident so abrupt and absurd that it seems almost mystical, Waclaw is stirred into a potent, hypnotic grief—a grief that necessitates the sea, the infinity it conjures, which Kampmann calls upon in the vignette that opens the text: “There would only be sea, piling up and up. There would be no north or south. The water would swallow even the cries of the storm, which no ear would hear.” In the midst of these tides—which overwhelm the daily rituals of work, care, and thought—is the solitary island of memories, visions in which Mátyás is frayed at the edges by recall. Only these mirages anchor Waclaw: these small footholds of before, in the vast midnight of after.

READ MORE…

Watered Foxtails: Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk

December 5, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Points of view alternate in Hwang’s brilliantly executed novella nesting story within story—each with the perfect amount of exposition.

Watered Foxtails: A review of Hwang Sok-yong’s At Dusk (tr. Sora Kim-Russell)

Set against the backdrop of South Korea’s rapid rise in the second half of the twentieth century, At Dusk follows the divergent fates of two children from the same slum, Moon Hollow. One (Park Minwoo) manages to fight his way out of poverty; the other (Cha Soona) never leaves it behind. Committed to our current technologized reality, novelist Hwang Sok-yong pieces together his protagonists’ past and present through text messages, phone calls, emails, and video fragments. At one point, pierced with sudden yearning for a childhood the memories of which he has long suppressed, Park even does a Google search of “urban redevelopment.” It is supposed to be a sign of Park’s prominence and success as an architect that such a generic term readily yields photos of his own large-scale residential redevelopment projects that paved the way for South Korea’s ruthless modernization. (Just as compelling if much subtler is the suggestion that Moon Hollow isn’t searchable on the Internet directly by name—so utterly has it been obliterated.) Now, fifty years after he has left Moon Hollow and at the dusk of his life, Park is haunted by what he has bulldozed to get to where he is today.

Points of view alternate in Hwang’s brilliantly executed novella nesting story within story—each with the perfect amount of exposition topped with vivid specificity—and whose translation in Sora Kim-Russell’s poised English was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019. A less imaginative writer would have made Cha narrator along with Park; but, instead of Park’s crush, Hwang arranges for another female character (Jung Woohee) to take the reins of even-numbered chapters. A young struggling artist who barely makes ends meet by working night shifts in a convenience store when not putting up plays, the milieu Jung occupies is worlds away from the other narrator Park’s.

At first, the two narrative strands that make up At Dusk’s rags-to-not-quite-riches story seem unrelated. It’s only when a fourth pivotal character, Black Shirt, a male co-worker, appears in Jung’s life that pieces of the puzzle start to shift into place. READ MORE…

Announcing our November Book Club Selection: At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović

November 30, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

One could spend a pleasant hour wandering inside nearly every evocative sentence of At the Lucky Hand.

As we inch towards the end of a year that has tested in turn the limits of our imagination, the capacities of our patience, and the extent to which we indulge our escapist tendencies, we have been encouraged to examine closely the narratives that perpetuate contemporary existence: narratives that not only exist within the pages of books, but that also thread our day to day, commanded by something as curious as it is unknown. So, in our second-to-last Book Club selection of 2020, we are thrilled to introduce a complex, mysterious, and commandingly beautiful novel by Serbian master Goran Petrović, which inquires into the infinity of literary invention in order to infer how fantasy contributes to reality.

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!

At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers by Goran Petrović, translated from the Serbian by Peter Agnone, Deep Vellum, 2020

Goran Petrović’s At the Lucky Hand, translated from the Serbian by the late Peter Agnone, flatters the sensibilities of those enamored with the written word—within its pages, we become romantic leads and daring detectives. Our quality of “mild presence or mild absence at the same time” becomes a virtue, nearly a superpower, highly valuable to various profiteering types. In fact, the novel is Petrović’s contribution to what might be considered the devastatingly nerdy genre that animates literary theory. And yet, this is only one face of a multifaceted work. Irresistibly engaging and virtuosically crafted, At the Lucky Hand marries high theory with high drama in spaces so quiet and invisible, that their liveliness takes one completely by surprise.

Petrović strikes a winning balance between imaginative extravagance and sober social criticism. Adam Lozanić, a somber, lonely philology student and part-time proofreader, receives a lucrative job offer from a mysterious couple; he must revise a memorial already long out of print. The book, expensively self-published, contains six hundred pages of description with no plot or characters to speak of. Adam and his employers are practitioners of a sort of reading analogous to lucid dreaming, in which they can meet other readers enjoying the same book at the same time and explore the universe of the text in all the richness suggested, not explicated, by the words. The elaborately described estate, imagined by the deceased author in a state of devotion to a love no less real for having never escaped the page, provides a ripe stage. Adam and the few other readers, thrown together by happenstance, fill in the vacuums where conventional literary elements were missing. Love, murder, mystery, power, and ambition electrify places that tremble on the edge of existence and people who, by all appearances, sit in chairs moving nothing but their eyeballs.

Jelena, characterized mainly by her pleasant smell, fervent desire for escape, and careful companionship to an increasingly senile woman, unwittingly enchants the innocent Adam. But they are only the latest lovers to inhabit the home and garden. As the stories of their predecessors unfold, frustrated precisely because of the disjunction between the realities on and off the page, one yearns for Adam and Jelena to reconcile the two. However, the more decidedly a character chooses to exist inside the literary imagination, the more they develop a noble purity outside of it. Adam and Jelena learn what the more seasoned readers already know: that they neither need nor want anything of “real” life. The very food that nourishes them is cooked in fictional kitchens and the money they exchange in long-shuttered shops appears from memories of long-defunct banks. Using nothing, they are useful to no one, and the talismans that give them access to their imaginations are the only means one has to influence them. READ MORE…

The Secret Outside Us: Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day

November 21, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Jae Won Edward Chung

The balance of the surreal, the cerebral, the melancholic, and the grotesque puts Bae’s work in league with Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49

Today, we continue our four-part series on contemporary Korean Literature sponsored by Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Introducing our next title is scholar Jae Won Edward Chung, who last reviewed Yi Sang’s Selected Works (tr. Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney, Sawako Nakayasu, and newly annointed National Book Award winner Don Mee Choi).

The Secret Outside Us: A review of Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day (tr. Deborah Smith)

Ayami, a former actress in her late twenties, works in an audio theater, takes German lessons, and fantasizes about the birth parents she never knew. One day, she has a disturbing encounter with a man loitering outside the theater. When he insists on being let in, their hands briefly meet over the opposite sides of the glass door. Buha is an aspiring middle-aged poet who has never written a poem in his life. He obsesses over a woman poet whose photograph he once saw in a newspaper. He appears to cross paths with her in the same audio theater where Ayami works. Is Ayami the poet? Here, too, their hands overlap without touching. But something is off. The poet woman should be decades older than Ayami. And we know—or think we know—that Ayami is not a poet.

On the surface, Bae Suah’s Untold Night and Day is about alienated city-dwellers stranded in their quest for connection and significance. The novel is filled with creative and intellectual types, most of whom have experienced varying degrees of failure. They discuss theories of photography and obsess about Max Ernst’s objets. Their lifestyle and banter may feel like familiar territory for some readers, but their journey is not without pathos, as we find ourselves in the thrall of the same yearning and fear that grip these artists as their lives unceremoniously pass them by. There are also scenes of levity. In the first section, we’re promised the appearance of a German poet. Seventy pages later, a detective novelist arrives instead, with hopes of taking an inspiring train ride up to Yalu River bordering China (Ayami has to remind him about North Korea).

As the introduction of this detective confirms, Bae is operating within the parameters of the postmodern noir. The balance of the surreal, the cerebral, the melancholic, and the grotesque puts Bae’s work in league with Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2020

November 16, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel, Marina Dora Martino, and Samuel Miller

Our favorite selections for the month, featuring David Diop, Yi Lei, and Pergentino José!

There’s plenty to get excited about in the latest offerings from around the world, bound to satisfy the desires of any reader—from the emotionally visceral, to the patiently curious, to the surreal and the hallucinatory. In scoping for the finest translations, we bring you reviews of anti-colonialist fiction by a Prix Goncourt des Lycéens winner, a new collection from a leading figure of contemporary Chinese poetics, and the first ever literary translation from the Sierra Zapotec into English by a thrilling new voice. 

at night

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020

Review by Lindsay Semel, Assistant Managing Editor

David Diop’s brutal sophomore novel, At Night All Blood Is Black, translated elegantly by Anna Moschovakis, is a relentless indictment of the colonial power structure. Through the utter dissolution of the protagonist, Alfa Ndiaye, the novel demonstrates its ripples and rhizomes throughout society—from the individual to the geopolitical to the environmental—rotting away what does not serve it. Though heavy and dark from beginning to end, this is a highly specific, deftly illustrated, poetically rendered critique that justifies the emotional slog.

Alfa is a chocolat soldier, a Senegalese man who has voluntarily travelled to fight on the side of France in the first World War. During the ensuing battles, Mademba, his childhood friend and “more-than-brother” is disemboweled before his eyes by an enemy soldier. We meet Alfa shortly after he has watched Mademba die slowly, refusing his pleas for mercy. In these scenes of articulate gore and moral anguish, Moschovakis reveals her poetic side in the restraint and somber vivacity with which she renders Diop’s descriptions. Alfa then finds himself in the throes of both deep regret and liberation from the moral conventions which had prevented him from acting in Mademba’s best interest. “No voice rises in my head to forbid me: my ancestors’ voices and my parents’ voices all extinguished themselves the minute I conceived of doing what, finally, I did.” The horror of both bearing witness to and being complicit in the suffering of a loved one silences the voices of morality in his head and marks his entrance into a world of alternate, competing guiding forces: his own tortured impulses and the abstract interests of the narcissistic state. He begins performing solo operations late at night in no-man’s land, disemboweling enemy soldiers and keeping one hand and a weapon from each kill.

A progression that functions on multiple planes expands the novel upwards and outwards from where it remains firmly rooted—in viscera spilled. As time advances and settings shift, Alfa’s psychological state, the narrative mode, the realms of reality, the overarching value system, and the gender coding of these spaces evolve in conjunction. Generally speaking, the trajectory is from the concrete to the abstract, the sober to the unhinged, the current to the eternal, the “real” to the mythological, the individual to the collective, and the masculine to the feminine. Alfa remains our guide, however unreliable, through this uncertain terrain, until his psychological coherence evaporates entirely, leaving the reader stewed in his reflections and testimonies. READ MORE…

Announcing our October Book Club Selection: Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París

November 9, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

[A]n absorbing character study, driven not just by voice . . . but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth.

It is perhaps fitting (though regrettable) that our October Book Club announcement has been somewhat delayed: Daniel Saldaña París’s Ramifications is all about holdups. Via Christina MacSweeney’s seamless translation, the acclaimed Bogotá39 writer gives us a counter-formative tale that is both masterfully constructed and poignantly penned. In it, he exposes existential and political conservatism without dealing cheap blows, and introduces readers everywhere to a profoundly relatable narrative voice.

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!

Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, Coffee House Press, 2020

Ramifications opens with a brilliant gambit; within a handful of paragraphs, it both sets up and crushes the prospect of a bildungsroman. A grown narrator feeds us the near-requisite opening, the painful loss at a much-too-tender age: in 1994 his mother, Teresa, flees their home in Mexico City, leaving ten-year-old him and teenage sister Mariana in the care of an oblivious father. Just a few lines later, though, we get a sharp taste of his current predicament—far from being the seasoned, thriving type mandated by the genre after years of fruitful struggles, he defines himself as “an adult who never leaves his bed.” 

The rest of the novel artfully explores the tension between the classic formative tale and its antithesis. Parts one and two delve into Teresa’s disappearance and her young son’s attempts to make sense of it, culminating in what could have been an archetypal “journey of self-discovery”—he tries to follow her to Chiapas, where she’s run off to join the budding zapatista movement. Part three, by contrast, hones in on the trip’s bland aftermath, both instant and deferred. It’s not as tidy as that, of course (the narrator jumps back and forth in time), but there’s an overarchingly grim shift from promise to flop. It’s made all the starker by a series of deliciously clever winks from the author: the protagonist’s childhood neighborhood and school are literally called “Education” (“Educación” and “Paideia,” respectively), and he’s thirty-three at the time of writing—an age that, for culturally Catholic audiences at least, can’t help but trigger unfavorable comparisons.

A disclaimer, lest readers think I’ve spoiled the plot: the novel doesn’t ride on events. It is, at its core, an absorbing character study, driven not just by voice (more on that later) but by a deeply original theme: (a)symmetry as a curb on growth. READ MORE…

Paranoid Wonder: A review of Yi Sang’s Selected Works

October 31, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Jae Won Edward Chung

In this second installment of a series on Korean literature, we look at an important new anthology collecting cult author Yi Sang’s work

Paranoid Wonder: A review of Yi Sang’s Selected Works (tr. Don Mee Choi, Jack Jung, Joyelle McSweeney, and Sawako Nakayasu)

Paranoid. Labyrinthine. Uncanny. Secretive. This is how a Korean literature enthusiast might describe the works of Yi Sang (1910-1937) before words eventually fail them. They might then offer up details of his life: that Yi lived during the Japanese occupation, that he trained as an architect, that his pen name sounds like Korean for strange or ideal, that he succumbed to tuberculosis in Tokyo after a period of incarceration for the crime of being futei senjin–a “lawless Korean.” When you hear about Yi Sang for the first time, there is something intoxicating about the reverential air, the residual awe, the mourning over what might have been. Everyone mentions how he died so young.

With the release of Yi Sang: Selected Works (Wave Books, 2020), English-language readers can chart their own journeys of paranoid wonder. The volume boasts over 200 pages of translated poetry, essays, and fiction, organized into four sections. Jack Jung tackles the Korean-language poems and essays; Sawako Nakayasu covers the Japanese language poetry; Don Mee Choi and Joyelle McSweeney collaborate over his fiction. But there is more to this division of labor than boundaries of language and genre. The volume includes essays from the translators, who speak in voices at once scholarly and personal, urgent and elegiac.

Selected Works acts as a sourcebook of images too, crucial for appreciating Yi Sang who was also a talented illustrator and artist. Much would be lost if we did not take into account the visual dimensions of his work, the unsettling emotions they were meant to evoke. Below are reproductions of “Crow’s Eye View” Poems No. 1 and No. 4, originally published in Chosun Central Daily in 1934:

poem1

Poem No. 1

 

For twenty-first century readers accustomed to eye-popping colors and sleek lines, the prickly black script and claustrophobic spacing may induce dread or ghoulish foreboding. Even if we can’t read the scripts in the original, we may detect lines of relentless repetition moving from right to left. We may in fact discern something presciently code-like, resembling the glittering digital rain in The Matrix. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2020

October 12, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Barbara Halla, George MacBeth, Georgina Fooks, and Jacqueline Leung

The best new writing from Norway, Argentina, Japan, and Colombia!

In the shorter brightnesses of autumn, we bring you four sublime new translations from around the world to fill your days with their generous offerings of fantasy, mysticism, intrigue, depth, and good old excellent writing. From a radical, genre-defying text that blends the textual and the cinematic, to an Argentine novel that expertly wields dream logic, to lauded Japanese writer Hiroko Oyamada’s latest release, to the first ever volume of poetry from a Colombian woman to be published in English, we’ve got the expert guide to your next literary excursions.

girls

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval, translated from the Norwegian by Marjam Idriss, Verso, 2020

Review by George MacBeth, Copy Editor

Unlike musicians, who often hear the same refrains sung back to them in crowds from Norway to Nizhny-Novgorod to Nottingham, writers can become disconnected from their corpus through the process of translation, often finding new markets and new readers for their early novels well into the mature phase of their authorship. Sometimes these multiple lives run in parallel, but more often than not, they’re discontinuous. Translated authors therefore begin to live out-of-sync with their work, jet-lagged as their oeuvre moves in transit across borders and between languages. This much is true of Jenny Hval, whose celebrated debut novella Paradise Rot was translated into English by Marjam Idriss in 2018, nine years after it was originally published in Norway. Now comes its highly anticipated successor Girls Without God, again translated from the Norwegian by Idriss.

Though mainly known for her eponymous musical output, comprising five studio albums and multiple collaborations (all in English), Jenny Hval originally studied creative writing in Melbourne and then in the Midwest, an experience of deracination (she originally hails from a small town in the south of Norway) that became the template for Paradise Rot. This book was a compost heap of bildungsroman, fantasy, horror, and queer love story—a peculiar, taut dreamwork that left residual stains in this reader’s memory. Its success lay in its distillation of a very particular ambience, the same oneiric mood conjured up by Hval’s music at its best (as on 2015’s Apocalypse, Girl): a dank warehouse filled with rotting fruit, sprouting mushrooms, and trashy novels; the estrangement of the Anglosphere’s soft food; the paradisical claustrophobia of a sudden and intense intimacy.

As Hval expressed in a discussion with Laura Snapes at the LRB bookshop in London, writing (rather than lyricism, or music) was her original aspiration—not so much because she felt she had any particular aptitude for it, but that, unlike the technological or instrumental expertise demanded by music, “it was unskilled. I could just do it.” This DIY ethos clearly informs the ambitious Girls Against God (whose title is itself drawn from a CocoRosie zine), which works over its themes in the same transgressive, intermedial groove as authors like Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, and, more recently, Jarett Kobek’s invective “bad novel” I Hate the Internet. For this reason, the novel deliberately resists a simple synopsis. An unnamed narrator, who in many respects resembles Hval, is back in Oslo after a spell abroad, working on a film treatment that will channel the provincial hatred of her rebellious adolescence, the legacy of early Black Metal’s irruption against Norwegian petit-bourgeois society, and the desire of “Girls Against God” to sustain their rebellion against the heteronormative “Scandinavian reproduction blueprint” even when “our corpse paint has long since run from our cheeks.” Whilst working on her filmscript, she documents the formation of a sort-of witches’ coven with her bandmates, co-conspirators, and weird sisters Venke and Terese, with whom she engages in esoteric rituals and discussions about art, gender, and magic.  READ MORE…

An Existential Gangster Novel: On Un-su Kim’s The Plotters

October 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Darren Huang

Kim’s novel joins recent [work] that offer[s] critiques of South Korean capitalist society and class—most notably Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite.

Prize-winning South Korean writer Un-su Kim was first introduced to English readers in 2019 via The Plotters, a hitman thriller that follows protagonist Reseng, a man raised by his mentor, Old Raccoon, to be an assassin. Comparisons have been made to numerous other gangster works, such as films by Quentin Tarantino and the John Wick series, yet Kim’s take on the genre is compelling and unique. After the death of a close fellow assassin, Reseng begins to question his place in this lucrative yet nihilistic industry, as the novel takes a more existential turn. In this review—the first of four in a series spotlighting Korean fiction in partnership with Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea)—Asymptote editor-at-large Darren Huang explores The Plotters as a political critique of Korean capitalism and considers whether it succeeds in subverting the gangster genre.

The soldierly heroes of literary and cinematic works in the gangster genre are often absorbed and then trapped within rigid political and cultural structures defined by their underworlds. In the 2019 Martin Scorsese film, The Irishman, Frank Sheeran, the hitman protagonist, played by a typically reticent and unsmiling Robert De Niro with his curled lower lip, is initially an outsider but assimilates into the Bufalino crime family by adopting the mobster ethos—cold-bloodedness, discreteness, and above all, unswerving loyalty to his superiors. He never seriously questions the instructions of his boss, even when they involve the killing of a longtime friend and mentor. In Mario Puzo’s crime novel, The Godfather, the tragic hero Michael Corleone at first renounces his family business of organized crime and detaches himself by escaping New York to settle in Italy. A number of incidents (including a car bomb explosion that inadvertently kills his wife and an assassination attempt on his father) compel him to return to New York, where he succeeds his father as head of the family organization. He expands his father’s dynastic empire and rises through ruthlessness and cunning to become the most powerful don in the country. READ MORE…

Announcing our September Book Club Selection: Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui

October 1, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Allison Braden

By immersing us in Jmiaa’s world, Alaoui successfully avoids stereotype.

Humour and courage infuse debut author Meryem Alaoui’s Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, a brazen and lucid portrait of a sex worker who moves through her city of Casablanca with a scrupulous gaze and an aptitude for colourful description. As our Book Club selection for September 2020, the novel enchants with its surprising and exacting prose as equally as with its deft navigation of human experience and emotional spectrums, building a fully populated world that seems to have always been there, waiting for one to visit.  

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!

Straight from the Horse’s Mouth by Meryem Alaoui, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Other Press, 2020

The title of Meryem Alaoui’s debut novel, Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, suggests a direct, candid style—and that’s exactly what we get. Alaoui’s charming and at times profane protagonist, Jmiaa Bent Larbi, shares her harrowing story with unflinching clarity: after being pressured into an early marriage, Jmiaa and her new husband Hamid move to Casablanca, where their lusty honeymoon phase soon gives way to a much more sinister relationship. Hamid sees start-up capital in his young wife’s body and pimps her out to fund his get-rich-quick schemes. The only plot that ends up working out, however, is a passage to Spain, where he finds a new wife and a raft of financial troubles. Jmiaa tells us all about the turns her life takes from there, and Alaoui infuses the seemingly casual narration with careful observations of Moroccan life, tracing the fault lines where the country’s social classes collide.

In Casa, as Jmiaa calls the seaside city, she builds a life among a rich milieu: her fellow sex workers, who tease and joke and squabble like sisters; her young daughter, Samia, who Jmiaa fears will soon unravel the true nature of her work; and her mother, who must grapple with various aspects of her daughter’s unusual life. The women here aren’t sketches or stereotypes, but fully drawn characters with a complex set of motivations and relationships. The men vary in their own way. In one haunting passage, Jmiaa describes those who seek her services:

You straddle all of them. The loser, the frustrated guy, the lonely guy, the son of a whore, the one just passing through.

The one who blames the warmth of your hand for his weak, sterile joy.

And the one for whom no hole satisfies his hatred. Who is not appeased until he hears the ripping sound of a brown and bloody stain.

And the one who pumps his useless sweat into your stomach. He has been cursed never to eat his fill, so he bites your flesh. So that his teeth—today at least—serve some purpose. And in the wheeze of his sulfur breath, he spurts his bitterness onto your cheek and your tangled hair.

It’s no wonder, then, that Jmiaa often loses herself in television. Whether they’re set in Morocco or Mexico, the stories that unfold onscreen offer an escape from the familiar pattern of her days. Like Jmiaa’s drinking habits, her TV binges initially provoke concern, but as the novel progresses, those movies and shows unexpectedly offer a path to a different kind of escape. (At the risk of spoiling the plot, I won’t elaborate.) READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2020

September 14, 2020  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal and Filip Noubel

New work from Taiwan's Amang and Germany's Jenny Erpenbeck!

This month’s selected new translations from around the world cross more than geographic boundaries: the first combines deliciously feral Taiwanese poetry with exclusive, first-hand conversations on the process of writing and translating it; the second features a series of stylistically varied but equally poignant essays on an acclaimed German author’s personal and political journey. Both titles prompt us to peek into their subjects’ fascinating lives and work, and we’re all too happy to indulge.

amang

Raised by Wolves: Poems and Conversations by Amang, translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury, Deep Vellum, 2020

Review by Filip Noubel, Editor-at-Large for Uzbekistan

When I agreed to review Raised by Wolves, I thought I had signed up to read a translation of contemporary Taiwanese poetry. I very quickly realized my mistake: Raised by Wolves is much more than that; it is an invitation to partake in a feast of words that agree to disagree, that clash and dissolve to reemerge in another language. It is also an act of transgressive eavesdropping, as the poet and her translator let readers in on their intimate discussions about their craft (the book’s subtitle is “poems and conversations”).

Amang has published several collections, including On/Off: Selected Poems of Amang, 1995-2002 (2003), No Daddy (2008), Chariots of Women (2016), and As We Embrace Thousands Are Dying (2016). In addition, she is a filmmaker and blogger, and her eclectic interests are clearly reflected in this new translation of her work. A couple of themes, however, seem to be especially prevalent throughout.

First, as the poet discloses (incidentally explaining her collection’s English title), she was raised mostly by her grandmother, who “was quite a character. She was very powerful and courageous. A she-wolf. She would do or say whatever she wanted. None of th[at] Confucian nonsense for her.” In line with this almost feral sentiment, many poems include raw images celebrating nature or the vibrance of the human body. In one, for instance, Amang writes: “Thrusting your hand down a tiger’s throat / to tear out his heart  / so, too, I / cut from a book a sheet of / ice.” And elsewhere: “I can give you anything / . . . / except that puny little stick / they call a prick / and is that worth making a fuss about?” READ MORE…

Of Loneliness and Disillusion: Abdellah Taïa’s A Country for Dying

September 10, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada

While each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. [The novel] draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, Seven Stories, 2020

A Country for Dying is more about atmosphere than plot. It is a brief, taut work that digs deep into the margins of society to demonstrate the many ways in which colonialism pollutes our notions of love and self. Over the course of three parts and six chapters, Abdellah Taïa introduces us to the inner lives of four immigrants in Paris, as they contend with their present realities, the pasts they are trying to flee, and the dreams they still hope to indulge.

Their stories read like monologues, and talk toward each other more than they ever intersect. In this they mimic the characters, who are largely confined to their individual apartments; even the city that holds them all is, in a way, isolating—a refuge that can never quite be home (as a Moroccan living in Paris, Taïa himself writes from a place of exile). Thus, while each narrative voice is unique, they all share a sense of loss. A Country for Dying draws its strength from its haunting air of solitude.

If there’s anything like a connective tissue between the stories, it is Zahira: a forty-year-old Moroccan sex worker who has moved to Paris to escape the trauma of her father’s suicide when she was a girl. She struggles with the guilt of having “abandoned” him when he fell ill and was confined to the second floor of their house. “I didn’t think my father was going to die,” she reflects, “[b]ut I accepted, just like everyone else, that I wouldn’t see him again . . . The weight of his heavy footsteps echoes in my ear.” Grief-stricken, Zahira struggles to rewrite his story and heal her pain. Much of the chapter devoted to it is written in the second person as she addresses her father directly, updating him on his family’s lives after his death; in practice, however, it feels like she is addressing the reader, telling us her story on her own terms, to great emotional effect.

There is a direct through line between Zahira’s trauma and her instinct to take care of Mojtaba, a gay Iranian exile, when she finds him collapsed on the street. Looking after him over Ramadan helps her cope with her father’s death: “He was also tender, sweet, melancholic. That was obvious immediately. Something in him was similar to me, familiar.” For a moment, the quiet intimacy that forms between them brings them the peace they so badly deserve. Their bond never ceases to feel fragile, though, and it is clear that it will not last. READ MORE…

What it Takes to Come Home Again: Nadia Terranova’s Farewell, Ghosts in Review

September 9, 2020  |  in Reviews  |  by Victor Xavier Zarour Zarzar

Terranova [. . .] foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism.

Farewell, Ghosts by Nadia Terranova, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Seven Stories, 2020

Nadia Terranova’s sophomore novel—her first to be published in English—is a carefully crafted meditation on familial ties and the pernicious effects of unprocessed trauma on a woman’s sentimental education. Originally published in 2018, Farewell, Ghosts tells the story of Ida, a thirty-six-year-old woman who lives in Rome and makes a living by writing stories for the radio. One morning in September, she receives a call from her mother, asking her to come home to Messina—a city that Ida has ceased to think of as hers—to help prepare their house for sale. In sorting through the objects of her childhood, Ida will be forced to revisit the trauma that defined her life: the sudden departure of her father when she was thirteen.

Although we are told that Ida’s father, Sebastiano, suffered from severe depression, his disappearance is never explained, nor is it clear if he is still alive. His fate, however, is of little consequence to the novel, which instead lingers with the living—those left behind in the wake of abandonment. Years after the event, Ida’s emotional growth has been stunted by the failure to come to terms with her pain, a failure exacerbated by the lack of a body to mourn, or even the certainty of death. As a result, Ida has grown into a woman who meticulously and egregiously avoids emotion, preferring to reroute her suffering via the “fake true stories” that she writes. She carries herself—and her relationships—with a composure that betrays a tumultuous undercurrent of repressed feelings, acquired through years of conscious disassociation.

There is, for instance, her marriage—described as a “lame creature”—to the dependable-if-too-bland Pietro, perfectly named for his rock-like reliability and immutability. As Ida remarks at some point, “our bodies had stopped functioning together, stopped fitting together in sleep and the waking that precedes it; we had become shields for one another.” Progressively, the novel reveals that this extreme reserve comes from Ida’s adolescent years, in which her mother entrusted her with the care of her father while she went—or, as Ida saw it, escaped—to work. The pain of these years and the culminating abandonment drove a wedge between the two women. “If there was an art in which my mother and I had become expert during my adolescence,” Ida says, “that art was silence.” Even decades later, their relationship is entirely modulated by her father’s absence, governed more by the things left unsaid than those they are able to utter.

It is to Terranova’s great merit that she is able to capture trauma’s potential to stop time in such a limpid manner. Among the novel’s many metaphorical figures (the house and its crumbling foundations, for one) is the alarm clock that belonged to Ida’s father, frozen at 6:16 a.m. on the day he left. “The alarm clock said six-sixteen,” Ida muses, “[and] would say six-sixteen forever.” Victorianists and fans of Dickens will sense a reference to Great Expectations, specifically to the morbidity of Satis House, where all the clocks had been stopped at twenty to nine, the exact time when Miss Havisham realized she’d been abandoned by her lover. Conjuring the specter of Miss Havisham makes abundantly clear just how high the stakes are for Ida, and the extent to which she risks being trapped in the prison of trauma. And while Dickens’s depiction of a woman ravaged by abandonment was inflected by his extraordinary gift for the grotesque, Terranova makes a similar claim about the dangers of remaining stuck in the circuity of grief, even if she foregoes the hyperbolic, opting instead for nuance and realism. READ MORE…

Announcing our August Book Club Selection: People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami

August 31, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Lindsay Semel

The portrayal and analysis of collective experience makes this a text that truly meets our moment.

As we continue into the latter half of this increasingly surreal year, one finds the need for a little magic. Thus it is with a feeling of great timeliness that we present our Book Club selection for the month of August, the well-loved Hiromi Kawakami’s new fiction collection, People From My Neighborhood. In turns enigmatic and poignant, as puzzling as it is profound, Kawakami’s readily quiet, pondering work is devoted to the way our human patterns may be spliced through with intrigue, strangeness, and fantasy; amongst these intersections of normality and sublimity one finds a great and wandering beauty.

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! 

People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen, Granta, 2020

Like a box of chocolates, Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen) contains an assortment of bite-sized delights, each distinct yet related. This peculiar collection of flash fiction paints a portrait of exactly what the title suggests—the denizens of the narrator’s neighborhood—while striking a perfect balance between intriguing specificity and beguiling universality. The opening chapters introduce readers to each of the neighborhood’s curious inhabitants, while later chapters build upon the foundation, gradually erecting a universe of complex human relationships, rigorous social commentary, immense beauty, and more than a little magic.

Existing fans of Kawakami’s will surely recognize these common features of her award-winning body of work, while first-time readers will likely go searching for more. Goossen is better known as a translator of Murakami and editor of the English version of the Japanese literary magazine MONKEY: New Writing from Japan (formerly Monkey Business); ever committed to introducing Anglophone readers to non-canonical Japanese writers, he brings his flair for nonchalant magical realism to this winning new collaboration.

The first story, “The Secret,” introduces readers to the anonymous narrator and sets the tone for the collection. First presented as genderless, (we only find out later that she is female) she discovers an androgynous child, who turns out to be male, under a white blanket in a park. The child, wild and independent, comes home with her. Despite occasional disappearances, he keeps her company as she ages, all the while remaining a child. In this story, we receive her only concrete—but general—description of herself: “I’ve come to realize that he can’t be human after all, seeing how he’s stayed the same all these years. Humans change over time. I certainly have. I’ve aged and become grumpy. But I’ve come to love him, though I didn’t at first.” This one statement exemplifies many of the collection’s trademark characteristics and overarching themes: a version of time in which past, present, and eternity coexist, the supernatural, and the narrator’s fascinating method of characterization. READ MORE…