Reviews

What’s New in Translation: November 2024

November 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Eva Dunsky, Jonathon Atkinson, Rachel Stanyon, and Xiao Yue Shan

Discover new work from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan!

In this month’s review of newly released titles, we’re looking at works from Denmark, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, Argentina, Japan, France, and Taiwan. From a haunting volume of ecopoetics to the first book in an acclaimed metaphysical septology, from powerful anticolonial verses to a meditation on the art of translating, read on for some of the best work being released now in English!

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On the Calculation of Volume (Book I) by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara J. Haveland, New Directions, 2024

Review by Rachel Stanyon

After an unremarkable day spent on a business trip in Paris, Tara Selter is enjoying breakfast in her hotel when it strikes her that it is yesterday again. In the first book of Solvej Balle’s seven-part On The Calculation of Volume, Tara’s eighteenth of November begins repeating itself.

What possibilities exist upon the dawning of an old day? Are there wrongs to right, missed opportunities to seize, risks to take or temper? Balle’s heroine does not seem to perceive any such problems or desires; she likes her fairly routine job as an antiquarian book dealer, and works alongside her husband, Thomas, whom she loves. She does not seem to want for nor regret anything, and has blind faith in Thomas, who believes her when she tells him about her repeating days (at least the first umpteen times).

So why has her time “fallen apart”, and what can be gleaned from observing this procession of almost identical days—slowly, meticulously, rhythmically—through the diary Tara keeps? (In this version of eternal return, some of Tara’s physical imprints on the world remain indelible.) Book I details a year (the first of many?) spent haunting the all-too familiar patterns of her husband, all the while lost in loneliness and musing on the volume of her existence. Is she an all-consuming “beast, a pest” or a “tiny monster in an immense space”? READ MORE…

Life Without Breathing: On Water: A Chronicle by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư

November 6, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

In this swirling quasi-novel, saturated with insatiable quests of all varieties, everyone is engaged in endless seeking.

Water: A Chronicle by Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, translated from the Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý, Major Books, 2024

Water might have been the first floating signifier, if the image is anything to go by. Depending on its form, quantity, and culture of reception, it can be an agent of ritual purity, a destroyer of crops, a source of life, a symbol of illegible emotion. For the Vietnamese, water has been an operative metaphor and a lived reality since time immemorial; the word nước indexes both ‘water’ and ‘country,’ the two elements inseparably wedded in the linguistic psyche. A ruler of the Nguyễn dynasty once compared his precarious position on the throne to being in a boat, with the hoi polloi as the waters around him, threatening to overturn him at the slightest discontent. The scholar-translator Huỳnh Sanh Thông pointed out that Lạc, the first recorded name for the Vietnamese people, has a sonic affinity with numerous words denoting water: lạch (creek), lạt (to taste bland like water), lan (to spread like water).

The newly translated Water: A Chronicle, by the Vietnamese writer Nguyễn Ngọc Tư, embeds itself in this serpentine tradition. Better known as a litterateur of short stories than a novelist, Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s popularity is virtually unmatched in her native country, even being named by Forbes as one of Vietnam’s most influential women in 2018. Many of her other works are similarly obsessed with the liquid element—as evidenced by their titles: Nước chảy mây trôi (Flowing Water, Drifting Cloud), Đảo (Island), Không ai qua sông (No One Crosses the River).

Though she mobilises a distinct dialect that is difficult to translate, spotlighting rural inhabitants swept up in the caprices of fate, her oeuvre is not unknown to the outside world. Her short story collection Cánh đồng bất tận (Endless Field) snagged Germany’s LiBeraturPreis in 2018, but the Anglophone sphere has thus far only received her work in dribs and drabs. This is now set to change with the groundbreaking labour of Major Books—a brand-new UK-based indie publisher dedicated to Vietnamese literature in translation, and with the poetic flair of translator Nguyễn An Lý, who deservedly won two PEN Translates awards this year. READ MORE…

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

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

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

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

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

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

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

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

An Allegory of the World’s Starving: ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín

October 17, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

These untranslatables are signs of the fissures of hegemony, of cracks in its dominance through which other worlds can blossom.

ana c. buena by Valeria Román Marroquín, translated from the Spanish by Noah Mazer, Cardboard House Press, 2024

In his manifesto of New Brazilian Cinema, “An Esthetic of Hunger,” filmmaker Glauber Rocha called for art that communicates the poverty and misery of Latin America, and that could contribute to liberating the region from the “debilitating delirium of hunger.” He wrote this in 1964, at a time of global upheaval when Latin American cultural circles began to grapple with the torment of those left behind by globalization. Sadly, today, sixty years later, Latin America remains one of the most economically unequal regions on Earth. Decades-long neoliberal developmentalism keeps failing at what it—allegedly—has set out to do: eradicating the entrenched social disparities of the region. Instead, inequality only intensifies. The World Inequality Database reports that in 2020, the top 10% of Latin America owned 77.6% of the region’s wealth, a 2% increase from the 75.6% reported in 2000. The trend of increasing inequality is not unique to Latin America, but it is particularly extreme there. In Europe, the top 1% share of wealth rose from 24.9% in 2000 to 25% in 2020, while in the United States it increased from 32.0% to 34.9% in 2020. Capitalism confirms—time and time again—the falsehood of its mythical self-conception as a system that bolsters the progressive enrichment of everyone. Responding to this context, different Latin American groups have, of course, questioned the region’s unequal social conditions, calling for justice and change. In 2011, thousands of Chilean students dressed up as zombies in massive protests against educational debt and the privatization of public universities. More recently, Latin American women have taken to the streets in yearly Women’s Strikes to demand the recognition of care work as unpaid labor and to protest rising femicide numbers. Their demands for justice and their achievements are sources of light in an otherwise darkening global political landscape, and literary communities have taken up the same fight. The book ana c. buena, a 2021 poetry collection by the Peruvian poet Valeria Román Marroquín, presents a critique of capitalism that highlights its disastrous impact on the daily lives of working women. Indeed, the book’s main figure—Ana C. Buena, a woman under precarious and insecure work conditions—also functions as an allegory of the countries wounded by historical colonialism, current neocolonialism, and insatiable global capital. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: October 2024

October 14, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Ben Goldman, Christopher Higgs, Jonathon Atkinson, and Matilda Nevin

Discover new work from Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba!

In this month’s roundup of newly published translations, we introduce nine works from nine countries: Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Cameroon, Sweden, Chile, France, and Cuba. From a politically tuned memoir embedded with a familial conscience to a series of poems that consider diasporic experience through the lens of spectatorship—read on to find out more! 

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Waiting for the Fear by Oğuz Atay, translated from the Turkish by Ralph Hubbell, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Christopher Higgs

The oft quoted line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, “Hell is other people,” reverberates conceptually across Oğuz Atay’s Waiting For The Fear like a heavy skipping stone slumping across the surface of dark waters. Yet, in each of the collection’s eight stories, a confounding tension arises between the book’s Sartrean misanthropy and another seemingly competing desire: a strong craving to communicate, a yearning to connect. While Atay’s characters avoid human contact, holding deep disdain and even loathing for other people, they still thrum with a surreal pulse, a quivering mixture of rage and sadness in which their hatred comingles with a cry of the heart; they are desperate to embrace, to be accepted, to be acknowledged and valued, to be seen and heard by others. Six of the eight stories, for example, are epistolary, while the others rely on letters as plot devices. When the concept of written communication isn’t foregrounded, the narratives still hinge on concepts of storytelling, connecting, and sharing. READ MORE…

For the Reader Who Cannot Be Bought: On Dubravka Ugrešić’s A Muzzle for Witches

October 10, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Eamon McGrath

. . . her writing worked to unsettle, challenge, and dismantle—a process she called “a perestroika of literary values.”

A Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Open Letter, 2024

For thirty years, Dubravka Ugrešić lived in self-imposed exile as a cultural dissident and an enduring critic, challenging the prevailing orthodoxies that fueled anti-intellectualism, oppression, inequality, and nationalism. Her prolific writing—including both fiction and essays—took on topics ranging from the rise of virtual fandoms and the wars of Yugoslav dissolution, to cultural nostalgia and the state of the publishing industry.

A Muzzle for Witches, released this year by her longtime American publisher Open Letter, was Ugrešić’s final book before her death in March 2023. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (the preeminent translator into English of Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian authors, including David Albahari, Ivana Bodrožić, Slavenka Drakulić, Daša Drndić, and Robert Perišić), the book is a highly polished transcript of an interview between Ugrešić and literary critic Merima Omeragić.

The book is divided into seven sections, throughout which Ugrešić expounds upon many of the key themes and ideas she addressed in her life’s work. Loosely guided by Omeragić’s brief questions, she focuses on three subjects that are her greatest concerns: the resurgence of Croatian nationalism after the breakup of Yugoslavia; the marginalization of women’s voices, particularly in literature; and the dubious future of contemporary literature itself. Cumulatively, these three areas—in no small part responsible for her extended exile—suggest a grim outlook for the future.

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A Literary Cocktail of Fiction, Non-Fiction and Autofiction: On After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová

October 3, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Filip Noubel

Platzová options a radical methodology of writing that reveals the unanswerable questions composing our present. . .

Life After Kafka by Magdaléna Platzová, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker, Bellevue Literary Press, 2024

Collage is perhaps the best term to describe Czech author Magdaléna Platzová’s Life after Kafka (Život po Kafkovi), recently translated into English by Alex Zucker. The cover of the book distinguishes the text as a novel, yet its two hundred and fifty pages are in effect an intricate labyrinth of letters, diaries, interviews, fictions, and the author’s own descriptions of working on the book, all blurring the boundary between fact and imagination. Bringing these myriad fragments together is a common thread: the life of Felice Bauer, one of Kafka’s many women. To Platzová, she remains a mystery: “Who really was Felice Bauer? Who was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture, and precisely set watches? . . . Little is known of her life after Kafka. She got married, had two children, and immigrated to America. Did she leave any traces behind?”

This erasure in the numerous works of Kafkology inspired Platzová to spend ten years writing about Bauer, and the resulting text finally appeared in Czech in 2022 (with the English edition coincidentally being published this year, the one hundredth anniversary of Kafka’s death). Kafka’s life—a short one of forty years—was shared by at least six very different women, mostly Jewish, verging from Austrian, Czech, German, to Polish: Hedwig Weiler, Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch, Julie Wohryzek, Milena Jesenská (the only non-Jewish exception), and Dora Diamant. Academia and popular culture have mostly retained Jesenská—herself a prolific journalist and writer—and Diamant as the main feminine figures in Kafka’s life, but Bauer, who hailed from Berlin, was Kafka’s first fiancée. They first met in Prague in 1912, and maintained a relationship until 1917, when Kafka broke their engagement for the second time. Grete Bloch, who was a friend of Bauer’s, met Kafka in 1913 and ended up playing a major role between the two. Kafka also wrote letters to Bloch, and she later intervened in the relationship between him and Bauer, at a time when the couple was drifting apart. Platzová centers her narrative around these two female figures, telling the story of how their lives intersected in the shared link to Kafka, and how his letters became a focal point of their complicated existences in exile, haunting them to their last days. READ MORE…

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

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

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

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

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

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

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

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

Rudderless in the samidare-rain: On Naoko Fujimoto’s Reinterpretation of Heian Period Japanese Woman Poets

September 25, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Tiffany Troy

. . . Fujimoto has rendered her translations to “restore some of the freedom of form in which these original works were made.”

09/09 Nine Japanese Female Poets / Nine Heian Waka Poems, translated from the Japanese by Naoko Fujimoto, Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024 

My parents were criticized for allowing a girl to study advanced language skills and piano lessons–for what–“Why don’t you keep your daughter in Nagoya?” Some teachers looked at me saying, “You are not even the smartest, nor a boy.”

Have you ever wished to be a boy? And have you ever interrogated the root of that wish? Perhaps you have been told by your family members that a woman’s role is not to utter garbage-talk like a hen pooping. Or perhaps your family’s insistence that you get married off has grown more insistent over the years. Maybe it’s shameful to admit that you’ve never been seated at the center of the table, that you’ve internalized a certain misogyny, or that you live in a society that has instated men as the heads of households, as breadwinners and intellectual superiors—not because they are smarter, but because they were given the opportunity to pursue their education.

This was the case for the men and women in my grandparents’ generation, who grew up under the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the Confucian teachings that compare the “tiny man” (the scoundrel) with the “women.” I grew up learning about the Nineteenth Amendment and the Declaration of the Rights of Women in a neighborhood that largely continues to unlawfully segregate jobs by gender. The number of times I have been told that my writing is “frivolous” and that I was “not serious” about my literary career is innumerable.

How remarkable it is then to behold 09/09 by Naoko Fujimoto as a testament to the resilience and remarkable artistry of Japanese women writers during the Heian period (794 to 1185), a time of both gender segregation and cultural flourishing. I find myself seeing my obstacles mirrored in the Heian court custom of referring to women by their relationship with their male relative, or in Fujimoto’s lament in being called out as “not even the smartest”—with smart being measured by her ability to repeat what she has memorized verbatim on these make-you-or-break-you high stakes examinations that are characteristic of East Asian countries like Japan, Korean, or Taiwan. The idea that only the “best women” are afforded the same education as the most ordinary man is pernicious and deeply ingrained in East Asian society, even with the ongoing women’s rights movements in those countries. That identity is further complicated in East Asian-American communities overseas, where western values of independence clash with Asian values of Confucian filial piety and female subservience to men, and where leadership positions continue to be wielded by men in all types of professions. READ MORE…

Held Together by Dreams: On Erminia Dell’Oro’s Abandonment

September 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Rose Facchini

Her characters are profoundly human, each wrestling with their own fears, hopes, and desires . . .

Abandonment by Erminia Dell’Oro, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky, Héloïse Press, 2024

Why do we leave behind people and places? Is it painful or bittersweet? Does it indicate bravery or cowardice, altruism or egoism? Do we have complete agency in these decisions or are we instead constrained by necessity, oftentimes masked by the illusion of choice? What kind of person do we become in the aftermath?

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2024

September 16, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Christopher Higgs, Fani Avramopoulou, and Henry Gifford

Ten translated titles that hit the shelves this month!

When we first started the What’s New in Translation column in 2015, it was to offer readers a look at the incredible work done by writers, translators, and publishers all around the world. Gathering some of the most exciting publications coming out each month, the column featured regular reviews from trusted critical voices, giving the spotlight over to this great wealth of literary work. A lot has changed in the last decade; though English still reigns, we’ve seen the advocates of literary translation win a lot of battles as they seek to make our reading landscape a more various, inclusive, and interconnected space. As such, we now feel the need to extend our purview to include more of these brilliant voices, more of this innovative work, more of the insights and wonders that they bring. We are delighted to announce that our monthly column will now feature a greater number of titles —but with the same incisive critical insight that we’ve always aimed to bring.

From Argentinian horror to the latest from a Hungarian master of form, an intergenerational Greek tale to haiku interpretations, read below for a list of the ten most exciting books out in September.

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Documentary Poetry by Heimrad Bäcker, translated from the German by Patrick Greaney, Winter Editions, 2024

Review by Fani Avramopoulou

Documentary Poetry compiles a selection of German poet Heimrad Bäcker’s documentary poems and photographs with his published interviews, lectures, and essays, offering a richly contextualized introduction to his many decades of work documenting and reflecting on the Holocaust. Bäcker does not conceal his relation to the Nazi Party; he was an avid member for about a year, joining at the age of eighteen. He then denounced the Nazi ideology in the wake of the Nuremberg trials, and spent the rest of his life meticulously chronicling the Third Reich’s atrocities through photography and a poetic method he described as his “transcript system.” The collection’s title essay introduces what feels like the conceptual seed of Bäcker’s work: a reflection on the Nazis’ use of ordinary language to conceal, sanitize, enable, and systematize the horrors of the Holocaust. His conceptualization of language as a participatory, covert administrative tool of the Nazi ideological agenda leads to this development of the transcript system as a form of intervention—a way of undressing such language and purging it of its duplicities.

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On the Tempers of Time: Reading Christoph Ransmayr’s The Lockmaster

September 12, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Moumita Ghosh

The Lockmaster is a chronicle of an imminent future where emotional disorientations encounter environmental turmoil.

The Lockmaster by Christoph Ransmayr, translated from the German by Simon Pare, Seagull Books, 2024

The Lockmaster, the latest novel from Austrian writer Christoph Ransmayr, begins with an act of killing in a small European town. The narrator’s father—the titular lockmaster—presides over a series of sluice systems for guiding river traffic around the Great Falls, a cascade over a hundred and twenty feet high on the White River. On a festive day, ironically a day to celebrate the feast of Saint Nepomuk, the patron saint of those in danger of drowning, the lockmaster floods a navigation channel carrying riverboats. Accidental or otherwise, this episode claims five lives. A year later, almost as if in atonement, the lockmaster stages his disappearance into the same foaming roars of the Great Falls.

Tortured by the possibility that his father could be a murderer, the narrator goes on to experience a series of harrowing events as his hydraulic engineering projects carry him from the banks of the Xingu River in South America to the Mekong in Asia. By the time the narrator travels back to Europe and to the coasts of the North Sea, he himself has transformed into a murderer. Throughout, Ransmayr details the narrator’s childhood with gentle premonitions of his transformation, with prose that feels like a moving panorama of the idyllic outdoors, soaked in an aesthetic genre that seems almost “cottagecore”; yet, existing collaterally with the seemingly quaint charm of strawberry-picking and kayak rides, amidst riparian forests and river spirits, there are far more disturbing scenarios. READ MORE…

A Polyphonic Portrait of Omani Women: A Reading of Silken Gazelles

September 9, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Through interconnected stories, Alharthi masterfully weaves a network of characters in a narrative inhabited by lively, magnificent women.

Silken Gazelles by Jokha Alharthi, translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, Catapult, 2024

The acclaimed Omani writer and academic Jokha Alharthi has emerged as an increasingly significant voice on the international literary landscape since her novel, Celestial Bodies (translated by Marilyn Booth), was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2019. Now, once again, Catapult Press has opened the floodgates to another tentacle of the Omani society in the form of Alharthi’s fragmented worlds. In her latest novel Silken Gazelles, also gracefully translated by Booth, a wide net reins in the past to the present, the village to the city, sisterhood to motherhood, and love to loss. The dreamy and nonlinear narrative moves forward and backward in time, treating generations as flexible containers and relying on polyphony to create a poetic geometry of voices.

Tellingly, the intertwined threads of the narrative are captivating from the very beginning; extremely concise hints are made in the early chapters towards the throughline, but the hints are almost complete in themselves. At the end of the first chapter, for instance, Ghazaala’s life is wrapped up in a few sentences. “Within five years [she] had given birth to twins,” writes Alharthi, “finished her secondary education, and entered the university. In her final year of study in the College of Economics, the Violin Player ran away from the house of marriage.” In a similar vein, in the second chapter, when talking about Ghazaala’s foster mother, Saada, Alharthi writes:

It would have seemed so ordinary, so natural, for Saada to live to be a hundred years old. For Saada to always be there, preparing maghbara for the cow and coconut sweets for the children, drawing milk and cream, feeding Ghazaala and Asiya and Mahbuba and the goats, undoing her hair and baking as she sang, exuding a fragrance of incense and fresh dough, laughing her ringing laugh, and forever gathering the plants that could treat poisons and fevers from the high slopes surrounding Sharaat Bat. . . But Saada never made it, not even to thirty.

READ MORE…

How the World Appears in States of Language: On A Thousand Thoughts in Flight by Maria Gabriela Llansol

September 2, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly. . .

A Thousand Thoughts in Flight by Maria Gabriela Llansol, translated from the Portuguese by Audrey Young, Deep Vellum, 2024

A Thousand Thoughts in Flight, the diaries of Portuguese writer Maria Gabriela Llansol, is divided into three sections: “Finita”, “A Falcon in My Wrist”, and “Inquiry into the Four Confidences”. Comprised of three books from the seventies that Llansol left behind when she passed away in 2008, these volumes were the only ones to be published in Portuguese during the writer’s life, and are also the first of her non-fiction writings to appear in English, thanks to the work of translator Audrey Young. In his introduction, the critic João Barrento describes these private texts as “osmotic diaries: their genesis, their development, and their final form are inseparable from Llansol’s other books, which always accompany them and are interwoven with them”. This is true not only in the conceptual but also the literal sense; the first diary begins the day she finishes The Book of Communities—the first volume in her acclaimed trilogy Geography of Rebels—and ends the day she finishes The Remaining Life, the second volume, in 1977. The second diary picks up when she is finishing In the House of July and August, the final volume, and beginning to write her second trilogy, while also providing glimpses at the author brainstorming her duology, Lisbonleipzig.

Llansol is a generous and poetic writer, sensual in her descriptions and intensely attuned to the metaphysical and the otherworldly, coalescing history, philosophy, and physical experience; these qualities are boldly apparent in her fiction, but appear with an experimental and kinetic mode in these diaries. A common thread across the volumes is silence: everything that remains in the journal is a “draft”, consisting of left-out pieces and vacant spaces for contemplation, and this attention and appreciation reserved for emptiness becomes integral to the diaries’ form. Silence manifests in the common use of gaps in the text, indicated in certain places by a horizontal line (________), and more compellingly in other places as unannounced fragments of poetry. And in between these fragments is life. She moves all around Belgium, from Louvain to Jodoigne and finally to Herbais, where she and her husband Augusto Joaquim run an experimental school as part of a cooperative—which also makes and sells furniture and food. There, Llansol cultivates her own garden, which provides a bouquet of scenes and observations for her diaries, and immerses herself in music. Still, she never pauses in her pursuit of literature, of writing and reading about theology, philosophy, the lives of poets and mystics. It is only in the final diary that she moves back to Portugal’s Sintra, sometime in 1983, remaining there until her death. READ MORE…