Reviews

The Simultaneous Precision of Each Person’s Storytelling and Unknowability of the Truth: On Ismail Kadare’s A Dictator Calls

October 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Landau

Kadare suggests that memory itself can build discourse, poetic and otherwise, with those who are no longer living.

A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson, Counterpoint Press, 2023 

In A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare creates an interwoven narrative of historic suspense, gently challenging the line between personal storytelling and an encyclopedic index of information. John Hodgson’s eloquent translation from Albanian is densely packed with perspectives, anecdotes, and curiosity surrounding a significant moment in Soviet literary history. How a legendary conversation transpired and what impact it had on all involved is the question that Kadare seeks to answer in A Dictator Calls; he approaches the question from all angles, and in the process investigates his own complex relationships to historical and literary legacies, afterlives, and the very act of storytelling.

Kadare’s novel is grounded in a story from 1934: Osip Mandelstam, a legendary Russophone poet, had been arrested after writing a poem critical of Joseph Stalin, a text known in English as “The Stalin Epigram” or “The Kremlin Mountaineer.” According to the general narrative, Stalin himself decided to call Boris Pasternak, a contemporary of Mandelstam’s, to ask whether or not Mandelstam was a great poet. Stories diverge, and contemporaries of both poets, from Viktor Shkhlovsky to Isaiah Berlin to Anna Akhmatova, claim different conclusions to that conversation. 

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Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri

September 28, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Thuy Dinh

To resist, the women in Birth Canal—as object of desire, porn actress, and sex worker—must stare back in their own fashion. . .

In an intricately woven novel of generational legacies, untold inheritances, and our multivalent history, Indonesian author Dias Novita Wuri navigates the matrixes of family and geography with a profound and powerful voice. Tracing a passage of interconnected lives across nations, regimes, territories, and spectacles, Birth Canal is a testament to both the visible and invisible impressions that our bodies make upon the world, a challenge to the archetypal presentations of sexuality that inflict their discreet violences, and a documentation of courage and perseverance.

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. 

Birth Canal by Dias Novita Wuri, translated from the Indonesian, Scribe, 2023

Birth Canal, Dias Novita Wuri’s provocatively-titled and self-translated debut novel, represents the Indonesian author’s mesmerizing endeavor to make visible both the female body and the structure of storytelling, deftly exposing the tensions between “legible” narrative and “shameful” history. Originally titled Jalan Lahir in its original Indonesian, the text carries multiple thematic and structural possibilities at its outset: jalan means pathway, road, approach, line, lineage, course, passage, while its etymological origins, borrowed from yalan in Ottoman Turkish, suggests deceit, fakery, lie; lahir, from the Arabic zahir, means “emergence / coming into existence” as noun, “to be born” as verb, and “outer,” “physical,” or “overt” as adjective.

Weaving this ambiguity throughout the narrative, Wuri explores the territory between linear storytelling and disputed, fragmented history by shifting gracefully between first-person, second person, and third-person omniscient viewpoints. As such, Birth Canal consists of four densely structured, cinematic chapters, crossing multiple timelines and cities in Indonesia and Japan to slowly reveal the links between its six female protagonists, Nastiti, Rukmini, Arini, Hanako, Dara, and Ayaka.

The novel opens in teeming, present-day Jakarta to trail after Nastiti, a young, sexually liberated office worker about to self-administer her abortion in secret; Indonesia—a Muslim-majority country—outlaws this procedure. The chapter is narrated from the perspective of an unnamed childhood friend who recounts his platonic, unrequited love for Nastiti up until the day after her abortion, upon which she disappears from his life. In his recollections, we see Nastiti refracted as a cypher—similar to how her image is captured on another occasion by a Western street photographer and subsequently enlarged for a gallery exhibition. The young man acknowledges that despite, or precisely due to Nastiti’s hypnotic allure, she is hard to read:

Sometimes Nastiti’s innocence could seem as bare as a peeled fruit, but that was only because she was allowing it. Other times she could close herself off completely.

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Affirmation and Erasure: On the Queer Stories of On the Edge

September 25, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Matilde Ribeiro

[N]ew and translated works have continued to explore the rich depths of how Hindi literature explores same-sex relationships and queer desire.

On The Edge by various authors, translated from the Hindi by Ruth Vanita, Penguin Random House India, 2023

“We all live in a prison of some kind,” Manoranjan, the protagonist of Sara Rai’s story “Kagaar Par,” tells his lover Javed, from whom he is separated both by barriers of class and religion, and by the glaring fact of social opposition to same-sex relationships. “Not being able to love openly is my prison. . . I know that it’s very hard for an ordinary man to understand my compulsions and to love a prisoner.” The story’s title, translated as “On The Edge,” lends its name to this anthology of translations from Hindi by Indian author, professor, and activist Ruth Vanita, and echoes the themes of queer desire and alienation that run through the collection.

This book comes amid what the Booker Prize-winning translator Daisy Rockwell has described as a “boomlet” in translations of modern Hindi literature—a boom in comparison to the previous dearth of translations, but one in which “so much remains untranslated and unpublished,” including key modern works. On The Edge, which includes modern and older stories, can in some ways be considered part of this boom, which is highlighting the variety and depth of Hindi literature. The story collection also comes at a time when same-sex relationships in India are under increased scrutiny—the Supreme Court is currently deciding a batch of petitions to expand existing marriage laws to include same-sex marriages—and in this context, it is also an attempt to unearth stories depicting queerness in Hindi literature

In this way, Vanita’s anthology makes a powerful statement against the frequent assertion that homosexuality is an aberration or alien to Indian culture. This view of Hindi literature as devoid of queer stories is a common one. In the introduction to this anthology, Vanita demonstrates how widespread this misreading is, quoting Namvar Singh, a revered Marxist critic of Hindi literature, who described homosexuality as “an exception, not a widespread practice,” and declared that “that is how it should be portrayed in literature.” He also derided authors working in English who, he claimed, were “trying to gain cheap popularity by glorifying this exception,” and cautioned the Hindi literary world against this. READ MORE…

Four-in-the-Morning Literature: On Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq

September 20, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin

Insomnia does strange things to time, or time does strange things to insomniacs—it estranges, stretches, slips.

Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from the French by Penny Hueston, Semiotext(e), 2023

While writing this review, I began making a list of everything I’ve tried in my attempts to fall asleep. The first was reading, which didn’t help me fall asleep at all (though not sleeping has helped immensely with reading). The second, which I tried after the first time I told a doctor about my trouble sleeping at age eleven, was melatonin, and I took it dutifully, in varying doses, until stopping cold a year ago. I sleep no better and no worse since. Over the years, I have also tried: valerian root, passionflower, marijuana, CBD gel, NyQuil, keeping my phone in another room, counting sheep, white noise, earplugs, Xanax, watching the same six television shows over and over again, an eye mask, new sheets, exercise, an early and consistent alarm. I have a prescription for trazadone but don’t take it (the benefits of simply being in possession of sleeping pills are often extolled to insomniacs, though I haven’t noticed any). I often end up listing all the people I love, and this last is perhaps least helpful—I always end up imagining what I would say if asked to give a eulogy, or what they would say if they gave one for me. Sometimes I end up in tears, still sleepless.

This is insomniac thinking: each line on a list bends and branches outwards. Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq, in Penny Hueston’s translation, is written in this “totally insomniac mode.” The book, a meditation on this condition, is comprised of lists, footnoted investigations into the history of sleeping and not sleeping, worries about the meaning and morality of insomnia in the face of genocide and climate catastrophe, and a compendium of quotes and anecdotes about sleepless writers or the characters to whom they’ve lent their insomnia. It includes a two-page spread of photos of hotel rooms Darrieussecq has stayed—though often not slept—in. Researching, worrying, organizing, reading: all insomniac activities, which lead as easily away from sleep as towards it.

She circles around sleep, doubles back, spiraling like a Louise Bourgeois drawing (the artist, a prolific insomniac herself, often drew spiraling shapes when awake late at night, but spiraling which way?). Darrieussecq enacts insomnia in her style; the book is fragmentary, intense, shifting. Her metaphors are hypnagogic, caught between reality and analogy: “we insomniacs plummet into horrendous ravines and the bags under our eyes are bruise colored.” Metaphor, incidentally, is one of the things on Darrieussecq’s list of things she’s tried to help her sleep. “I tell myself that a good sleep would be to sleep like a mountain,” she writes, “Oh, metaphors, metaphors.” This effort, of course, failed.

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What’s New in Translation: September 2023

September 11, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Meghan Racklin and Samantha Siefert

New translations from the Catalan and the French!

This month in newly released translations, we’re featuring two authors of inimitable voice and style. From the Catalan, a surrealist masterpiece by Ventura Ametller sharply blends history with mysticism in an epic retelling of the Spanish Civil War; and from the French, the latest text by Annie Ernaux returns to some of the author’s most central themes—sex and memory—in a poignant examination of corporeal and psychological navigations.

Summa Kaotica by Ventura Ametller (Bonaventura Clavaguera), translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle, Fum d’Estampa, 2023

Review by Samantha Siefert, Marketing Manager

A monstrosity of a fish gnashes at a tiger, the tiger leaps towards a gun, the gun is aimed perilously at the prone body of a nude woman. . . It’s all so unexpected and moving, but what do these objects have to do with one another—or with anything at all?

Such is surrealism: the challenge of reconciling the disparity of absurdity. “Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory,” declared André Breton in his manifesto. Riding on the coattails of Dadaism, surrealism emerged as an impulsive reaction to the tragedy of the First World War: If reason had resulted in such great suffering, then what good was a movement rooted in realism?

The antithesis of reason, then, was the way forward, and the efforts of the avant-garde were so resonant that they continue to exist today as comfortable figures of popular culture, where the discordance of fish, tiger, and gun feel almost familiar in Salvador Dalí’s famous painting, “The Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening.” The surrealist world of letters, however, leave room for discovery.

In Catalonia with Dalí at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writer Ventura Ametller—the pen name of Bonaventura Clavaguera—was hard at work, producing a prolific collection of poetry, essays, and novels that turn the world upside down in raucous prose, described by essayist Lluís Racionero as “Dalí in words.” His work has remained only quietly appreciated, but perhaps the time has come for that to change with the new publication of Ametller’s groundbreaking magnum opus, Summa Kaotica, in a masterful translation from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle. READ MORE…

A Self Remaindered: On Iman Mersal’s Traces of Enayat

September 4, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Mersal reveals that writing can embody the rougher textures of real life in its enmeshment with troubled, even buried, pasts.

Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger, And Other Stories, 2023

Since the ninth century, Cairo’s City of the Dead has served as the final resting place for Egypt’s caliphs, saints, poets and heroes. Their reprieve was disturbed a few months ago, however, when the Egyptian government began razing tombs in the necropolis to build a new highway. It’s a familiar trope: the uprooting of entire genealogies, the clearing away of accreting dust, all in the name of an ever-accelerated infrastructural modernity. Yet it isn’t only the dead who will be uprooted; many impoverished communities, working as morticians or caretakers, have built lives amid the deceased. Perhaps the cruellest irony is that the living, too, will be displaced in one fell swoop, sacrificed to what one writer has called “asphalt fever”.

She might not have known it then, but Iman Mersal’s perambulations through the City of the Dead in 2015, recorded in her sublimely digressive and moving Traces of Enayat, now read like premonitions of its disappearance. Primarily known for her poetry (her collection The Threshold was published in English translation by Robyn Creswell last year), Mersal is associated with Cairo’s nineties generation—a literary movement loosely characterised by a mistrust of totalising ideologies and an attentiveness to fractures in personal identity. One of her enduring themes have been to examine how exactly, if at all, the individual can be conjugated with the collective—the untraversable chasms that divide a self from another. It would not be too far a leap to connect Mersal’s quest to excavate hidden lives to Cairo’s penchant for hiding away—and obliterating—everything it deems trivial enough to forget.

Traces of Enayat resembles a biography, but is more so a catalogue of absence, a profound meditation on the limits and contingencies of the archive. Just as “there are no signs to mark boundaries in the City of the Dead”, Mersal’s hybrid work refuses the rigidity of genre. Winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, it approximates the baggy shape of what she herself terms “jins jaami, a catch-all for every literary form and approach”. Julian Barnes’s famous comparison of biography to a “trawling net” is here overturned: rather than the thrashing fish hauled on shore, Mersal cares more about what has slipped away through the crevices—wanting, in fact, to document the constitution of the net itself as a “collection of holes tied together with string”. The result is a text in which theory, memoir, fiction, urban legend, and photography jostle against interleaved histories of psychiatric hospitals, marital law, golden-age cinema, orientalist Egyptology, and contested literary legacies.

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Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Lojman by Ebru Ojen

August 31, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Xiao Yue Shan

Ojen writes along the pulse, and everything she describes is powered by the thrashing motions of something holding on to life.

Lojman is a book that shows its teeth. In powerful, unflinching prose of malevolence and confinement, Ebru Ojen depicts the family unit as a condition in which the most abject of cruelties and annihilations are imagined, resulting in an unparalleled portrait of madness and oblivion. By pushing her characters to mental precipices, the author points us toward the emotional peaks of human existence, drawing blood in an open display of intense, battered aliveness.

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. 

Lojman by Ebru Ojen, translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu, City Lights, 2023

There’s something out there. Such are the familiar words that announce fear’s dramatic incarnations—a sudden violent churning along the horizon, a scream that shears the night-fabric, a figure separating itself from the darkness. The common portrait of horror is aiming its heavy steps towards us, drawing nearer with each quickened breath—a grasp, a suffocation, a descent inevitable as gravity, an opaque force and singular direction. We’ve all been stranded in this lingering vastness, certain of some unbearable thing that approaches, and yet this dreadful knowledge, of what may lie out there, is only an elementary stage in fear’s true theatre. Eventually, one finds a more intolerable, more defiling fact: something that does not pursue, does not invade—something that does not come scratching at our windows, but dwells already in the closest, most secret part of us, capable of everything and knowing nothing of order, nothing of control.

Ebru Ojen’s Lojman is a horror of intimacies. In brutal, visceral treads, it walks that demarcation separating the inside from the outside, revealing all that rages against walls both visible and invisible—the unspeakable violence of the precipice. And while the outside still holds the unknowable chill of our darkest suspicions, in Lojman, it is the inside where monsters are unleashed. The title, transliterated from the Turkish word for lodging, is the first indication of this novel’s form—as tightly fortified as architecture, and as taut and enigmatic as the human body. Through passages of incandescent maleficence and enthralled terror, we are led into the stifling, worldly containers that somehow manage to hold utterly uncontainable things—all that goes on in a house, all that goes on in a mind. We have been made so small in order to live, and that unbearable reality is given, here, for writing to bear. READ MORE…

Translation as Disorder in Carlos Fonseca’s Austral

August 23, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Alan Mendoza Sosa

. . . disorder plagues the opening pages of the book, always in tight connection to translation.

Austral by Carlos Fonseca, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023

“What is the social impact of translation?” is a question that often buzzes in my ear like a hungry mosquito, especially when I read translated books, and even more commonly when I try to teach colloquial expressions in Spanish to my non-Hispanic friends—more precisely, Spanish from Mexico City, my hometown. Immediately, attempts at clear definitions become convoluted, uncertain, ambiguous—in a word, atropellados (literally “ran over,” an adjective that refers to stumbling over words). I sound more or less like this: 

“Take ‘chido/chida/chide’ [CHEE-duh/-da/-de] (adj.). It can technically mean ‘cool,’ but also ‘good,’ ‘agreeable,’  or ‘comfortable’ (for things and places and preceded by the auxiliary verb ‘estar’); it also means ‘nice-kind-laidback-easygoing-friendly’ (for someone who meets all and every one of these attributes and with the verb ‘ser’); or ‘ok, no problem,’  and ‘thank you’ (in informal social interactions with a close friend but not necessarily an intimate one and, crucially, with an upbeat intonation)…but if you want to make things easier for you, just remember that in any colloquial situation where you would say ‘cool’ in English or the closest equivalent in your mother tongue, you can say ‘chido.’ Don’t forget to adjust the last letter for the grammatical gender of the noun, or the preferred gender of the person you are referring to. Recently, non-binary gender is expressed with an ‘e,’ but some people prefer ‘ex,’ or the feminine (a), or do not have any strong preference. When in doubt, ask.”

Similarly involved and protracted explanations often result in simpering faces and jocose efforts by my bravest friends to try out the words I share. More common, and more fun, is when friends also share their favorite colloquial untranslatables in their mother tongues, eliciting everyone’s excited perplexity and marvel at the abundance of meaning and the frustrating difficulties of carrying that meaning across languages and cultures. When we try to explain these terms, it is as though their translation abruptly hits the brakes on our language, pushing us into linguistic confusion with the inertia from the sudden interruption. In other words, translation begets disorder, upsetting the comfortable and normally thoughtless flow of everyday language. This sensation—which emerged in me after my recurrent attempts at translating colloquialisms—appears more subtly and robustly in the 2023 novel Austral by Carlos Fonseca and its translation by Megan McDowell. Disorder, Austral suggests, lies at the heart of translation’s social potential, as it makes translation (its exercise and its experience) essential for radical change.

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Compass and Rifle: On Roque Dalton’s Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle

August 21, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by José García Escobar

No one escapes Dalton’s inquisitive pen . . .

Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle by Roque Dalton, translated from the Spanish by Jack Hirschman, Seven Stories Press, 2023

On Thursday, July 6, 2023, the inaugural day of Guatemala’s International Book Fair (FILGUA), the government of El Salvador requested organizers to exclude Salvadoran author Michelle Recinos’ Sustancia de hígado (F&G Editores) from the fair. The next day, online news outlet elfaro revealed that El Salvador’s ambassador in Guatemala had said, “It would’ve been an unpleasant thing for the government of El Salvador if this book had been a part of the fair.” Details are scarce, but presumably, this action was related to Michelle’s story Barberos en huelga, winner of the 2022 Mario Monteforte Toledo Prize, which openly criticizes sitting president Nayib Bukele’s war on gangs. 

Hearing this, I can only imagine what Roque Dalton would have written about Bukele. 

Roque Dalton’s Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases (Stories and Poems of a Class Struggle) dates back to 1975, and remains as timely as ever. In a time when most Central American countries are under authoritarian regimes and have experienced backslides of democracy, the life and work of Roque Dalton is at once a beacon of hope, an inspiration, and a warning sign. Historias y poemas de una lucha de clases is a book filled with courageous testimony, the poet’s typical dry humor, and bone-chilling depictions of state violence. Here, Dalton is hyperaware of the pain and plight of his compatriots, but in addition to his typical grittiness and social critique, we also find tenderness, softness, beauty, and frailty; Dalton’s acute perception is both a rifle and a compass, manifesting in words of both rebuke and encouragement. 

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What’s New in Translation: August 2023

August 14, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Irmak Ertuna Howison and Sofija Popovska

New work from Uruguay and South Korea!

This month, we take a look at two brilliant titles that embody the acts of interpretation and evocation. In Silvia Guerra’s poems, nature is given voice in stunning scenes of linguistic complexity. In Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s retelling of a Korean classic, beloved characters are brought to life in the graphic form. 

sea

A Sea at Dawn by Silvia Guerra, translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, Eulalia Books, 2023 

Review by Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large for North Macedonia

What constitutes a translation? Thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Lacan have argued that every utterance is a deeply intimate expression channeled through shared, culturally standardized verbal structures; that is to say, every time we speak, we are translating.

As with speaking, so with listening, as well. Bakhtin describes the act of conversing with someone else as a (re-)construction of our concepts upon the “alien territory” of the other’s mind. In A Sea at Dawn (Un mar en madrugada), a poetry collection originally published in 2018 and now out in English translation from Eulalia Books, the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra manages to push against even these (admittedly broad and inclusive) boundaries of defining translation. In her panoramic, evocative poems, she invites all kinds of life, organic and inorganic, to speak, thereby creating a delightfully strange linguistic landscape that is equally alien and welcoming to the voices of the world, all at once.

Given the vertiginous and heterodox nature of the book itself, it’s helpful to start with the afterword written by the translators Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas, which illuminates the process of recasting Guerra’s captivating and difficult voice into English, and offers various ways to think about her poetry. For those that have read her in Spanish, it might seem that translating Guerra might seem an exercise in futility, leading to “disappointment and outright lamentation”; however, Kercheval and Pitas’ exquisite translation evokes neither of those things. Instead, contemplating Guerra’s intricate verbal designs allowed the translators to experience “lost and found” moments—instances where English revealed its ability to produce accomplices to Guerra’s “extremely innovative soundscapes” and formulations. Kercheval and Pitas cite an instance where they rediscovered the potential of English words to be “sonically evocative,” in which editor Michelle Gil-Montero offered “hacked in half” as a match for “pensamiento imbricado hendido”—instead of the initial idea, “thought interwoven split.” Later, quoting Walter Benjamin’s notion that “translation makes one’s native language foreign to itself,” Kercheval and Pitas’ afterword shows that reading Guerra in translation not only allows one to experience her mysterious Spanish transformed into English (A Sea at Dawn being a bilingual edition), but leaves our image of English irrevocably altered by her expansive, multipotential approach to language. READ MORE…

The Air Itself Becomes Lead: On Mona Kareem’s I Will Not Fold These Maps

August 10, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Ruwa Alhayek

Are these scenes, these stanzas, dreams, memories, or prophecies? Or are they metaphors?

I Will Not Fold These Maps by Mona Kareem, translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel, Poetry Translation Centre, 2023

In 1986, just one year before the poet Mona Kareem was born, the stateless Arab population of Kuwait, who had been denied citizenship when Kuwait declared its independence in 1961, became categorized as illegal residents. Despite enjoying relatively equal status to Kuwaiti nationals until then, approximately 250,000 people were stripped of their access to free education, housing, and healthcare. Following the Iraqi invasion and the subsequent war of 1991, many of the Bidoon community, including Kareem’s mother’s family, were expelled from their positions or deported outside of Kuwait, accused of collaborating with the enemy. Forced to flee their homes, they became internal refugees when they arrived at Kuwait’s border with Iraq. For Kareem, memories of such scenes from childhood bleed into the present moment, where she is exiled in the US and denied the opportunity to visit the country in which she was born, as well as the members of her family who still reside there. I Will Not Fold These Maps, translated by Sara Elkamel, is a curated collection of poems covering twenty years of Kareem’s poetry, both previously published and new. It is a collection marred by exile, war, and the fraught relationships and ruins they leave in their wake.

Kareem’s poems are replete with unique images—they paint scenes in language that mirror the chaos of memory, the fragmentation of exile, and the mutilation of war. As Elkamel points out in her introduction, it seems that everything in Kareem’s poems has a body—one that bears the brunt of individual and collective traumas. At the same time, the poet is at a loss regarding what to do with her own body, as she tells us in her poem “My Body, My Vehicle” (Jasadī Markabatī). Her vehicle of a body is not one she can park or abandon just anywhere, for

When I go shopping, my wheels shatter
the glossy ceramic floors
and when I go to the beach
she sinks into the sand

small and dark, completed and broke
her windows are an almanac of winds
and her voice falters at rush hour.

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Any Single Thing: On Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory

August 2, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

Instead, “love” seems to be closely associated with research; with storytelling and the (im)possibility of comprehensive communication.

Out of the Sugar Factory by Dorothee Elmiger, translated from the German by Megan Ewing, Two Lines Press, 2023

How do you write about a book that is itself concerned with what it is about; that covers a vast array of seemingly disparate but fundamentally deeply interconnected topics in a fragmentary, multi-genre, looping montage; that is both tentative and unashamedly demanding; that is hyper-meta yet written in language that is refreshingly unselfconscious; that is so preoccupied with form and origins that it defiantly eludes attempts at endings? What can you say a book that has already said so much about itself?

You could say that, fundamentally, Out of the Sugar Factory is about exactly what its title suggests: sugar and production. In thinking and trying to write about this book, though, such a statement seems entirely insufficient—for this text, with tales spanning from the 16th century to the present day, is equally about love, desire, slavery, capitalism, the art of writing, artifice, self-representation, subjection, the Haitian revolution, religion, anorexia and mania—and utterly exhaustive, since all these parenthetical topics are ultimately also symbolised by sugar and its production. In this kaleidoscope of ever separating and reconnecting topics, full of “objects [that seem] to enter into new relationships, new constellations with each other”, Dorothee Elmiger—or rather, the narrator she pens—is perhaps suggesting that any single thing, if examined both broadly and closely enough, can lead us to everything else (are we singing along with Lauryn Hill that ‘Everything is everything’?); or perhaps she is suggesting that, haunted as the early twenty-first century is by the spectre of colonialism and its aftermath, we are saturated in sugar (some things are more omnipresent than others). Then again, maybe she is implying both or neither of these things, or even that the search for a metanarrative is futile: as Elmiger writes, “I thought I had to somehow gather everything together . . . but now things are imposing themselves on me virtually—I see signs and connections everywhere, as if I had found a theory of everything, which is of course utter nonsense.” READ MORE…

Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma

July 27, 2023  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daljinder Johal

Posthuma develops an affecting novel about grief by embracing its full complexity.

Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About delves into the closeness of a relationship that many find difficult to understand: the inextricable link between twin siblings. Through a delicately woven tale of memory, shared selfhood, and grief, the author takes us into the mind that struggles to understand a world shattered by loss, when one sibling dies and another is left to reconstitute the fragments. Poetic and surprising, Posthuma shows how even in the most intimate of connections, in another person lies the great unknown.

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. 

What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma. Translated from the Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey, Scribe, 2023

In short, poignant vignettes, What I’d Rather Not Think About is Jente Posthuma’s story of twin siblings: a brother who commits suicide, and a sister who is left behind. True to its title, the novel grapples with the narrator’s dark, complicated feelings of loss following the death of her brother, as she ruminates on the intensity of their relationship. In reflections of the siblings’ childhood and youthful dreams, tracing how these dreams changed or were lost on the way to maturity, Posthuma develops an affecting novel about grief by embracing its full complexity.

From its opening passage, Posthuma hints to the darker turn the twins’ story will take; the first memory shared is of the two experimenting with waterboarding as children, after seeing a film about Guantanamo Bay. To this, their mother sighs, accurately guessing that: “this has to be one of your brother’s ideas”. The untraditional game cleverly introduces their relationship, with the brother being more in control of their makeshift experiment, leaving the narrator coughing and spluttering from the experience. She asks her brother: “Why didn’t you help me?”, and only receives a single “sorry” in return. This pattern of behavior continues as adults, such as when the narrator joins her brother in a diving lesson, since “my brother expected me to follow him because that’s what I always did. If I wanted to go in a different direction, he would ignore me and keep walking.” READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: July 2023

July 10, 2023  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Catherine Xin Xin Yu and Heloisa Selles

New work from Natalia Ginzburg and Djuna!

This month, we’re excited to introduce two works that explore social intricacies from two respective angles: the familial and the technological. From the Italian, lauded modernist Natalian Ginzburg’s most recent English-language work plumbs into the combustive conflicts within a family unit to reveal the complex moralism within our most intimate relationships. From the Korean, science fiction author Djuna conjures a thrilling tale of how corporate politics and advancement colonises upon human identity. Read on to find out more!

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The Road to the City by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Gini Alhadeff, New Directions, 2023

Review by Catherine Xinxin Yu, Assistant Director of Outreach

Seventeen-year-old Delia is a frivolous beauty with neither talent nor sense. Her hobby is to get dolled up in her blue dress, take the dusty road to the city, and stroll around, admiring its affluence. Seeking to escape from the drabness of her townish family, she thought a bright future had beamed on her when a rich doctor’s son began pursuing her, but little did she know that it was an abyss, instead, that beckoned.

The Road to the City is Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s earliest published work, written in 1941 and published in 1942. At the time, she had been sent into internal exile to a village in Abruzzo for her husband’s anti-Fascist activities. Missing her home city of Turin while developing close ties to the locals in Abruzzo, she blended the places and people from memory and real life to craft this nuanced novella, with a snappy style that “[her] mother might like”.

Ginzburg has an incredible talent for depicting explosive clashes within families, integrating insight and humour into her narrative. English readers might already be familiar with her voice through Family Lexicon, her autobiographical novel published in 1963, and in The Road to the City, we see her burgeoning style with same pithy descriptions and wry comedy, surgically precise choice of scenes and voices, refrains of familial sayings as inside jokes and memory triggers, and nuanced character sketches that highlight their contradictions and moral ambiguity. But unlike Ginzburg’s own family, which is soldered with love and a common cause against fascism, The Road to the City traces how a family splinters into pieces from collective shame and spite.

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