Posts filed under 'beauty'

The Body as Project : A Review of Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal

May 7, 2025  |  in Reviews  |  by Miranda Mazariegos

Hilal’s genre-bending text is an invitation to face our fears—so that we can finally stop projecting them.

Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal, translated from the German by Elizabeth Lauffer, New Vessel Press, 2025

I have a memory. I’m about twelve years old, standing in front of a bathroom mirror, looking deeply at my body, and making a mental list of everything I could do to “improve” it. The list was ranked by struggle: the easiest came first—tasks that were beyond my control but were relatively simple (get my braces off); followed by items that would require significant effort (lose twenty pounds, maybe more). Mostly, the list lived in my head only to be recited incessantly whenever I saw myself in the mirror. Straighten curly hair. You could call them affirmations, albeit not positive ones, and always in a future tense: I will be pretty. I will be liked. Everything I hated about myself could be altered and remedied, and through this list, my body became a project.

The idea of bodies as projects is central to Moshtari Hilal’s new book, Ugliness, translated into German by Elisabeth Lauffer and published by New Vessel Press in early February. As a woman of Afghan descent now living in Berlin, Hilal examines and takes apart what she calls “the cartography of her ugliness,” an outline similar to my preteen list of remedies. “I divided my small body into enemy territories,” she writes, conducting a clinical analysis of her body and emphasizing what she considered faults. A pointed nose, an incipient mustache, a large head. The accompanying shame. However, contrary to my persistence towards the future, Hilal thoroughly stares at the past. The book begins with an all-too-common experience: childhood bullies. Looking at her school-age photos, Hilal reminisces and makes us think: Who hasn’t felt ugly at one point or the other?

Yet as the book moves forward, Hilal employs her clinical skills to take apart the concept of ugliness, leading us to its birth and attempting to understand how some of these unforgiving Western standards were created, as well as how they contribute to rejection. Sections are titled after body parts or features that can be changed, altered, modified, and reimagined to fit unattainable standards—which Hilal clarifies as being deeply entrenched in colonialism. “The notion of physical self-optimization functions as a technical extension of an ideology that upholds the necessity of shaping people into civilized modern citizens,” she writes. Blending scholarly research, sociology, history, memoir, poetry, and photography, Hilal turns her cartography (and my list) on its head, leading us down a thoughtful and compelling path. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Auntie with Two Laughing Braids” by Hoda AbdelKader Mahmoud

March 25, 2025  |  in Translations  |  by Jennifer Jean and Mohamed ElSawi Hassan

My vast darkness is lit with memories of my mother's hand

For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poem by Egyptian writer Hoda AbdelKader Mahmoud, translated by Mohamed ElSawi Hassan and Jennifer Jean. Simultaneously delighted by the temerity of a young interlocutor and agonizing over her own age and childlessness, the unnamed narrator of this poem faces herself in the mirror and worries about her frown lines, takes pleasure in the perfect skirt, and feels a wash of nostalgia at the sound of an old song. Torn between comfort in her new identity—the Auntie!—and anxiety over her future, she finds solace in the memory of her own mother and female ancestors, with whom she shares a bond through time, and beyond age.

You are old, Auntie!
This phrase delights, then turns me to face the mirror.
My heart is obliged to follow, every time, and
I catch it red-handed, in a small panic.
I joke with it about the idea of wrinkles and sagging breasts.
My hormones are still the same from late childhood!
And the fact that aging does not come.
If it does, it confirms my beloved will never arrive,
and that Auntie will never be replaced with Mom. READ MORE…

Announcing Our November Book Club Selection: Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito

December 2, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Josefina Massot

It’s rare for a novel to so deftly balance character and plot. It’s even rarer for a complex plot to sprout from such unlikely sources . . .

A winner of Mexico’s prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Award, Fabio Morábito’s El lector a domicilio is the first of his works to appear in English—and having read it, we can only hope there’s more to come. It’s hard to think of recent novels as well-rounded as this, which is why we’re delighted to announce it as our November Book Club pick: in just over two hundred pages, it delivers rich characters and riveting plots; it balances heart with humor; it sets us up only to shake our assumptions. More importantly, though, it finds value in lives that are often neglected, prompting us to fully see, hear, and touch those around us—an especially timely reminder as we continue to emerge from our pandemic solitudes.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.  

Home Reading Service by Fabio Morábito, translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer, Other Press, 2021

If ever a novel was deviously set up for stasis, it’s Fabio Morábito’s latest. Its protagonist, thirty-four-year-old Eduardo Valverde, is “stuck in second gear” after a case of reckless driving costs him his license, part of his job, and much of his time. Already living at home with an ailing father, he must now serve as a home reader to some of the other “elderly and infirm” in Cuernavaca—many of whom spend their days alone or half-silently with others, in dim rooms at the end of long passageways. Meanwhile, Eduardo has either cut or strained all ties with friends and family, and doesn’t seem keen on forming new ones; he, too, lives in “his own little world,” and while his court-mandated gig beats scrubbing public toilets, his heart just isn’t in it.

This is apparent to several of his listeners. “You come to our house,” one berates him, “sit on our sofa, open your briefcase, and with that magnificent voice of yours you read without understanding anything, as if we weren’t worthy of your attention.” To be fair, though, he’s not exactly dealing with a rapt audience. The Jiménez brothers are more eager to taunt him with vocal antics than take in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; the Vigils lose focus on Verne’s The Mysterious Island when they can’t read his lips (they appear to be deaf), and they don’t bother to mention it until he brings it up; Coronel Atarriaga drifts off like clockwork after two or three pages of Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe.

The characters’ mix of decrepitude, distance, and detachment sprouts from their broader environment. Once worthy of its nickname as the “City of Eternal Spring,” Cuernavaca has long since been “expelling young people and keeping only the old-timers around, like any godforsaken town of emigrants”—even “the bougainvillea on the fences are rotting.” The remaining population lives “closed up in houses and yards surrounded by high walls,” and these walls have “infected” them: “everyone walk[s] around stone-faced.” It is the product of “unchecked danger” at the hands of drug lords and mobsters, one of whom routinely visits the Valverde furniture store to collect a “protection fee.” But even this rattling occurrence is mentioned almost in passing, thus avoiding the immediate strike of conflict. The novel’s context in its first few dozen pages, then, seems hardly ripe for character or plot development. READ MORE…