Posts featuring Anne McLean

A Sacred Collaboration with Nature: An Interview with Natalia García Freire and Victor Meadowcroft

May 22, 2025 | in Book Club, Interviews | by René Esaú Sánchez

I try to find answers in nature, in the mountains, the volcanoes, the animals—I wait for them to tell me something.

One finds a symphony of lyricism, naturalism, and generational phantasms in A Carnival of Atrocities, the latest novel from Ecuadorian writer Natalia García Freire and our Book Club selection for the month of May. Through a succession of perspectives that enmesh and build, a town and its chaotic history comes into view, and with it an illumination of postcolonial fractures, ecological conflicts, and tensions between the human and the divine. In this following interview, the author and her translator, Victor Meadowcroft, speak to us about the creation and the English rhythms of this complex narrative, as well as its place in the great, varied canon of Latin American writing.

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.

René Esaú Sánchez (RES): I would like to start by asking both of you about the title of the novel, A Carnival of Atrocities. The original title in Spanish is Trajiste contigo el viento, which could be translated like You Brought The Wind With You, highlighting the mythical connection between Mildred—the character at the center of the novel—and nature.

Victor Meadowcroft (VM): That was actually a publisher’s decision. My original working title was the literal translation of You brought the wind with you. We also changed the title of Natalia’s debut novel, This World Does Not Belong To Us (originally, Nuestra piel muerta), so that could possibly be why they decided to do the same with the second one. Or maybe they thought that the title didn’t sound as nice as it does in Spanish, because they had asked me to look through the book to see if I could find some lines that might work well. I came up with a list of ten possible titles and the publisher loved A Carnival of Atrocities; at one point she said she wanted to call all her books A Carnival of Atrocities from then on. And Natalia was very happy to go with that title, so it was a publisher led decision, rather than a translator led one.

RES: What are your opinions on the title, Natalia?

Who Will Win the 2019 Man Booker International?

May 20, 2019 | in Essays, News | by Barbara Halla

I tried to decipher from their inflection and word choices whether perhaps one of the books held their attention more than the others.

We know you’re just as eager as we are to learn who will win the Man Booker International Prize tomorrow, so we’ve enlisted our very own Barbara Halla to walk you through her predictions! A member of this year’s Man Booker International Shadow Panel, Barbara has read every book on the short- and longlists, making her our resident expert. Read on for her top 2019 MBI picks!

Last year, someone called the Man Booker International my version of the UEFA Champions League, which is fairly true. Although I don’t place any bets, I do spend a lot of my time trying to forecast and argue about who will win the prize. And I am not alone. For a community obsessed with words and their interpretation, it is not surprising that many readers and reviewers will try to decipher the (perhaps inexistent) breadcrumbs the judges leave behind, or go through some Eurovision level of political analysis to see how non-literary concerns might favour one title over the other. Speaking from personal experience, this literary sleuthing has been successful on two out of three occasions. After a meeting with some of the judges of the 2016 MBI at Shakespeare & Company, I left with the sense that Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (translated by Deborah Smith) would take home the prize that year. In 2018, Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (translated by Jennifer Croft) seemed to be everyone’s favourite, and despite a strong shortlist, I was delighted, although not shocked, to see it win.

The winner of this year’s Man Booker prize is proving more elusive. The shortlist is strong, but no one title has become a personal, or fan-, favourite. And I find the uncertainty at this stage in the competition very interesting. It is almost in direct contrast to how the discussion around the prize unfolded between the unveiling of the longlist and the shortlist. When the longlist was announced on 12 March, it was immediately followed by a flurry of online reactions that are all part of a familiar script: despite predictions by “expert” readers, few big names and titles made it onto the longlist. With good reason, some literary critics addressed the list’s shortcomings with regards to its linguistic and national diversity. Independent presses were congratulated for again dominating the longlist, a reward for their commitment to translated fiction. But as dedicated readers tackled the longlist head-on, there was a general feeling of disappointment with a good portion of the titles, which allowed the best to rise to the top quickly.