Posts featuring Enrique Vila-Matas

The 2020 Booker International Longlist

This year the specter of violence, visceral brutality, and even hauntings loom large.

Every year, the prestigious Booker International Prize is always announced to a crowd of critics, writers, and readers around the world with much aplomb, resulting in great celebration, some dissatisfaction, and occasional puzzlement. Here at Asymptote, we’re presenting a take by our in-house Booker-specialist Barbara Halla, who tackles the longlist with the expert curiosity and knowledge of a reader with voracious taste, in place of the usual blurbs and bylines, and additionally questioning what the Booker International means. If you too are perusing the longlist in hunt for your next read, let this be your (atypical) guide.

I tend to dread reading the Booker wrap-ups that sprout immediately after the longlist has been announced. The thing is, most critics and bloggers have not read the majority of the list, which means that the articles are at best summaries of pre-existing blurbs or reviews. Plus, this is my third year covering the Booker International, and I was equally apprehensive about finding a new way to spin the following main acts that now compose the usual post-Booker script: 1) the list is very Eurocentric (which says more about the state of the publishing world than the judges’ tastes); 2) someone, usually The Guardian, will mention that the longlist is dominated by female writers, although the split is around seven to six, which reminds me of that untraceable paper arguing that when a particular setting achieves nominal equality, that is often seen as supremacy; and 3) indie presses are killing it, which they absolutely are because since 2016, they have deservedly taken over the Booker, from longlist to winner.

I don’t mean to trivialize the concerns listed above, especially in regards to the list’s Eurocentrism. Truth is, we talk a lot about the unbearable whiteness of the publishing world, but in writings that discuss the Booker, at least, we rarely dig deeper than issues of linguistic homogeneity and the dominance of literatures from certain regions. For instance: yes, three of the four winners of the International have been women, including all four translators, but how many of them have been translators of color? To my understanding, that number is exactly zero. How many translators of color have even been longlisted? The Booker does not publish the list of titles submitted for consideration, but if it did, I am sure we would notice the same predominance of white voices and white translators. I know it is easier said than done, considering how hard it is to sell translated fiction to the public in the first place, but if we actually want to tilt the axis away from the western literary canon, the most important thing we can do is support and highlight the work of translators of color who most likely have a deeper understanding of the literatures that so far continue to elude not just prizes, but the market in its entirety. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

The latest news from Brazil, Egypt, and Spain!

This week, we take off on tour just south of the equator, where Editor-at-Large for Brazil, Maíra Mendes Galvão, gives us the scoop on Indie Book Day and some big-time literary awards. Then it’s east to Egypt, where we’ll catch up with Editor-at-Large Omar El-Adl about some exciting recent and upcoming events. Finally in Spain, Editor-at-Large Carmen Morawski highlights new releases and a chance to win poetry collections!

Maíra Mendes Galvão, Editor-at-Large for Brazil, has the latest from the lit scene:

The National Library Foundation of Brazil has issued an open call for publishers from all over the world interested in translating and publishing works by Brazilian authors to send in their proposals. Selected works will be eligible for a grant. Publishers have until May 2 to apply.

Raduan Nassar, veteran Brazilian writer with a short but acclaimed bibliography, has made headlines after giving a politically-charged speech on February 17 when he accepted the Camões Prize, issued by the Ministry of Culture of Brazil in partnership with Portugal. Mr. Nassar has called out the present government’s controversial claim to power, calling it anti-democratic and pointing out specific instances of misconduct by the administration, the president’s cabinet, and the Supreme Court nominees.

The popular Plana Fair, catalyst of a movement to popularize self-publishing and small publishing houses in Brazil, is holding its fifth edition under the name Plana – Art Book Fair at the São Paulo Biennial building, taking over the ground floor and the mezzanine of the iconic Pavilion Ciccillo Matarazzo from March 17 to 19. Plana will feature around 150 national and international exhibitors and a parallel program of talks, screenings, performances, and workshops.

Brazil is taking part on this year’s Indie Book Day on March 18, an initiative to promote and popularize independent publishing. It is a concerted action with a simple proposition: to go to a bookstore, any bookstore, on this particular day, buy an independently published book and post a picture of it on social networks with the hashtag #indiebookday.

Casa Guilherme de Almeida, the São Paulo State museum dedicated to Modernist journalist, poet, and translator Guilherme de Almeida, is holding a two-day conference dedicated to the translation of classics—the 3rd Translation of Classics in Brazil Conference—with the theme Re-translations in Conversation. Speakers will focus on comparative efforts of the differences between the premises, procedures, and results of translations of the same classical works.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Updates from Spain, Morocco, and the United States, from the Asymptote team

This week, we visit Morocco with new Editor-at-Large Jessie Stoolman, who tells us about a new play based on a classic novel. Then in Spain, we have a publishing update with Editor-at-Large Carmen Morawski, and onto the United States, we strap in for today’s Presidential Inauguration and writers’ reactions to the historic event. 

Editor-at-Large Jessie Stoolman reports from Morocco:

A theatrical interpretation of Mohammed Khair Ed-dine’s novel Le Déterreur [نباش القبور], adapted by Cédric Gourmelon and starring Ghassan El-Hakim, is currently on tour in Morocco, with the next performance set to take place on January 21 at the House of Culture [دار الثقابة] in Tetouan.  In the novel, a man from southern Morocco shares his countercurrent perspectives on living in a marginalized community inside a wider, fractured, postcolonial space as he recounts his life story.

Winner of numerous literary awards, including Jean Cocteau’s Les infants terribles literary prize for his novel Agadir, Khair Ed-dine (or “The Blue Bird,” as he is sometimes called) mainly wrote poetry and novels in French. He is credited with establishing a new style of writing, what he coined guérilla linguistique, that resists, in both form and content, linguistic or societal domination. Considering his prolific contributions to the genre of revolutionary writing, it is unsurprising that Khair Ed-dine is commonly grouped among renowned, twentieth century North African authors writing in French, such as Assia Djebar, Yacine Kateb, Abdellatif Laabi, Driss Chraibi, and Tahar Ben Jelloun.

Some of Khair Ed-dine’s work has been translated into German and English. For more about the German translation of his posthumously published novel Once Upon a Time There Was a Happy Couple (Es war einmal ein glückliches Paar), Qantara.de published this article, which includes a summary of the book with excerpts and information about the writer.  Similarly, to read a sample of Khair-Eddine’s poetry translated into English, see this piece from Jadaliyya, that includes four poems from his collection Ce Maroc!

In other literary news, only a few more weeks until Morocco’s largest book fair will be back!  The 23rd edition of the International Book Fair in Casablanca will open on February 9.

READ MORE…

My 2015

For me, being able to chew on something I’ve read throughout my day is as essential as the coffee that gets things moving in the morning.

I’ve been lucky enough to have enjoyed most everything I’ve read this year and a number stick out in my mind (Erpenbeck’s End of Days and Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth for instance), but the two I’m writing about here occurred one after the other in the past month: Enrique Vila-Matas’ Because She Never Asked and Daniel Sada’s One Out of Two. I wonder, though, if it’s not recency-bias so much as the circumstances under which I read them.

I’ve been working a short term job–which happens to have ended today, which sounds like the intro to one of Vila-Matas’ books, come to think of it–and found myself riding the L on a daily basis for the first time in years. I try to travel without a bag, so having books that fit into an inner pocket of my vest is somewhat key (and inner pockets in one’s jacket: so very, very key). Both these volumes, slim and not overly tall, were ideal travel companions on those grounds and, what’s more, somehow enhanced the physical experience of riding the train, too.

Because She Never Asked is as playful as any of Vila-Matas’ work: stories within stories, diving and looping in and out of one another; narrators less unreliable than slowly unhinging; a prose that skips along at a pace at once jaunty and leisurely. In many ways (and as Michael Orthofer suggested in his review), Because She Never Asked functions as a great entry point to Vila-Matas, but I would also offer that this work is perfectly suited for a short trip on public transit. The story moves along, sure, which is something of a key component to anything read in a public space, but it also possesses a light density: that is, one can dip in and out without feeling like anything has been lost, but at some point, some aspect of the story will go off in one’s head, motivating a return to story, a desire to dive back in and parse it further. For me, being able to chew on something I’ve read throughout my day is as essential as the coffee that gets things moving in the morning. READ MORE…