alicia yanez cossio – Three Percent

Ecuador vs. Cameroon [Women's World Cup of Literature: Second Round]

Chad Post — Wed, 24 Jun 2015 15:00:00 +0000

This match was judged by Margaret Carson, who co-chairs the and crunches numbers for (WiT).

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

In today’s match, Ecuador is represented by Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands, translated by Amalia Gladhart, and Cameroon by Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night, translated by Tamsin Black.

Here’s one of those odd WWCOL matchings that other judges have commented on: under what circumstances would these two novels have otherwise been paired? The playing fields could not be more different. Beyond the Islands takes its cues from that well-worn playbook, magic realism, while Dark Heart of the Night tangles with cruelty, horror, violence, blood and guts. This is a match in which Miano’s dangerous writing squares off against Yánez Cossío’s safer and somewhat recycled magic realist storytelling.

In eight, mostly self-contained chapters, Beyond the Islands (in Spanish, Más allá de las islas Galápagos, and what’s so clunky about “Galapagos” that it was left out in the translation?) draws from a rich storehouse of imagery and fantastical elements to portray eight characters, each with something a little “special.” Morgan, a green-eyed pirate with a peg leg, Iridia, a tenderhearted prostitute, Alirio, a poet whose pockets are stuffed with abandoned poems, others. Each one meets a mist-shrouded end and gets transported elsewhere, often on wings. That’s where the magic comes in. Iridia, for example, ascends to the great beyond in a grand Chagallian flourish. As translated by Amalia Gladhart:

Iridia began to ascend the celestial ramp . . . [she] might have lost her balance, but a supernatural force was carrying her obliquely upwards toward the center of the sun, with the mechanism of an automatic staircase. Iridia was light and she kept walking; she was slowly gaining altitude like a weightless figure from the brush of Marc Chagall. From time to time she paused to breathe and reestablish her balance, although she knew that her shoes had sprouted soft suction pads that stuck to the ray, which was the same one that trapped the white butterfly that emerged from Morgan’s foot, and that illuminated the viscous dampness, like semen, that had been Alirio.

Exuberantly fantastical passages like this happen over and over in the novel, and they might be just your thing. But as someone who has been hearing about and reading Latin American magical realism for over thirty years, I wanted at times to yell, “ya basta,” enough. It felt as if the team were dribbling in circles, running down the clock, indulging in flashy play for its own sake. Look! Another player has sprouted wings and is suspended midair!

But it’s a tenacious genre. To my surprise, the game would pick up, new players would be introduced, each with an idiosyncratic tic. Long dull stretches would be followed by something stupendously ridiculous, like the story of the life-size woman doll that when filled with warm water turns into a kind of high-maintenance sex toy. It’s almost all harmless, with metamorphoses rather than outright death, except for the cruel burning of the plant-gatherer and healer Brigita, who’s taken to be a witch.

You might ask why a magic realist novel first published in 1980 comes into English thirty years later, well after the heyday of Latin American magic realism; but put those questions aside. Here it is, still playing with zest and wacky energy, winging its way down the field to score a few goals.

On the other hand, Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night (published in France in 2005 as L’intérieur de la nuit) plays a much more disturbing game. Set in a remote village in an unnamed African country, the novel tells the story of Ayané, the only child of the Aama and Eké, a couple who ignore the traditional customs and rules of the village and are ostracized as a result. But it’s just as well, because it allows Ayané to escape the destiny of other girls whose mothers “taught them to live as they had done, with gritted teeth, a ramrod-straight back and vanquished hope” (in Tamsin Black’s translation). Ayané is sent away to school and grows up, mostly off stage, to become an enterprising and spirited young woman.

Up to this point the novel seems like a rare coming-of-age story of a young African woman, but then it suddenly turns into gruesome bloodbath. Ayané’s return home to tend to her dying mother coincides with the arrival in the village of a band of drug-crazed revolutionaries in need of soldiers. There is resistance, followed by page after page of unbearable brutality, witnessed by Ayané from the high branch of a tree. You might find yourself recoiling from the descriptions of decapitations, castration, the murder of a child, disembowelments, the cooking and eating of entrails and brains, sustained for over forty pages. Once again, you want to yell, “enough!”

When I first read this novel I hated it. Its violence and cruelty seemed gratuitous, over the top, frankly sadistic. But just as the sporting world has its “extreme sports,” maybe literature too has its “extremes” that deeply disturb and push at whatever limits are out there? Of course it does; the orgies of violence in Dark Heart make you think of the Marquis de Sade, Alejandra Pizarnik in The Bloody Countess, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker. Contrary to what we might think, Miano is not doing social realism. She’s not chronicling horrendous acts of violence in Africa (which of course are not unique to Africa) in order to cater to the expectations of outsiders. Whether or not she succeeds is another matter, but she could care less about enchanting the reader. She’s asking herself: can this be described in words?

I won’t overdo the soccer analogies, but I considered: which of the two novels “goes for it”? Which one scuffs up the turf, does some damage, earns a few red cards, challenges some notions about what women write about when they write novels?

For her more ambitious game plan, Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night advances, beating Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands 4-3.

And now half of the final six are set, with Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night joining Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine and Atwood’s Oryx & Crake in the upcoming quarterfinals.

Tomorrow’s match features Nigeria’s Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie up against Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent.

Japan vs. Ecuador [Women's World Cup of Literature: First Round]

Chad Post — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 14:00:00 +0000

This match was judged by M. Lynx Qualey, who runs the website, and can be found on Twitter at @arablit.

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, translated by Stephen Snyder, and Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands, translated by Amalia Gladhart, take two very different stylistic approaches. The first is spare, light, and beautiful, while the second bounces along wildly, piling words on top of words (on top of words). But both are collections of linked stories that confuse magic and reality. One takes us around Japan and the other around the Galapagos.

Ogawa scores first with her tidily crafted tales that give us strange, miniature portraits of rejection, with perfectly tended sentences ably re-crafted by Snyder. Each of Ogawa’s creepy story-portraits is linked to the next, sometimes through a character, but more often through a single image. The stories aren’t linked organically, but through their recurring images: a strawberry shortcake, a torture device, apartment number 508.

She scores again as the stories go off-kilter. Each tale of revenge isn’t much in itself: a man won’t leave his wife for his lover, a father doesn’t properly look after his daughter, a woman kills and buries her husband. In the course of them, we hear about violence, but we don’t feel its impact. Instead, the camera cuts away just as a human tongue rolls semi-comically out of a pocket. It soon becomes clear that the violence has been staged for us, and are we to enjoy it? A character’s boyfriend asks, “Do you find it amusing that someone died?”

The echoes grow stranger as they move from one story to the next: kiwis, tomatoes, hand-shaped carrots, torture devices, a dying tiger. As the stories progress, the earlier tales reappear curled up inside the later ones. The women in the stories grow older, clutching their manuscripts, or their reams of blank paper.

None of the individual stories is particularly memorable. Instead, what fascinates about the collection is the echoes that move from one story and the next, often pointing back at the reader. These aren’t really dark tales. They’re light and creepy, twisted in their reflection of the reader looking at the strange violence of rejection, in a mirror that includes a look at ourselves.

Alicia Yanez Cossio’s playful, satiric Beyond the Islands is also a collection of short tales, each chapter focusing on a character who’s at the edge of the world, on the Galapagos Islands. The characters are wonderfully storybook: the pirate with buried treasure, the poet who’s lost his muse, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the narcissistic scientist, the spinster schoolmarm, the grieving mother, the witch-healer, and the baker with the blow-up baroness.

All of them are migrants in some way, and all have come to live among the strange animals on the beautiful, forbidding islands. Each is pushed to his or her outer limits in this place where land shifts its location and the rules of life and death are different than they are elsewhere. Many of the sections—particularly the poet and the scientist—are told with such over-the-top joie de vivre that the reader, thanks to Amalia Gladhart’s translation, goes bouncing over the sentences, with humor and exaggeration.

Everyone is pushed to absurdity here, as for instance the scientist who hijacks a plane in his self-important eagerness to get to the Galapagos (and to his lover), and the spinster schoolmarm who whips up the entire island in the cause of greeting Princess Anne.

This novel scores again and again with its bouncy sentences, its exaggerated marginal characters, the exploration of place beyond place, and the pure joy of its delivery.
Both books have their own strange wit, but Beyond the Islands is a thrill, even steering the reader in to a ridiculous, moving finish. Beyond the Islands definitively beats Revenge 4-2.

And that does it for the first round of the inaugural Women’s World Cup of Literature!

For Ecuador, Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands will next face off against Cameroon’s Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano on Wednesday, June 24t.

The second round will kick off on Monday with Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood (Canada) taking on The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (New Zealand). That’s a huge match! Experience against youth. A book about the future versus one set in the past. A reasonably sized novel compared with a giant. This should be interesting . . .

Tomorrow’s match will be judged by Rachel Crawford, and features Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent against Sweden’s The Stranger by Camilla Läckberg.

France vs. Ecuador [World Cup of Literature: First Round]

Chad Post — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 14:00:00 +0000

This match was judged by P.T. Smith. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket.

France and Ecuador take to the pitch in what appears to be a serious mismatch. France, represented by Prix Goncourt winner Michel Houellebecq, teamed up with translator Gavin Bowd, puts forth The Map and the Territory. Its first moves on the field show the level it wants to play at: Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have posed for a painting, and the protagonist, another artist, this time fictional, is struggling to finish it. Houellebecq’s strategy is clear. He’s going to portray the contemporary world, the high-brow of commercialism, and while his flair and spite is French, he’s speaking to the English, to Americans, to the Western world.

Against the strength of the French side is them oldest contender in the tournament. Pushed into service without another able to take its place representing Ecuador, Alicia Yánez Cossío’s The Potbellied Virgin, aided by Amalia Gladhart’s translation, arrives to the tournament as an outsider. Set in the 60s and often reaching further into the past, living wholly in one small Ecuadorian village, The Potbellied Virgin can’t compete with The Map and the Territory on the same terms, to have any chance of moving on, it must embrace its own style, letting the French be as adventurous in the attack as Houellebecq wants, hoping to keep him from scoring, looking for its own opportunities to counterattack.

Houellebecq is indeed looking to be on the offensive, to strike often and quickly, against art, for art, against commercialism, for commercialism, against himself, and, through Jed, for himself. Yet, at this point he is a veteran, suave and poised on the ball, no overly-ambitious balls or reckless challenges. He understands when to be showy, creative, and why. The passes, towards the goal, away, towards again, are intricate. Of the attitude of French hotels Jed imagines:

a rich young urban couple without children, aesthetically very decorative, still in the first phase of their love affair—and for this reason quick to marvel at everything, in the hope of building up a store of beautiful memories that would come in handy when they reached the difficult year, perhaps enabling them to overcome a crisis in their relationship. They represented, for any professional in the hotel-restaurant trade, the archetype of ideal clients.

Houellebecq is probing the defense, pointing out the weak spots, the ways that we as humans give in to, thrive on, love commercial materialism, but then he’s letting us have it, writing of an artist dedicated to it, and the people caught up in it.

Against the hipness, the humor, the way the reader is rewarded while putting forth little of his own effort, Ecuador plays a complicated, defensive, possession game. Potbellied Virgin is a denser affair, inward-turning. It is slower than Map and the Territory, patient and asking the reader to pay more attention while not being as easily thrilled. In a unnamed Ecuadorian village two families rival for power, or more accurately, one family dominates while the other passes the time sitting on a bench, smoking cigarettes and remembering when they had land and power. Yánez Cossío sets opposites against each other, but they do not get split in the obvious ways. The matriarchy controls the town through religion, through their devotion to the town’s miracle idol, that Potbellied Virgin. The Benavides are conservative, but younger, newer to the town, and rich, rewarded by capitalism, and notably lighter-skinned, blonde, closer to those rewarded by imperialism. The other family, the Pandos, is the patriarchy, devoid of influence, tied to communism, irreligious, and though not native Indians, aligned with them rather than the American influence from the north.

The Potbellied Virgin may not be as bunkered down as Greece is in the Real World Cup, but it is content to keep the ball without moving forward. It wants to set up this self-contained world, tell the history of the town, of the political turmoil of the whole country, of the miracle of the flatbellied virgin becoming the Potbellied Virgin. Its defensiveness is not thuggish tackles or packing five men in the box, but of little passes amongst teammates, and beautiful ones at times. The relationships in the village matter for everything. The sons and daughters who switch their allegiance from one family to another are the forces that are quieted throughout much of the story, but build into the best chances at goal. Holding onto the ball, playing beautiful passes in the dusty streets of the village may not move forward, but is still nice to watch, and becomes an expression of a life outside of the world of Houellebecq’s grasping:

The acid deposits in her overworked veins ache, ache with the pain that will last until her death without respite or remedy, because she will always be standing among the large boulders of the river washing her clothes, the clothes of Magdalena Benavides who passes her time galloping from the hacienda into town, and who dents her so much clothing that isn’t even dirty, for the pleasure of making her work and harassing her with the hard soap of bad fortune.

In control of the match, Houellebecq tells of Jed Martin’s career as an artist, and his life as a man. He has a distant connection with his father, brought close by their shared isolation and their acceptance of that isolation, and though he has great loves in his life, Houellebecq never gives us hope that they will break Martin from his isolation. Besides, if those loves did take him from solitary life, we cannot imagine room for his art. Jed is a Zidane, a Pirlo, playing his own game in the middle of the pitch, independent, grumpy, yet making connections no one else is able to see until after the fact. By creating a visual artist, with works that if brought to life could be as interesting and successful in real life as they are in the book, Houellebecq threatens to score early but Ecuador manages to hold on. Until just before half-time that is, when the pleasure of The Map and the Territory, through pure enjoyment of the game, playing while having fun, puts through a lovely ball (Houellebecq’s portrayal of himself, beaten, a wrecked man, but through Jed’s eyes, somewhat magnificent), cleanly finished, and takes a lead into the locker room.

Drawn out, The Potbellied Virgin needs to press forward to tie. It is a task Yánez Cossío is up to. To solve a country-wide drought, the Benavides are willing to send out the Potbellied Virgin to travel the country, followed by rain. When the army becomes involved, the Pando convince the town that the Virgin is being sold, greedy religious-capitalism from the Benavides, and the town rises up, fighting off the army with whatever is at hand, mainly the mattresses they were sleeping on in the church while protecting the Virgin:

But what gives the greatest results in the uneven and ferocious combat are the mattresses. With the bare mattress blows they charge the sacrilegious troops calling them thieves, faggots, and all the son-of-a-bitches they can muster. A cloud of dust obscures the sun and the sheep’s wool of all the disemboweled mattresses covers the streets and plaza.

With humor and violence, all the while staying reserved, sticking to the slow style that kept the match equal for so long, The Potbellied Virgin ties the match at one.

But right after, The Map and the Territory presses again. The relationship between Jed and Houellebecq deepens, and so the relationship between Houellebecq and Houellebecq becomes more compelling, an old love briefly returns, human connection again and again seems briefly possible before falling off. The Potbellied Virgin is playing with confidence, happy to have made things level eager for another one. Yet, Ecuador is overexposed, the conflict between Pandos and Benavides heats up, without either side gaining anything.

With the massive success of Jed’s art career, a project of portraits culminating in one of Houellebecq, he almost finds happiness. He is rich, he has a chance with his greatest love. There’s a happy ending in sight, and even if we bemoan sappy, unearned happy endings, don’t we still want one sometimes? Destroying one so perfectly set up, what’s the reward in that? Houellebecq finds it. It is lost not because of cynicism, not because of the dark brooding that feeds every summer blockbuster now, but because for Jed, it is overwhelming, happiness is impossible to embrace, it is too fleeting, and must be caught in the perfect moment, or it’s lost, and that moment can be, will be, terrifying. Jed does not turn to angst or depression, but a sort of paralysis, and when this is so compassionately understood, articulated, given compassion, The Map and the Territory goes up 2-1.

Ecuador is more desperate now. The Benavides begin to lose their control of the village, their daughters not living up to their roles as living icons. Power and wealth become more important than their faith. The Virgin, belief in her miracle, becomes fully a tool of control, no longer true devotion. Their matriarch, Doña Carmen blackmails and bribes rivals into aligning with her. The three daughters of a former communist are rewarded with riches, if they act out the role of virginal caretakers for the Potbellied Virgin. Purity no longer matters, just the obedience that faith in it once created. When Doña Carmen begins to paint threats on her own walls in order to foment dissent between her rivals, any sense of herself is lost. These risks, this destruction of the village, looks like it is going to pay off. Crosses bang in, but are too high, or headers go wide.

In the midst of this, The Map and the Territory makes a substitution. Satire, humor, art, commercialism, are left in, but pure literary fiction is taken off, and sent on in its place is top-flight genre fiction. French police vomit at a horrific crime scene, aging detectives work with their young replacements to solve a high-profile murder, and our former protagonist becomes part of the investigation. The switch does wonders. Losing no pace, no fluidity, but gaining width and pace where exhaustion had it lagging, France scores again almost immediately after the substitution, to take what seems like an impossible to overcome 3-1 lead.

From then, Ecuador fights back fiercely. Finally giving in to rough challenges, unafraid of hitting again and again to take control of the ball, The Potbellied Virgin never stops threatening France’s goal. Knowing that violence has suited Houellebecq well, Yánez Cossío tries her hand at it, with the accidental death of a child in the conflict that Doña Carmen created, in the awful and haunting retribution for that accident, where our hearts break as the offender lays dying, accepting that death. Past that, though, she offers that thing Houellebecq denies us: successful love. The lovers need to exile themselves, but there is hope for a return one day, for: “the man of flesh and blood, of weakness and lunacy that he was until a short time ago, becomes the mystic the town needs to move ahead through so many troubles, for it seems even the image of the Virgin was wearing out . . .” With that, with relentless fierceness and hope, Ecuador scores in the 87th minute, bringing it to 3-2 and giving hope.

It was not to be. France holds on to the victory we expected them to take, too wily, too thrilling, rewarding us with ease, but Ecuador was inspired, and created a memorable match, one you recount any time you’re at a bar, one too many in, telling tales of sports and literature. It’s the type of performance that truly makes you hope that Alicia Yánez Cossío has the chance to compete in translation again.

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P.T. Smith is a writer and critic living in Vermont. He has written for Three Percent, BOMB, Quarterly Conversation, and most recently Bookslut.

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