Anyway, I thought to myself that it would be a good idea to try and read all of these before the award ceremony (I’ll be cutting it tight, and I don’t think the Solvej Balle book comes out before the ceremony) and write something kind of frivolous about each title. Like, in the vein of the old “Why This Book Should Win” posts for the Best Translated Book Award (R.I.P.). So here goes . . .

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Author: Layla Martínez

Translators: Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott

Publisher:

Publication Year (Original Text): 2021

Page Count: 153

Goodreads Rating: 4.16 with 11,800 ratings and 2,283 reviews

Notable Amazon Sales Ranking: #286 in Ghost Fiction

Publisher Description: The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.��It was built by a smalltime hustler as a��means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

In this lush translation by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott,��Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as “a��house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge,” this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.

Previous Familiarity:��So, I wanted to do this book for Open Letter and read a sample back in the summer of 2022. And then blew our chance by not getting in an offer in time for the auction. Which we likely would’ve lost. And that’s fine—Two Lines is excellent! But I did know the outline and general themes of the book before starting it this week.

Translators: Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott are both absolutely fantastic. I edited their translation of��Montevideo��by Enrique Vila-Matas (pub date ???) this past spring, and it was such a gifted, assured, excellent translation. Allowed for very strategic editing suggestions, whereas some translations feel like they need one more pass by the translator.

My Reading:��It’s a book about intergenerational trauma and, to some extent, the impact of Spain’s Civil War. I mean, there are��literally��skeletons in the closet in this. It also addresses the divisions between social classes, with the two narrators— granddaughter and grandmother—and isolated and not well off, yet are entangled for generations with the very wealthy Jarabos.

Reflections on Style:��The language in the book is a bit off-kilter, which is fitting with the gothic horror elements present throughout. (The scratching, the spirits inhabiting the house, the grandmother’s conversations with the “saints,” etc.) That said, it’s not wildly experimental or anything, just clipped with interesting word choices, such as in the opening line: “I walked in and the house pounced on me.” The chapters go back-and-forth from granddaughter to grandmother There were times where I’d put the book down, and when I picked it back up have to reorient myself as to who was talking since the voices are rather similar, but that’s a minor complaint.

Any Big Reviews?: In the��New Yorker, who said, “Shadowed by the Spanish Civil War and the remarkable cruelty of men, the violent tale unspools into a potent consideration of inherited trauma and the elusiveness of justice.”

Will It Be Discussed in Five Years:��I would say that’s not assured. If it wins, sure! But otherwise . . . maybe? And this isn’t a slight on the book! It’s just that most books fade from public consciousness after a couple three years—until they’re “rediscovered” a decade later. This does fit a certain type of book that’s quite popular now, so it should have great word-of-mouth.

What Authors/Books Does the Publisher Compare This To: Samanta Schweblin and Fernanda Melchor. And throw in Mariana Enriquez, who blurbed it.

Any Books You Would Recommend for Fans of��Wormwood:����by Lucío Cardoso and����by José Donoso.

Will it Win: My sense of things—from Winter in Sokcho through��The Words that Remain—is that short, localized, slightly strange fiction does really well for the National Book Award. And this book has those qualities! It’s the first I’ve read so I can’t judge it against the field, but, it has a 10% chance right now (shortlist hasn’t been announced), and based on these qualities, I’ll bump it up to 15% (and may adjust this later).

Your Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

How did you come to Dead Girls?

Annie McDermott: In fact, came to me. Chris Andrews, who translated—brilliantly—Selva’s first novel, , was too busy to take it on, so Carolina from Charco Press asked me to do it. She gave me a copy of the original after we met up in London one evening, and I remember reading the opening pages on the tube on my way home, among the discarded McDonald’s packaging and dozing office-workers, and getting shivers down my spine because it was so extraordinary.

Why should people read this book?

AM: Because it puts gender violence under the microscope and shows you what it’s made of—all the ugly component parts, wriggling around on the slide in full view. Nothing in this book is abstract: it’s all real, it’s all there on display, which is what makes reading it such a visceral and unforgettable experience.

What did you learn in the process of translating this book?

AM: In a way, I felt like I was translating for the very first time when I began work on . The stakes seemed so high—these were real women, real stories, real lives and deaths. Because of that, the accuracy of the translation seemed more crucial than ever, and my early drafts were quite wooden because I was clinging so tightly to the original. But as I carried on working, I learnt all over again that translating involves being faithful to so many things at once, like the rhythm and tone and emotional weight of each sentence, and that to achieve this you sometimes have to loosen your grip on the original.

What specific elements of style/structure/voice were the most challenging/rewarding about this project?

AM: The sparseness of the prose was a great challenge and, by the end, a great thrill—learning from Selva how much you can do with very few words, as long as they’re the right ones and in the right places.

If someone loved Dead Girls, what would you��recommend they read next?

AM: I edited this book, so I’m biased, but I’d say this even if I hadn’t: , by the Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández, translated by the inimitable Julia Sanches and published last month by And Other Stories. Set in an unnamed Central American country, it tells the story of several generations of women struggling to get on with their lives in the wake of a civil war. Like Dead Girls, it goes beyond the headlines and statistics to explore everyday reality for individual women in a corrupt, patriarchal and unequal society. Both books are preoccupied with historical memory and seem to be presenting themselves as a kind of alternative account, with a different focus and on a different scale, and telling a different kind of truth.

by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott ()

Yesterday, on Twitter, I promised that the rest of this month’s posts on new books in translation would be way more positive, but, well, sorry everyone—I momentarily forgot which books I was planning on writing about today (and next week). Let’s kick this off with a page from the “epilogue” to Dead Girls, which also serves as the book’s main thesis:

The new year began a month ago. In that time, at least ten women have been killed for being women. I say at least because these are the names that appeared in the papers, the ones that counted as news.

Mariela Bustos, stabbed twenty-two times, in Las Caleras, Córdoba. Marina Soledad Da Silva, beaten and thrown down a well, inn Nemesio Parma, Misiones. Zulma Brochero, knifed in the forehead, and Arnulfa Ríos, shot, both in Río Segundo, Córdoba. Paola Tomé, strangled, in Junín, Buenos Aires. Priscila Lafuente, beaten to death, half-burned on a barbecue and then thrown in a stream, in Berazategui. Carolina Arcos, killed with a blow to the head, on a building site in Rafaela, Santa Fe. Nanci Molina, stabbed, in Presidencia de la Plaza, Chaco. Luciana Rodríguez, beaten to death, in the capital of Mendoza. Querlinda Vásquez, strangled, in Las Heras, Santa Cruz.

We’re in summer now and it’s hot, almost like the morning of November 16th, 1986, when, in a way, this book began to be written, when the dead girl crossed my path. Now I’m forty and, unlike her and the thousands of women murdered in my country since then, I’m still alive. Purely a matter of luck.

The most frustrating aspect of this book is also its main point: women are murdered, over and over and over, and justice is never served. (All this summer I’ve had the opening line to A Frolic of His Own��stuck in my head: “Justice? —You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”) And in Dead Girls, you don’t even get the law.

The book centers around three murders that took place in “the interior” of Argentina in the 1980s, when Selva Almada was a teenager. Andrea Danne was stabbed to death in her own bed, without putting up a struggle. María Luisa Quevedo went missing in December 1983 and was found raped and strangled “on a patch of wasteland on the outskirts of the city. No one was tried for the murder.” And Sarita Mundín disappeared on March 12th, 1988, and declared dead when remains were found nine months later “on the banks of the Tcalamochita river [. . .] Another unresolved case.”

Over the course of the book, Almada talks to living relatives of the three girls, Andrea Danne’s boyfriend at the time of her murder, even a medium, but nothing is ever uncovered, the murderers are never found out, never arrested, never tried, never convicted. She details a number of suspects, of “likely” possibilities, all without resolution. This lack of closure is taken to an extreme with Sarita Mundín. With the advent of DNA testing, her bones were exhumed and tested. The body her sister thought was Sarita’s wasn’t. She could still be alive, although that’s not the consolation for her sister that one might hope for—instead, her sister believes that she was sold into the sex trade.

Bleak and unforgiving,��Dead Girls��draws attention to the secondary horror of violence in society. Not only are woman constantly in physical danger (and not just women—this book could be written about Black Americans or members of the trans community or, god, I can’t finish this list), but their murders are often left unresolved or, way too frequently, uninvestigated.

One other note: In a way,��Dead Girls��and��Mothers Don’t��by Katixa Agirre (available in Basque and Spanish, forthcoming in English) are mirrors of one another. In the case of Dead Girls, it’s billed as fiction, but is almost entirely true. (And reads more like an investigation than an invention.) In the case of��Mothers Don’t, it reads like an autofictional true-crime book about a woman who kills her child, but it’s completely fabricated. Both deal with tough subjects in differing ways, and would be interesting to read in conversation with each other. (In a couple years when Mothers Don’t comes out, that is.)

*

��by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson () is the ninth book of Mabanckou’s to appear in English (although maybe only the eighth to be available in the U.S.? I’m confused by the status of Black Bazaar) and his works generally receive a decent amount of review coverage and buzz. Personally, I still love����the best, but it’s probably because that was the first one I read . . . I haven’t seen this yet, but it totally fits with my “death” theme for this post:

Mabanckou’s riotous new novel, The Death of Comrade President, returns to the 1970s milieu of his awarding-winning novel��Black Moses, telling the story of Michel, a daydreamer whose life is completely overthrown when, in March 1977, just before the arrival of the rainy season, Congo’s Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered. Thanks to his mother’s kinship with the president, not even naive Michel can remain untouched. And if he is to protect his family, Michel must learn to lie.

Moving seamlessly between the small-scale worries of everyday life and the grand tragedy of postcolonial politics, Mabanckou explores the nuances of the human soul through the naive perspective of a boy who learns the realities of life—and how much must change for everything to stay the same.

*

��by Davide Sisto, translated from the Italian by Bonnie McClellan-Broussard ()��sounds fascinating:

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can’t avoid death; digital ghosts—electronic traces of the dead—appear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In��Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death.

Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death—including Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones—and discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people’s last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person’s account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

It also reminds me that a) I need to clear out my browser history more often, and delete my Twitter at least once a mental breakdown, and b) that the��Black Mirror��episode “” is trippy as shit.

But what I really want to write is about . I didn’t know Randall very well, but there are few human beings I think on with as much tenderness and respect and admiration as I do Randall. We met in Marfa in 2016 when we were both on Lannan Fellowships, and, in addition to a few interactions at readings and receptions, all of us who were there at the time (Amitava Kumar and Timothy Donnelly were also there) had the most amazing going away party for him. Aside from him warning me about (first I’d heard of them! but Randall was nervous about being out too late with these things around—and ) and telling me to email him next time I’m in Chapel Hill, I don’t remember any of the specifics of that conversation. Nevertheless, my memory is steeped in a warm glow, a sense of rightness and goodness. (I also very clearly remember his smile. Not just from that day, but from all our encounters. He had a really fantastic smile.)�� In the back of my mind, I’ve assumed for years that I would see him again someday in Chapel Hill and hang out. (And that I would read the giant novel he was working on in Marfa as soon as it was published.) And then, I found out, through John Keene’s social media, that Randall had passed away.

And as much as I want to rail against social media, and am afraid to read this book because of the philosophical issues surrounding death that it inevitably must bring up (my next birthday isn’t too far away, which makes this primetime for mortality thinking), I do have to say that the tributes and photos and memories being shared about Randall are really touching.

(There will be a for Randall on September 20th at 4pm eastern.)

*

by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund ()��is maybe the most timely (?) book in translation to come out this month. I mean, anything about the postal service . . . (Although I wish it was “Long Live the Muted Post Horn! W.A.S.T.E. 4EVA!”)

Ellinor, a thirty-five-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she’s not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she’s ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.

This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Hjorth’s trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

I wasn’t personally as into����as many others, but this sounds a bit more up my alley . . .