��by Lucie Rico, translated from the French by Daria Chernysheva (World Editions)

Upon her mother’s death, Paule Rojas, a vegetarian city-dweller, returns to the chicken farm where she grew up. Pressured to fulfil her mother’s last request, Paule rediscovers pleasure and meaning in running the old family business. Yet, eager to bring something of herself to a family tradition, Paule embarks on increasingly intricate ways of helping the chickens to self-actualize before their deaths. She records the chickens’ life stories, adding them to the labels that decorate the vacuum-packed meat sent off to market—an individual biography for every chicken. But not all runs smooth in her childhood village; Paule finds she has few friends and many enemies. She is forced to spread her wings, relocate her livestock, and oversee the construction of an urban farm of never-before-seen practices and proportions.

This was mentioned during out Consortium Book Sales & Distribution pre-sales conference call, in which one of the CBSD team members said that it would make a good comp title for��River��by Laura Vinogradova, which Kaija Straumanis is translating from the Latvian for us. (Spoiler: An excerpt will appear here tomorrow.) I’m not sure how much chicken slaughter or death talk I’m really there for these days, but stories of a woman making her own way (or struggling to do so), like in River, Wolfskin��by Lara Moreno,��Un Amor��by Sara Mesa—these books are right in my wheelhouse right now.

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by Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Orenda Books)

“The wealthy, powerful Snæberg clan has gathered for a family reunion at a futuristic hotel set amongst the dark lava flows of Iceland’s remote Snæfellsnes peninsula.

Petra Snæberg, a successful interior designer, is anxious about the event, and her troubled teenage daughter, Lea, whose social-media presence has attracted the wrong kind of followers. Aging carpenter Tryggvi is an outsider, only tolerated because he’s the boyfriend of Petra’s aunt, but he’s struggling to avoid alcohol because he knows what happens when he drinks . . . Humble hotel employee, Irma, is excited to meet this rich and famous family and observe them at close quarters . . . perhaps too close . . .

As the weather deteriorates and the alcohol flows, one of the guests disappears, and it becomes clear that there is a prowler lurking in the dark.

But is the real danger inside . . . within the family itself?

Masterfully cranking up the suspense, Eva Björg Ægisdóttir draws us into an isolated, frozen setting, where nothing is as it seems and no one can be trusted, as the dark secrets and painful pasts of the Snæberg family are uncovered . . . and the shocking truth revealed.

Succession��meets��And Then There Were None . . . A Golden Age mystery for the 21st Century, with a shocking twist.”

Couple, few things: 1) Eva Björg Ægisdóttir’s series (of which this is book number four) is “Forbidden Iceland,” which is pretty sexy; 2) I’ve added a ton��of Orenda Books to the database recently, so check them out if you’re looking for really interesting international crime fiction; 3) before helping lead a trip of Ģ����ý alums through Iceland, I read approximately 1,000 Icelandic books, from Laxness to��Njall’s Saga.��And, more relevant to this, a number of Icelandic mysteries and thrillers.

My absolute favorite so far has been Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, whose Thóra Gudmundsdóttir series I’ve been enjoying. Especially on audiobook. And especially, especially because I listen at 1.2x speed, which makes everyone’s accent sound both whimsically sing-song, and sort of British?

Anyway, based on how much I’ve enjoyed her books (and the Ragnar Jónasson books from Orenda), I’m willing to read any Icelandic mysteries Orenda puts forth. I don’t know why this is called the “Forbidden Iceland” series, but I like that it’s set in a reasonably small Icelandic town (Arkanes, pop. 8,000), which is a feature of Icelandic crime that I love, with the small number of characters lending itself to Agatha Christie-type mysteries.��

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by Catherine Leroux, translated from the French by Susan Ouriou (Biblioasis)

In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.

When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future,��The Future��is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.

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by Liliana Colanzi, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (New Directions)

“The seven stories of You Glow in the Dark��unfold in a Latin America wrecked and poisoned by human greed, and yet Colanzi’s writing—at once sleek and dense, otherworldly and intensely specific—casts an eerily bright spell over the wreckage. Some stories seem to be set in a near future; all are superbly executed and yet hard to pin down; they often leave the reader wondering: Was that realistic or fantastic? Colanzi draws power from Andean cyberpunk just as much as from classic horror writers, and this daring is matched by her energizing simultaneous use of multiplicity and fragmentation—the book’s stylistic trademarks. Freely mixing worlds, she uses the Bolivian altiplano as the backdrop for an urban dystopia and blends Aymara with Spanish. Colanzi never gets bogged down; she can be brutal and direct or light-handed and subtle. Her materials are dark, but always there’s the lift of her vivid sense of humor.��You Glow in the Dark seizes the reader’s attention (from the title on) and holds it: this is a book that announces the arrival of a major new talent.”

This is on here both because I am intrigued in reading it (Bolivia has some killer writers in translation), but also because I read Colanzi’s debut,��Our Dead World, for a forthcoming “Reading the Dalkey Archive” post, right before I saw an announcement for this collection. (In fact, I was going to post a piece about her this week, but I’ve been wicked sick and am all wrapped up in writing about a��different��Dalkey title . . .)

I’m not a huge short story reader or admirer, but I’m going to try and read more collections in the future. Little bits of bite-size fun amid the gigantic, epic books that I seem to always be editing or proofing. (Although, and the full list will be available soon, the Summer 2024 Open Letter list consists of all books under 200 pages. BUCKING OUR OWN TREND.)

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form by Douglas Glover
203 pgs. | pb | 9781771962919 | $21.95

Review by Brendan Riley

The Erotics of Restraint is an excellent companion—with a no less provocative title—to Mr. Glover’s previous collection, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published in 2013.

Glover’s essays are models of clarity, each offering a precise, finely articulated exegesis, and highly accessible, practical examinations of structure and rhetorical intention. With robust attention to detail, Glover illuminates how the living structure of powerful, effective writing draws readers to outstanding books and stories and makes other writers, both aspiring and accomplished, strive to compose them.

The title essay, one of nine, examines the dramatic social configurations of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which Glover declares “a brilliant book, a great book, breathtaking in its invention and orchestration.” In 10 laser-focused sections, this essay explores how the morally steadfast Fanny Price becomes the apophatic pearl of great price by not yielding to the superficial temptations of courtship, young love, and family pressure.

Glover’s admitted obsession with Mansfield Park—an unflagging, and equally steadfast, concern with the structural nuances of literary craft and meaning—also drives the other essays in this collection. These pieces are engineering symposia, and Glover takes stories and sentences down practically to the atomic level, not showing how to write a story, (not, as I mentioned in my review of Attack of the Copula Spiders, any rote, write-by-the-numbers instruction), but rather through careful analysis showing the results of the sometimes slippery, unquantifiable X-factor that imbues carefully composed, deeply accomplished writing. His studies reveal the life of detailed, complex prose and his cogent descriptions of plot mechanics, such as “patterns of inflection by antithesis,” always serve the structural analysis.

In “The Style of Alice Munro,” Glover points out how Munro “forges her style in the furnace of opposition”—showing how statement provokes counter statement or counter construction, subversion or complication; how Munro’s contrarian, counterpunching stories “advance by the accumulation of contravention.” His character study of her story “Lives of Girls and Women” notes the “motivational consistency, expanding symbols, tie backs, and memory rehearsals” of her novels.��Examining Munro’s story “Baptizing,” Glover quotes a short sentence and then offers a typically impressive . . . breakdown? Might we call it a translation?

Munro: “Her agnosticism and sociability were often in conflict in Jubilee, where social and religious life were apt to be one and the same.”

 

Glover: “This sentence is constructed with the balanced antithesis of an aphorism (“conflict” vs. “one and the same”; “agnosticism and sociability” v “social and religious life”), and part of the reason for her compositional elegance is Munro’s habit of composing in opposed doubles. But the larger point is that much of any Alice Munro text will be taken up with a precise delineation of differences. Her style is to mark the differences.”

“Anatomy of the Short Story,” the collection’s longest essay, offers deep structural explorations of three stories Glover cites as exemplars of the craft: “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason; “The Point” by Charles D’Ambrosio, Jr.; and “Brokeback Mountain” by E. Annie Proulx, minutely examining each in terms of plot, image patterns, thematic passages, and backfill.

Glover sees a story as “a composite text orchestrated around a dramatic plot,” and defines plot, which he calls, “the sonogram of the heart,” as “the backbone of a story, the first element of its architecture . . . a desire conflicting with a resistance over and over.” And his explanations blossom into greater complexity and sophistication—“The energy of plot is revelatory, illuminating character like ultrasound waves projected into the human body, exposing the inner workings beneath the surface”—which he renders as this basic formula:

“Plot = (d/r) + (d/r) + (d/r) ^time>>>

and then delineates specific examples of this structural formula as it operates in each of these three echo-logical compositions.

This chapter is an exegetical tour-de-force, and should enhance the way any reader or writer approaches fiction. Without bending any pieces to a single theory or perspective—analysis and theory often carve up stories and novels to oblige certain parameters—Glover’s microscopic analysis reveals fascinating structural undercurrents. Methodical, penetrating, and brilliant, this herculean essay is wonderfully lucid, perfectly poised, sharply focused—a classic.

Another valuable study, “The Art of Necessity: Time Control in Narrative Prose,” focuses on how plot is overwhelmingly time oriented: “narrative is a temporal art; time control is its essence, and good authors spend a surprising portion of their texts watching the clock.” In addition to exploring “Time, Consciousness, and Verisimilitude,” Glover explains time indicators, time shifts, time segments (which he calls “globs”), and “thought points,” and identifies a “short list” of��no-less-than eight different “time switches [that] serve as relational and transitional devices.” He shows how narrative time is not chronological time, how authors create focus, emphasis, and transport by rearranging, managing, and curating time in their stories, and offers demonstrative dissections of passages from Proust’s Swann’s Way, and essays by Annie Dillard (“Seeing”) and Ted Kooser (“Small Rooms in Time”).

In “Building Sentences,” Glover offers a personal epiphany experienced when reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay “On Some Technical Elements of Style in Literature”:

[Stevenson]was talking about sentences, but instead of repeating the platitudes he showed how to construct sentences on the basis of conflict. Instead of just announcing a single thesis, a sentence begins by setting out two or more contrasting ideas; the sentence develops a conflict, intensifying toward a climax, a “knot” Stevenson calls it, and then, after a moment of suspension, slides easily toward a close. Suddenly, I understood both how to write those lovely, lengthy compound-complex sentences and also how to write paragraphs that had nothing to do with topic sentence-body-conclusion patterns (because I could construct a paragraph the way Stevenson constructs his long sentences).

More than just standard explication, Glover’s close analysis of prose structure is really a kind of translation, laying bare the mechanics in order to show how the direct, denotative meaning of prose is created; again, not as illustrative of theory or school of thought, but how writers shape their illusions, how they successfully transmit stories and ideas.

Regarding translation per se, Glover offers plenty to interest both readers of literature in translation as well as translators themselves, most notably in the essay “Making Friends with a Stranger: Albert Camus’ ����ֳٰ����Բ����.” Glover traces and retranslates his relationship to The Stranger, from what he first recalls of it—a casual impressionistic, attitudinal, hormonal relationship—to a deeper structural one; reading is, intrinsically, an act of translation, and Glover’s concern, as mentioned above, is to read better.

Glover mentions making the novel’s acquaintance in French in 1967 while simultaneously reading an English translation of it—probably Stuart Gilbert’s 1962 translation (The Stranger), the standard English version until Joseph Laredo’s 1982�� translation, The Outsider; Glover notes the latter as the one he has most recently revisited. Since then, ����ֳٰ����Բ���� has also been translated into English by Matthew Ward (1989), and Sandra Smith (2012).

Glover discusses how Camus “borrowed”—(translated?)—The Stranger’s elliptical point-of-view structure from the American novel, specifically, and for the sake of practicality not preference, from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and quotes from Camus’ reply to interviewer Jeanine Delpech, who claimed to note a resemblance between The Stranger and “certain works by Faulkner and Steinbeck”: “I would give a hundred Hemingways for one Stendhal or one Benjamin Constant. And I regret the influence of this literature on many young writers.” (from Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy).

Camus was more taken with Melville and Faulkner, whose discursive styles and twilight tones feel palpably present in The Plague, Camus’ longest novel. In his essay on Melville and Moby-Dick, (which, editor Philip Thody notes, Camus probably read in the French translation by Lucien Jacques, Joan Smith, and Jean Giono, published by Gallimard in 1941), Camus has this to say:

“. . . Melville never wrote anything but the same book, which he began again and again. This single book is the story of a voyage, inspired first of all solely by the joyful curiosity of youth (Typee, Omoo, etc.) then later inhabited by an increasingly wild and burning anguish. Mardi is the first magnificent story in which Melville begins the quest that nothing can appease, and in which, finally, “pursuers and pursued fly across a boundless ocean.” It is in this work that Melville becomes aware of the fascinating call that forever echoes in him: “I have undertaken a journey without maps.” And again: “I am the restless hunter, the one who has no home.” Moby-Dick simply carries the great themes of Mardi to perfection. But since artistic perfection is also inadequate to quench the kind of thirst with which we are confronted here, Melville will start once again, in Pierre: or the Ambiguities, that unsuccessful masterpiece, to depict the quest of genius and misfortune whose sneering failure he will consecrate in the course of a long journey on the Mississippi that forms the theme of The Confidence Man. (Camus, “Herman Melville,” Lyrical and Critical Essays, 291)

And in his 1957 “Foreword to Requiem for a Nun,” Camus offers these thoughts on translation:

“The Goal of this foreword is not to present Faulkner to the French public. Malraux undertook that task brilliantly twenty years ago, and thanks to him, Faulkner gained a reputation with us that his own country has not yet accorded him. Nor is it a question of praising Maurice Coindreau’s translation. French readers know that contemporary American literature has no better nor more effective ambassador among us. One need only imagine Faulkner betrayed as Dostoevski was by his first adapter to measure the role Monsieur Coindreau has played. A writer knows what he owes to his translators, when they are of this quality.” Lyrical and Critical Essays, 311).

Glover himself subtly raises the specter of betrayal with this question about Laredo’s translation of ����ֳٰ����Բ����: “Why is the climatic murder scene so gorgeously oneiric with its crescendo of heat and glare as Meursault approaches the spring (la source in French—my goodness, what gets lost in translation)?” A firm nod to the translation blues—familiar imputations of linguistic neglect, betrayal, loss, or debt—in response to a novel deeply concerned with those problems on a social scale.

Some insights from scholar and translator Karen Emmerich may help to gather these seemingly disparate threads:

“A work, once it enters the world, is subject to the textual condition, one of variance, difference, proliferation, and iterative growth, including growth in new linguistic contexts. Negotiating the tension between work and text, in and between languages . . . thus involves the underlying question of the relationship of the one to the many: how different can two texts be before we cease to see them as iterations of the same work? How much of Moby Dick can we sacrifice to the abridger’s scalpel, saw, or scimitar? Is Moby-Dick still Moby-Dick in Urdu?” (Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (Literatures, Cultures, Translation).

Glover’s essays, especially the aforementioned forays into style and structure, may certainly be read as “iterative growths”—translated iterations, iterated translations, of the source texts. Not interlingual translations, of course; the task Glover has undertaken here, is to elucidate, to reveal, to illuminate, and his readings, fired by fascination, render good service to these works, perhaps nowhere better than in his essay on Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, “Consciousness and Masturbation,” which translates this novel, (whose first English-language translation came from the French and German translations from the original Polish text) into meaning, showing the deep concerns of a work that can seem, upon a first reading, trivial, superficial, or inconclusive, (admittedly, my own experience), revealing the novel’s concern with the dominance of form in human existence, how the inherent limitations of form and structure are overbearing, even monstrous—certainly human structures often approach this reality.

This is one of the major, underlying concerns in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Immortal,” another work about obsessions with textual variants and iterations. The endlessly symmetrical dungeon and its counterpart, the vast, cataclysmic City of the Immortals, (a mashup of every known architectural form, a sort of demiurgic Winchester Mystery House) through which the narrator wanders for years, are both nearly inescapable perfections of the hideous replication of forms—only through limitless time and chance does one trapped within stumble on a way out. One needs cosmic access to elude form which, as ineluctably as gravity, perpetually defeats us.

Glover also shows how Cosmos, for example, exemplifies the need for translation: “Gombrowicz hates form but loves form; he can’t escape form because that would look mad (schizophrenic), and, besides, he also loves to play with form” (194). So do translators. Gombrowicz’s worrying of form affirms the need for translation, for form to be pitted against form, meaning that translation is neither intrusion, incursion, theft, betrayal, sales ploy, or simply shabby simulacrum; it is an organic response, a psychological need; a reader’s encounter with an incomprehensible text, not a Finnegans Wake but a coherent text, in a language unknown to the reader which stimulates a need to make sense of it, to impose some comprehensible order on it, and that begets itself, iteratively. Thus that desire, the desire to imitate, to replicate is a kind of necessary madness; the urge to translate is a temporary escape, refuge within a simulacra of which the translator momentarily, and only momentarily, senses ownership before the bramble traps them by growing, cascading, whirling into a prison beyond control and overwhelms again. This may or may not be liberation; Glover points out that Gombrowicz does not so much redefine the novel as seek escape from it. Yet it is by means of patterning and pattern recognition that Gombrowicz performs his apophenic legerdemain.

In the essay’s final statement, Glover claims that “In this sense, all beautiful texts, insofar as they practice this kind of elaborated structure of repetition, are uncanny, horrifying; rhyme is mechanical and inhuman, structure destroys reason.” And yet rhythm, as astrophysicists, musicians, physicians, and children alike all know, is organic—it impels us to build sensible empowering structures of sound: drumbeat, dance, melody, nonsense, to and from which we then seek, endlessly, return and flight and return again.

Much of the satisfaction found in Glover’s essays lies within the reader’s encounter with his meticulous, patient demonstration of the results of thoughtful, intelligent writing—not apophenia but his eye for deliberate detail and, especially, a superior ability to explicate its importance.

To wit, the chapter “The Arsonist’s Revenge” provides an alluring structural study of linguistic patterning in David Helwig’s novella The Stand-In, while the “The Literature of Extinction” presents three brief, dizzying sections (“Nostalgia (the Death of God)”; “Cynicism (Lifting the Veil)”; and “The Return of the Repressed, or the Aesthetics of Extinction”) that touch on Cervantes, Kundera, Rabelais, Nietzsche, Saussure, Plato, Kenny Goldsmith, zombies, Heidegger, Surrealism, Duchamp, Oulipo, and Ccru writing.

Among the many approaches and techniques identified in “Building Sentences,” Glover also shows an interest in writing lists, and mentions notable��list stories: Steven Millhauser’s “The Barnum Museum” and Leonard Michael’s “In the Fifties.” In terms of lists, this dazzling, kaleidoscopic collection sadly lacks—and fully deserves—a proper index in order to help readers explore its wealth of knowledge. In lieu of one, and in addition to the many authors, stories, and subjects already mentioned, here is a partial list of other subjects mentioned or discussed in The Erotics of Restraint:

• Absurdism
• Christa Wolf’s novel The Quest for Christa T, ��and her essay “The Conditions of Narrative”
• Constance Garnett, translator
• Descartes
• Derrida
• �ٴDz��ٴDz�𱹲����’s The Idiot
• E.M. Cioran
• Edmund Husserl
• Edward Topsall’s Historie of Serpents
• Existentialism
• Forrest Gump
• French noir: Francis Carco, Georges Simenon
• Gertrude Stein
• Glover’s own short stories “Fire Drill”; “The Obituary Writer”; “Pender’s Visions”; “Heartsick”; “Tristiana”; “Bad News of the Heart”
• Hans-Georg Gadamer
• James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet
• Leon Surmelian’s Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness
• Mark Anthony Jarman’s “Burned Man on a Texas Porch”
• Modernism
• Montaigne
• Nietzche
• �������ǰ�DZ�’s Pale Fire
• Pico della Mirandola
• Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
• Sartre’s essay for The Atlantic Monthly – “American Novelists in French Eyes.”
• Spanish novelist Germán Sierra
• Ted Kooser: “Small Rooms in Time”
• The New Yorker
• Theodor Adorno
• The St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V
• Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser
• Thomas Wyatt: “They Flee from Me”

In sum, The Erotics of Restraint is a superlative collection—smart, judicious, clear, interesting, sharp, expertly crafted, infectious as the metonymic impulse—an education in and of itself, a brilliant primer on how to understand, and possibly emulate, modern and postmodern literature.

And for the first time ever, we’re going to be focusing on a book that was originally written in English:��Ducks, Newburyport��by Lucy Ellmann. Clocking in at just over 1,000 pages (depending on if you count the list of acronyms in the back or not), this is a single-sentence rant about America, Trump, gun violence, Flint’s water problems, Jared Kushner . . . well, basically everything that is now.

From Parul Sehgal’s :

“Ducks, Newburyport,” the new novel by Lucy Ellmann, recently��, unspools as a 426,100-word sentence that stretches over 1,000 pages — occasionally interrupted by a more traditional story, albeit one from the point of view of a mountain lioness. It seems designed to thwart the timid or lazy reader but shouldn’t. Timid, lazy readers to the front! Ellmann’s unnamed narrator, a mother of four living in Ohio, has a cutting power of observation and a depressive charm. “Being good-looking means you have to try to��stay good-looking and that’s stressful,” she says. This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now: toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry. [. . .]

The narrator of “Ducks, Newburyport,” however, is consumed with the troubles and triumphs of others (ineffectually, as she’ll hasten to tell you): her four children and husband, people in Flint, Mich., forced to pay $200 in monthly water bills, families starving in Syria. Coming across a pigeon egg, she considers incubating it in her bra. Her dreams are full of animals she cannot save, people she cannot protect. She is haunted by the death of her mother. “Nobody fixes anything,” she laments, “not faucets, not window frames, not the Ohio River, the fact that sea salt now contains microplastics, the fact that coelacanths die now from eating plastic potato chip bags at the bottom of the ocean, the fact that sometimes I think that people today must be the saddest people ever, because we know we ruined��everything, even geraniums probably, the fact that, heavens to Betsy, I’m sure people haven’t always lived in such a constant state of alarm.”

It’s hard to think of a book that’s better suited to the digressive, humorous, nature of this podcast . . .

The first episode will be broadcast on YouTube next Monday, September 30th and will be available as a podcast on Thursday, October 2nd. Here’s the schedule for the whole season in case you want to read along (and even if you don’t, I think you’re going to be able to enjoy and get a lot out of this season):

October 2: Pages 1-81

October 9: 81-150

October 16: 151-231

October 23: 231-297

October 30: 297-360

November 6: 360-429

November 13: 429-487

November 20: 487-562

November 27: 562-621

December 4: 621-700

December 11: 701-776

December 18: 776-862

December 23: 862-917

December 30: 917-1020

The second printing should be arriving at bookstores now, so go visit your local indie and pick up a copy. Biblioasis is taking a great risk publishing a book of this size and it would be great to help them get a real win . . .

And if you’re in the UK, pick up the Galley Beggar edition. I’m pretty sure the pagination is the same, so the above schedule should work, and it’s great to support GB.

One last note:��Ducks��is a finalist for the Booker Prize, the winner of which will be announced in mid-October. Fingers crossed!

Anyway, once I had this idea for structuring my weekly posts, I immediately wanted to schedule a month for Canadian publishers. Partially because I like a lot of them—and they get next to no play in the U.S.—but mainly because I wanted an excuse to read , translated from the French by Lazer Lederhendler and published by . And thank god I did. Over the past two months, she’s become one of my favorite contemporary writers. And I curse myself for not having read these books earlier . . .

*

Similar to what I did last week for��QC Fiction, I want to highlight all of the Quebec titles that Biblioasis has published as part of their “.” (Which, you should all know, contains a number of non-Quebec authors as well. Definitely worth checking out!) But, because I’m struggling through some insane anxiety right now (I have a new computer, which is glorious, but we’re having trouble accessing the 1/18/2019 backup that contains literally��everything��that I need, which is . . . breathe, breathe, deep breath), I’m not sure how many smart things I’m going to say. Instead, I’m probably going to rely on Biblioasis’s descriptions and random thoughts . . .

I definitely want to start with��The Party Wall��though, about which, I do have some thoughts. First off: GO BUY THIS BOOK AND��.��I really should’ve read this back in 2016 when it was first published in English—and was a —or, if not then, at least last spring before I went and met Catherine Leroux as part of a special event at the Toronto Public Library celebrating the special��. (Which was co-edited by Leroux and Madeleine Thien.) Then again, maybe I was meant to wait until now, because reading this over the past three days has been as gratifying as any literary experience I’ve had over the past couple years.

The Party Wall��is the sort of book that I don’t want to spoil, which would absolutely happen if I went into too much detail about why exactly I like it . . . But here goes: This novel is made up of four different stories, each featuring a pair of characters. “Madeleine and Madeleine” is about a woman who finds out that she’s a chimera, containing two distinct sets of DNA, as if she basically encompassed her twin while in utero. “Ariel and Marie” features a very charismatic Canadian politician whose life is utterly derailed by information about his birth mother. “Simon and Carmen” revolves around the death of their mother and secret revelations about their father.

Each of those storylines appear twice in the book, whereas the fourth, “Monette and Angie,” occurs between every other chapter (seven times in total) and tells the story of two girls in Savannah, Georgia who walk to a grocery store to get candy.

So far, I’m sure this sounds like a rather conventional, if not a bit disjointed, novel. Which is pretty accurate. Each of these sections is utterly captivating, building its own particular world and conflicts, fleshing out its characters and raising the stakes over and over in a way that would make most conventional novelists really jealous. The theme of identity and one’s ancestors ties all of these pieces together, and, to be honest, the book would work��pretty well��if that were its only unifying structure.��Instead, Leroux takes things to a masterful new level, linking together all of these stories in ways that are tricky to delineate, are generally unexpected, and that reward close readers.

Again, I can’t go into too much more detail without somewhat ruining the mental thrill of uncovering the underlying structure to this novel. Which is exactly what I liked about��Madame Victoria��as well. I’m a sucker for interesting structures, for books with a sort of architecture. It’s one of the things I love about Thomas Pynchon and Richard Powers and William Faulkner, and that has me dreaming about Leroux’s next novel (which Biblioasis publisher Dan Wells told me a bit about already). I find these sort of books to be so much more gratifying than titles that play it safe and stick to a more straightforward, easy-to-follow approach. (A statement that will surprise exactly no one.)

It’s tricky to pull out a single paragraph to share here, so instead, here’s a bit from an interview the ABA did with Leroux when they selected��The Party Wall��as an Indies Introduce book. (I can’t envision a better response to sell this book to me than this one.)

Valerie Welbourn: In��The Party Wall, there are many stories, characters, and layers that eventually connect. Was it difficult keeping so many threads going in your head?

Catherine Leroux:��It would have been impossible to manage in my head. I created different tools to help me keep track — timelines, character summaries, a diamond-shaped graph, and esoteric calculations involving ages, specific dates, world events, and the future. And I’m terrible at math.

There are nine other works of Quebec literature in the Biblioasis International Translation Series, including��, forthcoming in May of 2019. Here’s the jacket copy:

It’s winter in Montreal, 2002, when a graphic design student’s gambling addiction starts to drag him under. In debt to the metal band that’s commissioned him to draw their album cover and ensnared in lies to his friends and his cousin, he takes the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at La Trattoria, a high-end restaurant, where he finds himself thrust, on his first night, into roiling world of characters. A magnificent, hyperrealist debut, with a soundtrack by Iron Maiden,��The Dishwasher��plunges us into a world in which—for better or for worse—everyone depends on each other.

Iron Maiden, eh? That’s a curious choice.

Although the vast majority of titles that Biblioasis publishes in the series are works of fiction, they have brought out two poetry collections, both by Robert Melançon:��, translated by Donald McGrath and, translated by Judith Cowen.��

I don’t know much about poetry, and nothing about Melançon, but a cursory glance of his Wikipedia page points out that he won the Governor’s General Award on two occasions: in 1979 for French language poetry or drama, and in 1990 for English to French translation. There’s something really impressive about that . . .

If you’d like to check out Melançon’s poetry, Biblioasis posted by him back some time ago. Here’s one of them:

A VOICE HEARD IN A DREAM, UPON AWAKENING

“Your days will pass, one by one,

words in a breathless sentence strung

together without punctuation, your actions,

those thoughts that come at such a cost,

won’t follow you, but if they do

it will be as perpetually vain regrets, little

will it matter, very little, whether you

betray or remain faithful, because each will

come to you in turn, everything will

be lost as if you’d been dreaming, it’s like

a dream, the disorder of an old man’s life

that comes back at the end, you’ll descend

into lower depths you don’t suspect are there,

you’ll be seized, at times, by an unfathomable joy

before the expanse that evening will open up

where the streets run out; impassive, the world

will continue on its course, flowers

that will fade in autumn will come, snow

that’ll melt like snow in the sun, each day

will bring with it the History you’ll throw out

with the newspaper, with your boredom, you’ll

have friendships that you’ll lose, love you’ll see

falling away from you, that you’ll try

in vain to hold onto, everything will be

given to you, everything taken away,

everything will come, everything pass away

like this night I’ve pulled you from, now go.”

It’s nice that Biblioasis tends to do multiple titles by the authors they include in this series. That’s something a lot of small presses aspire to, but aren’t always willing/able to pull off. Ondjaki, Mia Couto, Mauricio Segura, Catherine Leroux,�� and Robert Melançon all have multiple titles on this list.��, translated from the French by Donald Winkler��is based on jazz pianist . So rather than come up with something interesting to say about this book, let’s just hear some music.

And yes, I��had��to choose the most BuzzFeed of all available videos. It’s one of the nine times I’ve pulled that trick this year.

One more from��Mauricio Segura!��Eucalyptus, translated from the French by Donald Winkler. Although it’s stuck here in the middle, this is the final book from the International Translation Series that I’m writing about. I made it! (Sort of. There’s a bonus section below all of this for the true fans who want their weekly dose of nonsense.)

That said, I don’t have it in me to write up anything about this book. I’m sure it’s interesting. Dan has great taste. (Which reminds me that one of the��only files I’m currently able to access from my old computer is the shitty manuscript I wrote in Marfa and sent to Dan and thought I deleted forever. Of course that was immediately downloaded to my desktop, whereas I’m still trying to get access to the complete list of current subscribers. UGH. This is giving me an ulcer and my first heart attack.��Technology hates me.)

What I’m stuck on, mentally, right now, is whether this is my favorite—or least favorite—cover from this set of titles. I don’t like the earliest covers in this series, and some (Boundary��and��Arvida) are a bit too muted, color-wise, for my taste . . . I think��Madame Victoria��is my favorite. It looks like the cover of an indie rock album by a band whose lead singer I would fall in love with at a show.

I know shockingly little about��Larry Tremblay. I remember coming across his plays years and years ago, but he has four novels translated into English, including��, translated from the French by Sheila Fischman,��and something called��The Obese Christ.��Which, based on the title alone, is up my alley.

And although we call all agree Wikipedia is Wikipedia, this is intriguing:

Many of his plays focus on characters confronting psychological trauma. In��Le Déclic du destin, a character progressively loses body parts; in��The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, the central character recovers from��aphasia��only to learn that while recovering his ability to speak he has lost his native language; and in��La Hache��a university professor is driven insane by his obsession with ideological purity in literature.

I need to do a better job paying attention to drama in translation. And international authors in general. It’s easy to feel like you know a lot by knowing a bit more than most people; then you realize how large the World Republic of Letters really is. (Or could be.)

Also: Sheila Fischman. I’m certain I’ve mentioned this before, but she’s translated almost 150 Quebec novels over her career, and has been nominated fourteen times for the��Governor General’s Award��for Translation. (Although only won it once?! Is she the Susan Lucci of Quebec translation?)

I feel like someone should publish a book about Fischman’s life and works, but so far, the best I can find is .

Some thirty years ago when I wrote my first translation there was none of this. The novel, with the oddly–to me at the time–bilingual title��La Guerre, Yes Sir! was published by the then young House of Anansi, after the translation I had done as a personal exercise had made the rounds of a number of other houses. I wanted to kiss the feet of Dennis Lee and Dave Godfrey for recognizing that it was an important book. And they wanted to pay me! Two hundred and fifty dollars! I did not want to accept it, this was a small, newborn publisher after all, but I was talked into it and spent the money on a pale blue suede coat. The sixties still had a few years to go . . . [. . .]

And now, thirty-odd years later, I’ve translated something like 150 books, or 138, I haven’t counted recently the books that now fill two complete shelves, plus overflow. I’ve had the tremendous pleasure of introducing some of my favourite writers to a broader readership–the English-speaking world. In most cases I have been the one who approached a publisher–with Lise Bissonnette, Christiane Frenette, François Gravel, Gaétan Soucy and Élise Turcotte and in particular, of Jacques Poulin. In some cases the publisher was won over instantly, in other cases–such as Poulin–it took years of patient wheedling. This aspect of my work never seems like work because I consider what I am doing to be a logical extension of my enthusiasm for a book or a writer. [. . .]

Still, literary translation does not always enjoy a comfortable seat at the literary table. This is due partly to ignorance of just what it is that we do and how we do it, partly to a misguided notion that being obliged to read a work in translation betrays a reader’s ignorance, so that translation is perceived as something shameful, an activity to be hidden or camouflaged. How many times have you heard someone say apologetically that she has “only” read a book in translation? As if every reader must have a profound knowledge and understanding of all the written languages in the world . . . This is particularly true in Canada, for other reasons that are perhaps political or at least socio-political. Should all Canadians be bilingual in French and English? Who knows? Maybe.

Someone out there with talent and connections should write long-form profiles on Sheila Fischman and Drenka Willen. Make it happen.

BONUS SECTION

��by Mark Kingwell��is not the best book about baseball out there, but if you like memoirs about the game, about being a fan, about why baseball is the best, then this book is definitely for you. (Also, Kingwell is smart as fuck.) Now let’s talk about me. Here are my questions for the 2019 baseball season:

1. Who will have a higher WAR/Annual Salary—Machado or Harper? (I bet Machado, because I think Harper is good, lucky, inconsistent, and an average defender.)
2. Will Goldschmidt lead the Cardinals to the playoffs and,
3. ��if so, will he win the NL MVP? (Yes, those are the two least analytically-minded questions I could come up with.)
4. In 2018, league-wide, there were more strikeouts (41,207) than hits (41,018)—will that gap (189) increase or decrease?
5. DH for both leagues? YES YES YES PLEASE. I’LL MOLLY BLOOM ALL OVER THAT RULE CHANGE.
6. Will Hunter Pence bat .320? (NO. Sorry not-sorry for that callback.)
7. Given that bullpens are dumb and rarely track from one year to the next, which team will have the greatest improvement from 2018 to 2019? Will Andrew Miller () be part of this bullpen?
8. ��How many teams will employ an “opener” in the first month of the season? How many in September/October?
9. Will the Cubs miss the postseason again? And if so, how much am I allowed to celebrate without being an asshole?

Read the “copy” to by Lucy Ellmann. I want to assume wrote this (it’s not the same as the UK version) and I wish I could stop writing these posts long enough to read this 728-page book. So my jam. (I’m re-reading/reading��Against the Day, which is a billion pages long, so hopefully I can make this my summer enjoyment read.) I would quote it here, but it’s one sentence, which is like Zone, but English and Man Booker eligible, so, advantage Ellmann, I hope you beat��everyone and fuck I am way too anxious to let this post end.

by Samuel Archibald, translated from the French by Donald Winkler (Canada, Biblioasis)

In Samuel Archibald’s Arvida, carried attentively into English by Donald Winkler and shortlisted last year for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize, one small town’s secrets become a universe that alternates between the tender and the terrifying, often blurring the line between the two.

Arvida is a collection of stories named after a town named after the American industrialist Arthur Vining Davis, who underwrote its construction around an aluminum smelting plant over the course of an astonishing 135 days back in 1927. As a child born to this far-flung outpost in Saguenay, Quebec, Archibald’s world was a tapestry of tales of madness, misfits, domesticated bears, and a Yeti-like cougar prowling the woods. The fact that Arvida was quickly absorbed by a neighboring town and exists, in a sense, solely as a memory only reinforces Archibald’s fascination with the mythic dimension of these private and shared histories. As he observed in an interview with the Canadian press, “growing up in a place that is so remote it’s on the edge or outside history, you never have any history except for the stories you told each other.”

There are two kinds of spaces in the narrative world of Arvida: the vast, unknowable ones of the Canadian wilderness, and the claustrophobic, unknowable ones of the home.

Archibald excels in the latter, filling domestic spaces with the minor chords (and occasional bloodcurdling screech) of gothic horror. Yet for all the attic rattlings and mythical predators that abound in this narrative world, there is nothing more frightening than the interactions among its inhabitants, or their behavior when left to indulge in isolation. As Bryan Demchinsky observed in the Montreal Gazette, “there’s a dark, hard presence in the stories, sometimes wry, sometimes muted, but always lurking” . . . most menacingly, perhaps, among armchairs and embroidered tablecloths.

Several stories are quite direct in asserting that genuine horror belongs to the domestic or interpersonal, rather than the supernatural, realm. “House Bound,” which appears toward the end of the book, is the account of a successful contractor who buys the house of his dreams and only later realizes the true cost of his investment. “Not many people will understand me,” he reflects, “but there’s something strange about taking over an ancestral domain . . . When a man buys a place like that, he buys the nest and protective shell of someone else, someone else’s wiring, and someone else’s ideas, and he has to decide how far he’s going to go to become that person, how much of that man he’s prepared to graft onto himself.” And yet, no matter how dark the history he adopts with the place turns out to be (and it does turn out to be quite dark), in the end it is emotional and physical violence of the most mundane and terrible sort that truly haunts the family’s new home.

“A Mirror in the Mirror” is also the tale of a haunted house, though the violence that undergirds this particular story is self-inflicted, and offers a glimpse into the often desperate position of women in this narrative universe, many of whom have little agency beyond the power to make themselves disappear. Likewise, in “Jigai,” probably the collection’s most brutal entry, a Japanese girl and her mysterious foreign governess enclose themselves in a world of erotic bodily mutilation, slicing off fingers and toes, eyelids and lips while leaving their tongues intact, because “because without [pleasure], pain is only pain.”

It is to Archibald’s credit that not all the stories of the collection are written in this mode: just as unity of place opens on to a vast range of narrative settings, the book’s gothic tropes are offset and enriched by the understated tensions and literary allusions of its other tales. The first, willfully charming, story offers insight into the mind of the narrator’s father through a chronicle of his petty thefts as a young boy—the very first in Arvida, and almost exclusively of pastries. “The comedy darkens,” he observes, as he considers his father in light of these stories, “something tragic makes its presence felt . . . the idea that the fulfillment of the desire never satisfies it, nor does it make it disappear, and that in the midst of all the things longed for desire survives in us, dwindling into remorse and regret. My father no longer lacks for anything,” the narrator continues, “but he misses the taste food had when there was not enough of it.”

Arvida does not employ the fancy stylistic footwork that characterizes some of the other nominees for the BTBA this year: grounded in oral history, the book is exceptional in its attention to the rhythms of storytelling and subtle regional and demographic modulations in vernacular. Its language is also quite restrained, and Donald Winkler rose admirably to the challenge of the narrow margin of error that this implies; the range both author and translator manage to achieve while remaining anchored to the collection’s unifying conceits is truly an achievement worthy of recognition.

– Ondjaki, Translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Hennighan, Angola
Biblioasis