Katie also was given the honor of choosing the book for the sixteenth season of the TMR, kicking off in September. Tune in if you want to find out what we’ll be reading post-trilogy.

Please ignore all of the technical difficulties, but definitely get in touch if you’d like to rent Katie’s writer’s space outside of Valencia, Spain.

This week’s music is “” by Sonic Youth.

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . You can ��and ask questions, make comments, or correct inaccurate statements. Here’s where you can find the complete reading schedule.

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions.

You can also support this podcast and����������of Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

This week’s music is “” by L7.

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . You can and ask questions, make comments, or correct inaccurate statements. Here’s where you can find the complete reading schedule.

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions.

You can also support this podcast and����������of Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

The associated with this post is copyrighted by .

Kári Tulinius is an Icelandic poet and novelist. He and his family move back and forth between Iceland and Finland like a flock of migratory birds confused about the whole “warmer climes” business.��

by Yuko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt (FSG)

Writers cannot choose the moment in which they are read. They may imagine the circumstances their readers will find themselves in, or the concerns and preconceptions that are brought to the work,��but even at a writer’s most perceptive, it is just a vague generality. This goes exponentially once a text has been translated and is even further compounded as decades and centuries pass. All of which is a fairly circuitous way of saying that Yūko Tsushima almost certainly never thought that her novel, if it’s even correct to call it a novel, would be read by an Icelander during a pandemic in the year 2020.

When I was contacted by Patrick Smith about writing a “Why This Book Should Win the Best Translated Book Award” post, I asked if I could write about��Territory of Light. I hadn’t read it, but had the idea that it was something akin to one of my absolute favorite films, Chantal Akerman’s��Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a portrait of a single mother slowly cracking under the pressures of a sexist society. That is, of course, a reductive summary of a deep, brilliant film, and while I would not balk at a similar description of��Territory of Light, the situation in which I found myself reading Tsushima’s book made me focus on very different aspects of it.

Before getting into the content, I need to discuss structure.��Territory of Light��is one of those books that asks its readers to think about what a novel is. This is partly an accident of how it was first created.��Territory of Light��was originally published as a monthly series of short stories in a magazine from July 1978 to June 1979, following the travails of its divorcing protagonist in real time. When collected as a single book, the month forward jump between each chapter, each of which are a similar length, gives the book a strong formalist rigor. The effect is Oulipian, anticipating in novel form Jacques Jouet’s “metro poems,” where each line is composed while the train is moving, and written down while it waits at the station.

Each chapter is therefore episodic, following its own inner logic, with its own cast of characters, some of whom appear in other chapters, but many who do not. This gives the book the feel of real life—random people show up, events lead to nothing, significance found just as often in happenstance as well-laid plans. I have no idea whether Tsushima had worked out the structure before she started, but it certainly doesn’t feel like there is a plan. Which is remarkable and refreshing in a novel.

Another aspect of the structure feels much older than OuLiPo. The protagonist’s dreams are part of the narrative in a way that reminded me more of medieval literature than modern. To reach for an obscure term from my university days, I was specifically put in mind of the prosimetrum form, which mixes prose and poetry. In��Territory of Light,��the protagonist’s dreams read more like poems than fiction, which both opens the world of the story up, and comments on it from an angle askew from realism, which is otherwise the book’s dominant mode.

Though it is not the rule-bound realism found in most fiction, I cannot remember the last time I read a novel where I never felt like I knew where the story was going. At first, it was a bit confounding—my empathetic faculties started expecting that awful things were about to happen, as is generally the case in chaotic stories, and sometimes they did, but then they were over, and soon enough, another month had gone by in the protagonist’s life and the cares of the previous month were long gone. It was remarkably soothing, because I could let go of my readerly need to recognize patterns and guess what was coming. Because nothing was coming; only life, only everything.

Over the last eight weeks, the entirety of my social life has been reduced to ten people: my immediate family and the staff of the bookstore and bakery near my apartment. I haven’t talked, in person, to anyone else. My social life had been reduced to that of a character in a novel. Though not a character in��Territory of Light, which reproduces the randomness of normal life more faithfully than daily existence during the pandemic. Life has no need to be realistic, after all. While I move in my restricted fashion around my world, the protagonist strikes up an acquaintance with another parent at her daughter’s daycare, has a heart-to-heart with a woman at a bar, gets into a dispute with a neighbor; all the incidental encounters that make up one’s day-to-day existence in non-pestilential times.

So what I focused on as I read the book was all that randomness, those run-ins with strangers: being at a crowded neighborhood festival, going about the city in your day to day, taking a child to kindergarten. Experiencing all these events with the protagonist was deeply pleasurable—it was like going on a holiday in normal life, though 1970s Tokyo is far removed in time and space from Iceland in 2020. Quite a few scenes that probably would have made me feel nothing but anxious if I had read the book in normal circumstances—such as when the protagonist leaves her child sleeping alone in their apartment to go out for a drink—were tinged with nostalgia now that the simple act of going out for a drink is impossible.

In some cases, this mix of readerly nostalgia and anxiety would throw some of Tsushima’s themes into an even starker relief. One reoccurring trope in the tale involves random people, strangers even, telling the protagonist that she should get back together with her estranged husband. The way society pushes and constrains her, while making every excuse for her husband, is a good reminder that, as much as not being able to meet people is awful, people are awful.

Incidentally, her husband, Fujino is awful. He’s the sort of fuckboi that deserves at least a paragraph’s worth of ranting, but Tsushima skewers him—and his ilk—beautifully enough that I’ll limit myself to just quoting in brief: “Before he left, Fujino did some explaining: he wouldn’t be able to repay the money he owed me for some time yet; he meant to pay child support when he was able to, but this too was impossible for the present; he didn’t want to let people down by abandoning his dreams of making a movie and creating a small theatre company.” And though I’m not qualified to comment on the accuracy of Geraldine Harcourt’s translation, I hope this short excerpt shows how smoothly the text flows, and how well-wrought the sentences are.

Territory of Light��should win because it is the right book for right now. Not only because it has absolutely nothing to do with pandemics, thankfully, but because the way it portrays reality feels genuinely fresh, making most novels seem overly restricted by contemporary storytelling conventions. That it achieves this using formal constraints somehow makes it even more appropriate. And the way it handles social ills, especially everyday sexism, is a reminder that once the pandemic is past, the human species still has to reckon with a lot of awfulness.

The one definition of the term “classic novel” I have found to have a ring of truth to it is that some books find a way to speak strongly to people in all kinds of different circumstances and eras.��Territory of Light�� spoke very strongly to me at a remove of forty years and thousands of miles.��It should win the Best Translated Book Award because it is a novel for every sort of time and place.

Dorian��Stuber teaches at Hendrix College and blogs about books at��. His work has appeared in��Numéro Cinq, Open Letters Monthly,��and Words without Borders, among other places.

by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (FSG)

Virginie Despentes’ latest work is trilogy about a man in midlife, who falls victim to the precarity of neoliberalism and finds himself pushed to the margins of society. Vernon Subutex I should win the BTBA because of its prescient depiction of what, as many of us are discovering now, if we hadn’t already, is an all-too pressing scenario.

Vernon—“the guy with the name like an orthopaedic mattress, Subutex,” as one character acidly but aptly puts it—ran a record store named Revolver for twenty-five years. But then came downloading, and rising rents, and he had to close shop. On the first page of the book, he’s about to be evicted, the last of his remaining possessions taken as collateral. He’s hardly eaten in days, even quit buying coffee and cigarettes. He’s 49 years old and without any plan for what comes next. Without his even noticing it—Vernon is not shrewd; one reviewer calls him an “affable loser,” which is near enough I guess, though it makes him seem sweeter and more hapless than he is—his friends have left him behind: moved away, started families, schemed desperately to cling to economic stability (unless of course they married into money). Or they’ve left him permanently: cancer, car accident, overdoses, the losses mount up.

Of those deaths, the most consequential is Alexandre Bleach’s. Alex, a mixed-race kid who found his way into Revolver one day and learned about bands like Stiff Little Fingers and Bad Brains under Vernon’s tutelage, made it big. But Alex never much liked being a star, though he had enough self-knowledge to know how irritating it is to complain when you get everything you’re supposed to want. Alex would periodically hole up in Vernon’s apartment, listening to music, getting high, and hiding from the responsibilities of fame. As recompense for having this bolt-hole, Alex would pay Vernon’s rent.

But now Alex has died, and Vernon immediately wonders where the rent money’s going to come from. Yet like the characters of so many nineteenth–century novels—subject matter aside, Vernon Subutex is quite old-fashioned (and I don’t mean that as a slight)—Alex is never so alive as when he’s died. One of his last acts was to record a manifesto/testament, a combination of stoned philosophizing and vituperative score-settling. Vernon, predictably, slept through the whole thing, but the tapes are some of the only things he takes with him onto the streets because he’s convinced he’ll be able to sell them.

The book is plotty and I’ll try not to go into too much detail and reveal too many secrets, other than to say that the tapes, which Vernon deposits with a friend from whom they are promptly stolen, link the large set of characters. For the bombshell hidden in all that rambling is that Alex has told the truth about the death of his former girlfriend, a porn star named Vodka Satana, at the hands of a movie mogul named Laurent Dopalet (part Harvey Weinstein, part Dominique Strauss-Kahn). Dopalet hires a woman known as the Hyena to find the tapes, but she joins forces with another former porn star and friend of Vodka Satana’s to forge an alliance with Vernon’s friends. (The Hyena’s job is to boost and attack directors, actresses, and other media personalities, “to plaster the internet with love notes, photos, passionate declarations and real-life accounts about how lovely and approachable they are,” or, conversely, “to stop some young starlet from making it too quickly.” Fascinating stuff, and I wish Despentes had done more with it.)

Even more than plot, the Vernon Subutex series cares about character. This is both good and bad. Vernon’s friends, in particular, are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they are the focus of much of the book’s energy and social critique. For example, there’s Xavier Fardin, a screenwriter with only one hit to his name who has been living for years off his wife’s family money and his peculiar fame as an avowed conservative in the leftist Parisian art world: basically a shit but a fairly decent one, especially in his love for an old and practically hairless poodle, not to mention his willingness to stand up to alt-right thugs (he’s beaten badly defending Vernon and another homeless person). Even more interesting is Patrice, a punk musician who cut ties with the industry and is now a mailman. Patrice lives alone because of his inability to stop himself from physically and emotionally abusing his ex-wife and girlfriends. Sometimes the various gradations of male douchebaggery and assholery seems to be Despentes’s real subject.

On the other, the friends are a problem, because they complicate what’s really great about the books: their depiction of Vernon’s journey to homelessness. Despentes shows how easy it is to drift to the margins of society, how quickly one can be reduced to something less than human. Along with Vernon, we learn the rules and strategies of begging (which are the best pitches—outside bakeries, because people pay cash and leave with change). We experience with him the constraints of public space (realizing that the world is made up of park benches with bars down the middle of them and shop fronts with spikes). We also see the camaraderie, even freedom that prevails among the homeless (one woman has a theory about how much the system needs people like her; without her example, she avers, most people wouldn’t keep going to work). But we also see how violent and dangerous it is to be on the streets: you are tired, cold, sick most of the time; your body changes on you, becomes unrecognizable, from your smell to your painful uncut toenails, not to mention the ineradicable grime that colors your skin.

Like Zola in his day, Despentes critiques the depredations of a gilded age. Unlike Zola, however, she isn’t also fascinated by the extravagance and excesses of the one percent. Vernon Subutex is a great novel of the failures of neo-liberalism. One of my favorite sections concerns Patrice’s reflections on what he’s learned being a postman:

It’s hard fucking work. He is sorry he has always been so down on postmen. First off, it’s hard not to steal stuff. But the main problem is all the walking. And it’s an obstacle course, working out where people mount their letter boxes . . . If it were left to him, he would have regulations in place like a shot—the fuckers already get their mail delivered for free, the least they can do is have standard-size letter boxes situated in the same places. Make things move faster. People take public services for granted—they’ve been spoiled. People need to make sure they have the letter-box in the right place, that there are no vicious dogs barring the way, they need to realize how lucky they are to have a postman come by every morning.

Which leads him into a screed against deregulation:

The old-timers are devastated to see what the postal service has come to. It’s like everything else. They’re witnessing the systematic dismantling of everything that worked, and to top it all they get told how a mail distribution system should work by wankers straight out of business school who have never seen a sorting office in their lives. Nothing is ever fast enough for them. The skeleton staff is too expensive. Tearing down a system that already works is quicker. And they’re happy with the results: they are good at wrecking things, these bastards.

Substitute higher education for the mail distribution system and this works just as well—for lots of other things too, no doubt, public utilities, health care, anything important that isn’t amenable to profit. Patrice, as I’ve noted, is no saint. He’s quite repulsive, actually—but he’s also appealing. Despentes forces us to sit with that contradiction. After all, contradiction is what capitalism forces us to live out. Note how, in Patrice’s fulminations against the people he serves, he’s been infected by the neoliberal language of efficiency (“make things move faster”).

As these passages suggest, Vernon Subutex, despite the presence of alt-right bullies, porn stars, popular music and movies, and plenty of drugs and alcohol, owes more to Honoré de Balzac than J. G. Ballard. But there is some Ballard in these books. Nothing like the fascinating sexual and consumer excesses of, say, Crash, but moments when the books’ social critique is decoupled from realism and, as in Ballard, connected to something more fantastic and oneiric.

This is most apparent when Vernon becomes something like a shaman, the still, doped-out center of a network of people who reconnect through his tribulations—and his way with a playlist. Vernon’s friends track him down, and offer him money, couches to crash on, help of various kinds: he refuses all offers and finds a place for himself in an encampment on a disused railway line near the Buttes Chaumont. Vernon no longer cares about rejoining society. He only cares for music. He becomes a DJ at regular events, raves of a sort, first at a bar and then in abandoned industrial sites across France, where hundreds of people come to lose themselves in his sets.

Vernon hasn’t been on the streets for long before he starts experiencing fevered visions: sometimes he feels himself to be growing wings, soaring through the air. Sometimes he feels himself, “a hobo perched on a hill, in Paris,” to be an amalgam of all those who suffer from ordinary life, from “the drug mule pissing myself in fear ten metres from customs” to “the nurse made deaf by the cries of the patients and by dint of powerlessness” to “the cow in the abattoir.”

For the most part the book asks us to take Vernon’s reincarnation as a guru at face value. But how is all this shamanistic stuff supposed to be a critique of neoliberalism? Is Despentes arguing for the power of fantasy to counter alienation and inequality? Or is she depicting nothing more than ineffective resistance to those states? At times the book seems to manifest the inchoate rage of the gilet jaunes, but then the belief in the power of music and dance mitigates that sense of injustice. In the end, Vernon Subutex seems to hold fast to the radical potential of the 1960s and 70s, even as it is alive to the irony that its middle-aged characters, through the world they built, have done so much to undermine these ways of being.

Maybe the book’s most interesting social criticism concerns the idea of friendship. Although the book is peopled by dozens of characters, all of whom are connected in some way, hardly any of them are married. Nor is there much sex. If these books have utopian tendencies, they’re quite chaste. Or quite pornographic—in the sense that sex has retreated to a realm of private, managed fantasy. Which makes the insistence on friendship all the more striking.

Despentes is not a stylish writer; her sentences are not particularly interesting. In its rapid cutting between different characters, Subutex seems written for tv. But I wouldn’t say it’s badly written or structured. It has a hurried, helter-skelter charm, which translator Frank Wynne evokes with commas rather than semi-colons, dashes, periods, or other more formal methods of linking and separating clauses. Vernon Subutex is easy to read and soothing to plunge into, even when the subject matter is enraging or disquieting.

At times, Despentes dabbles in aphorism. (She is French, after all.) “Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed-out city.” “He recognizes the fervent foolishness of people who feel the need to put the same expressions in every sentence.” Life under capitalism has made us like “the battered wives you see on documentaries: we are so gripped with terror, we have forgotten the basic rules of survival.”

Thinking about the books’ tendencies toward pronouncements, I was reminded of a much earlier French text about how to live, one with a similarly naïve hero: Voltaire’s Candide. Admittedly, I haven’t read it in 30 years, and that was in high school French class, so I probably didn’t understand it, but the way Despentes depicts the raves organized by Vernon and his friends, I couldn’t help but think of Pangloss’s insistence that we cultivate our own gardens.

Of course, Voltaire ironizes the imperative as much as he avows it. And maybe Despentes is similarly ambivalent. Does Vernon have a plan we don’t know about? Is there more to him than affable helplessness? Are the love, drugs, and music that seem to resist neoliberalism’s cruel optimism in fact nefarious?

Can’t wait to see how Despentes answers these questions. Because the remaining two volumes are forthcoming in the US this year and next we might well be considering her for the BTBA for some time to come.

Following the [Chernobyl] accident, physicists calculated that there was a ten percent risk that a nuclear explosion on an unimaginable scale would take pace within a fortnight. Such an explosion [. . .] would have been equivalent to forty Hiroshima bombs going off at the same time, and would have rendered Europe uninhabitable.

—Andrés Neuman,��Fracture

Is this thing on?

Even though I posted something a mere eleven days ago (good god, time has no functionality anymore), and have been doing podcasts almost constantly, I feel like I’m coming out of retirement, or am back from some season-ending injury, or something.

There’s no reason to dwell on the ways in which COVID-19 + the mental and physical burdens of lockdown (is it possible for the world to run out of booze?) + full-time parenting (quarantine is the new social birth control) has made a mess of daily life. We’re all struggling, we all have our good days and dark moments, we’re all filled with uncertainty and fears about the future, and I’m willing to bet that concentrating on��anything��is kind of hit or miss right now.

I alluded to this in “The Book That Never Was” post, but in another timeline, I’m transcribing the final interview for my proposed book on translation and getting ready to go on tour with Sara Mesa and Katie Whittemore to celebrate the release of Four by Four.

In��another��alternate timeline, I came back from Europe to quarantine, kept my shit mostly together, and wrote a novel or a book that’s half-play, half-novel (I might dump my plot idea somewhere in this post), or worked on a lot of content for Three Percent, or wrote more newsletters than any reader could ever want.

But then again, as mentioned in the quote above, in��one of the worst timelines, Chernobyl blows Europe all to hell in 1986 and the world of 2020 is unrecognizable—unrecognizable in a way that’s different than it currently is.

Remember when the biggest news story of the year was Kobe’s passing?

For me, on March 15th, everything I used to do with ease—read, write, make terrible jokes, get angry about petty shit in righteous ways—became nearly impossible. Over the past six weeks, the sense of trauma (or world sick) that completely crippled me is��occasionally manageable. Like today.

That said, all my favorite bits for how to write these posts feel pretty stupid.

How the Sausage Is Made: In the past, I would figure out some book(s) I wanted to write about, then construct some sort of framing bit that would twist the way we usually talk about books. I can’t write straight reviews anymore (could I ever?), and journalism is boring. I hope some of those posts (like the one about treating authors like soccer players and totally upending the author-agent-publisher relationship in favor of the small, yet mighty) were entertaining. Maybe one or two had something interesting to say about book culture. They all feel like dispatches from another world right now, and to goof on shit when the world is shut down, when the continued existence of indie bookstores and publishers feels like a possibility��instead of something to count on, and when there’s a strong possibility we will all lose someone close to us because of this virus . . . well, that just doesn’t feel quite right.

Then again, I’m sure someone out there is working on a book about “Marketing in the Age of the Coronavirus,” looking to exploit our current situation for the benefit of the wealthy. Oh dear god, !��

SHOULD we even be marketing right now?

Firstly, yes. You should absolutely be continuing your marketing right now. The financial and economical impact that loss of revenue or businesses shutting down could have, may linger far beyond the actual health crisis. So you need to ensure that consumers who CAN continue to buy do, and that those who don’t still build a relationship with your brand through this time.

Well, books are listed on there as a valuable product to market, since they’re “entertaining” (I have questions), maybe I should just go ahead and riff and recommend for a while. We’re covering��The Dreamed Part every week with the , and being coronhonest about the book ecosystem on the , so why not talk about a broader set of books here on the website?

Also, buckle up, I feel like I have all the time in the world now, so this is most definitely going to run long . . . and, like with the “January Reading Diary,” this is going to include all sorts of media. I mean, that’s all we have left, right?

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Let’s start with the actual reason I forced myself to try and write this post tonight: Andrés Neuman’s��, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, and coming out on May 5th from FSG.

This was the first thing I tried to read when I got home on March 15th. The world was breaking and shutting down at an incredible pace, and I figured a book about a different catastrophe—the earthquake and ensuing tsunami that led to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster—would take my mind off of panic buying and my assumption that I probably had the virus and/or would get it and die alone.

As you might remember, this trifecta of destruction took place on March 11th, 2011. Jeremy Garber pointed this out to me, but do you know what else has happened on March 11th? The Madrid bombings. And the WHO declaring COVID-19 a pandemic. What a cursed date! Fuck 3/11.

(And is it weird to anyone else that this is exactly��six months before another cursed date? One of violent coups, terrorist attacks, and Russia’s test of the most powerful non-nuclear bomb of all time. Coincidence? Or just the result of living in a simulation?)

Back to the book. On March 11th, Yoshi Watanabe is out on the streets when the earthquake hits.

The city’s obsession, its nervous system, is prevention. Containment. Isolation. Ditches. Firebreaks. Anti-seismic constructions. An entire urban plan based on future disasters. The result is a dense weight of trust on a surface of fear. With this in mind, Watanabe stops off at a supermarket. He enters with a very specific objective.

When he locates the toilet paper shelf, he discovers there isn’t any. He notices that the people gathering the last rolls are more or less his age. On his way out, he sees that the stocks of a second product have been exhausted. Diapers. Senescence and infancy are united by the bathroom.

The ways in which different cultures and countries process catastrophe is kind of the point of the book, and the fact that this was paralleling our situation right from the jump led me to set the book aside for a few weeks. It wasn’t the right time—too much stress.

(Digression: My bidet obsession might have seemed a bit creepy in the past, but it sure doesn’t anymore! My butt has the last laugh!!)

Over the course of��Fracture, through chapters told by the four major loves of his life along with his own reflections on his current moment, we come to find out that Watanabe was in Hiroshima when the Little Boy was dropped. He loses his father before his eyes, and the rest of his Nagasaki-based family one day later.

This is a book about trauma, about the danger of nuclear energy and weapons, of cultural responses to guilt and suffering, and about human life. All the bigger ideas in here are well thought through—this feels like a massive step forward for Neuman in terms of scope and self-assurance, which is saying a lot after��Traveler of the Century, Talking to Ourselves, and��The Things We Don’t Do—but it’s the sections from the various women that contain so many incredible lines and insights.

The way Neuman writes about failed relationships, about beauty at different ages, about sex and longing and mystery, about webcams and how a mother’s fears tend to be “preemptive,” is so heartfelt and human. This is the first book I’ve read in COVID WORLD that really connected with me. The first one that I��read��and didn’t just intake words.

I could quote probably fifty paragraphs from this book, but I’ll stick with just a few (each from a different one of Watanabe’s loves) that I personally found wise and perceptive:

You spend years creating rituals with someone, and then one day you realize that you don’t like that person anymore. You’re just in love with the ritual. And yet you feel incapable of separating, so you spend the rest of your life cultivating the perfect ritual with the wrong person. [. . .]

Ultimately, translation requires an element of attraction. You desire their voice. You recognize yourself in a stranger. And both are transformed. Doesn’t loving someone also include making their words your own? You struggle to understand, and you misinterpret. The other person’s meaning bumps up against the limits of your experience. For things to work with someone, you have to accept you won’t be able to get them perfectly. That even with the best of intentions, you’re going to manipulate them. [. . .]

As I see it, you fall in love twice. With the same person, that is. Once when you meet them and a second time when you lose them. That happened to me with Enrique. We weren’t getting along so well during those last years, why lie about it? He had his ways, like everyone, but time led me to forget them. After he died, I started to appreciate him again. Not just my husband, but somebody who’d already left long before he did.

All three quotes that are much more mawkish than you probably expected! I love the pyrotechnics that a lot of Spanish-language writers employ in ways that are unequaled in world literature. I’ve made my reputation in publishing a number of them—both at Dalkey Archive and Open Letter. (Speaking of, there’s a bit in Fracture��that I think is an allusion to Fresán’s The Invented Part.��Or a happy coincidence.) I grew up on Cortázar and Borges and love the challenge and brashness of books that challenge ideas of form and structure. Neuman can—and has—done that, but at a time when human connection is so mediated by Zoom and six-feet separations and fear of the infected, his heart really comes through.

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Interlude #1: It’s ironic that the last post I wrote had a long, involved takedown of . At the time, I was goofing on the way that celebrities—or celebrity authors—could invent their own “bookstores” on Bookshop.org and basically compete with bookstores. At the time, no one gave two fucks about Bookshop.org and it was probably four months from the digital graveyard.

But, oh, how times have changed!

Sort of.

#QuarantineBody

is now being heralded as some great savior for indie bookstores, who��can get up to 30% of all sales placed through the website. (If you choose to attribute your purchase to a specific bookstore; if you just buy from the shop generically, then your favorite indie gets dick.) That sounds great, except it’s a much lower margin than the store gets if they process the order themselves.

So, with all the stores still shipping books—either in stock, or direct-to-home via Ingram—please order from one of them if at all possible.

On a related note, I’ll be putting up more shit in my personal (started as a troll move to show the flaw in the system) and will donate any money I receive from this to . (So far, I’ve made $19.20. WATCH OUT, JAMES PATTERSON!)

Related note to that related note: All proceeds from the sales of our will ALSO go to BINC.

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Interlude #2: My initial idea for this post was to describe nine different books I’m 100% CERTAIN will come out in 2021 and reference COVID/lockdown and rate them. This came out of reading a sample in which a totally jaded man-boy narcissistically complains about how the world has gone off the rails in 2011. HA! Just wait, buddy. The idea that 2011 was the “worst possible timeline” seems so quaint now. I can’t imagine this book getting published in our current situation.

But that was written years ago, so it can be totally forgiven. (Even if it does have the most purple metaphors I’ve ever encountered.) But someone writing the great Brooklyn relationship novel about a couple falling apart (or coming together) during lockdown? UNFORGIVABLE! Don’t do it. Full stop.

Also: No twee diaries about your personal experiences during lockdown.

I’m dreading the deluge of dystopian YA books about viruses as well. And poorly imagined “alternate histories” about this particular moment in time.

I would be totally into books by moms about having to mother during this period. Because society has always sucked, a lot of the moms I’m in touch with are taking care of the kids full time + homeschooling + trying to do their jobs. I feel like writer-moms have a lot to share about empathy, sanity, will, and humanity. But, as we all know, I’m a sucker for mom books. (Preorder��World’s Best Mother��by Nuria Labari/Katie Whittemore from World Editions as soon as it’s available! I totally stand by this book. It’s great.)

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Which is maybe a good segue to the��second book I wanted to write about here:��, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore, and which we’re bringing out on May 5th.

All the copies of FOUR BY FOUR that would be in our office, but are instead in my teenage daughter’s LED-lit room, dressed up as a giant armchair.

So, the other day, on one of the never-ending Zoom drinking get togethers that I’m both loving and feeling exhausted by, a bookseller shat on my posts for never promoting our own books. Which, fair. (This was the same day that someone on Twitter trolled me by calling me “a lame” and “total cap” for making fun of in my class. Which, c’mon bro, Bookfinity?!?! That exists to be the butt of so many jokes.)

Although, to be fair, this part of the Open Letter business—meaning Three Percent—was never supposed to be about Open Letter. At least not directly. This is me indulging my impulse to not��market, but to say things about the book world in a broader way. Marketing our books is Anthony’s job! (I kid, I kid. But I do feel embarrassed pimping our own product.)

Nevertheless, I’ll try and include more of our books in here from now on out. I’m 100% sure this won’t change our sales, which, oh my god, this is a chart that will make it crystal clear what trouble the industry is in.

We had planned out two major books for 2020:��Four by Four��for May,��On Time & Water��by Andri Snær Magnason for September. That was one of the pillars to the “How to Take Open Letter to the Next Level” plan.

WELL!

Four by Four‘s tour is over and all of the lovely booksellers who wanted to promote it are either a) unemployed, or b) not capable of hand-selling it in the way they could. And, to add insult to injury, the ABA didn’t choose it for the May IndieNext list. Which, who cares? That particular promotional pamphlet will be in something like 42 Florida and Georgia bookstores. But still: Don’t tell me this process is democratic. Let’s have a little transparency, ABA!

Anyway, this is THE quarantine book, in my opinion. Because I’m almost done with this glass of wine, I’m going to plagiarize what I wrote to all of our subscribers last week, AND reference the forthcoming interview:

I know that we won’t come anywhere near our goal, but since this is Katie’s debut as a translator, I think everyone who reads this post should just buy it. I’m not above asking for favors right now. And if you don’t have a local store to order from, and we’ll give you the ebook for free.

I can’t write about this anymore. It’s a book that’s been in the works for two years, which was—not exaggerating here—the best editing experience of my life, and . . . all of the potential joys of sales and readings and Sara’s first Cubs game have been railroaded. Alas. Such is baseball, such is life!

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Interlude #3: Speaking of the love of my life—”I’ll never look at my wife the way I look at baseball”—I’ve been filling that void with MLB The Show 2020, which happened to come out as my self-quarantine started. Am I good at it? NO. But I’m passable. And my Cardinals are in first place at 24-20. One-quarter of the season done . . .

One of the things I’ve learned by playing every single game (which I’ve never done before) is that losing streaks suck. You can do everything��almost��perfectly and still lose 3-2 because the homer you��nearly��jacked, went six inches foul. This is a game that is so random. And reminds you that the universe is cruel.

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Interlude #3: Speaking of baseball, my favorite part of the podcast is the opening banter. I 150% love the way Sam Miller looks at the world (the inspirations for how I think about my own writing are Sam Miller, Drew Magary, and Franco Moretti), and especially the stray thoughts he shares at the beginning of every podcast.

“Shared” might be more appropriate. Without any new stimuli, what is banter?

This is the thing that’s causing me the most psychic anguish: It’s hard to get new stimulation. For something random and unexpected to happen. The craziest shit we’ve ever lived through is all in play, so hearing that Jay Cutler and Kristin Cavallari are getting divorced just isn’t the same. In normal times, I’d have a bunch of jokes about this. (Mainly related to their appearance on The League in 2013.) Nowadays, that’s too frivolous to even register.

Which is also true of book news. And why I feel weird even attempting this post. Nothing makes sense, nothing matters, so why talk about anything that’s not COVID? On the upside, Rochester decided not to test city employees for smoking weed? They never should have been, but after “staying in place” for two months, I think we all deserve more than that courtesy. I think $1 billion of the��next stimulus package should be sent sending edibles to every adult in the country. I don’t know about all of you, but if a little weed could relieve the stress? Even for an hour? Totally there for that. I feel like my stress baseline is like basically heart attack level. (Did you see that chart above???)

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Interlude #4: Nicholas Mosley’s series is my intellectual jam right now. I read this��decades��ago. Before I ever met John O’Brien or applied for a fellowship with Dalkey Archive Press. It was one of my top five favorite books—well, if you let me take all five books as a single entry—and it seems more relevant than ever.

I’ll get into this more in future weeks, but here’s a summary of the first book (written, but not the first one you should read) in the series:

, in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, follows six characters trying to find their way through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive—conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations—and try to find a way to realize genuine experience.

I’m so here for a revolution. It doesn’t have to be violent. We have an opportunity to rethink everything. And if we don’t take it? If we let the powerful go back to fucking our lives day in and out after this? That’s on us. Radical change is most possible during a catastrophe. Let’s do this. We can create a new timeline that’s better.

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I’ve been listening to sooooo much music. Mostly artists like Julia Kent (for relaxation), Dan Deacon (for optimism), and Waxahatchee (for beauty). But, yo, a new Car Seat Headrest album comes out on Friday (a mere 4 COVID years from now) and it’s going to be incredible. I’ve listened to the EP/singles over and over and over and, as someone who likes artists who reinvent themselves with purpose, I’m all in.

That said, in reading the profile of Will Toledo, I found out about his parody EDM band 1 Trait Danger. HOLY SHIT. This is like Tenacious D + MC Lars + Juvenilia.

THIS.

Trolling Pitchfork is always fun. And the bit: “This is supposed to be Vampire Weekend. This is supposed to be Perfume Genius. The good shit!” SO GOOD.

“” is fantastic. And the line, “I’ve only made one mistake in my life, I’ve only made one mistake” from “Can’t Cool Me Down” (ugh, so untimely with the fever metaphor) is killer. God I hope I can hang on for 42 more years and hear this whole album . . .

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What’s next?

That’s��literally��a note in my “tickler file” of ideas to write about. Right next to “We live in soap opera land continuity.” Jesus Christ, Post.

For me, what’s next is one of fourteen different things. When I first felt like I could read again, I laid out every single book I was interested in across my living room floor and hoped that one would draw me in. That lead to and and and , who were absolutely perfect for my reading mind at that moment.

Now I have two really long books calling out to me: ��by Marguerite Young (been talking about it on TMR forever, and always wanted to finish it), and����by Minae Mizumura, which makes sense as a way of blending Neuman’s Japanese book with Fresán’s bits about Wuthering Heights.��(A True Novel��is based on Emily Brontë’s masterpiece.)

Or I’ll read for work. Or watch��Westworld��and hope that this is all a dream we’ve been living in.

Till the next, stay safe, wash your hands, drink when you need to, and stay sane.

Tony Messenger��is an Australian writer, critic and interviewer who has had works published in many places including��Overland Literary Journal,��Southerly,��Mascara Literary Review,��VerityLa��and��Burning House Press. He blogs about translated fiction and interviews Australian poets at����and can be found on Twitter��

��by Khaled Khalifa, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

Khaled Khalifa’s fifth novel, Death Is Hard Work is the first Syrian novel to make the Best Translated Book Award longlists although another Syrian book, Adrenalin by Ghayath Almadhoun (translated by Catherine Cobham) made the poetry longlist in 2018.

Khaled Khalifa’s four previous novels include In Praise of Hatred, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and No Knives in the Kitchens of this City, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013. He continues to live in Damascus and writes in cafes despite the obvious dangers. Despite offers for overseas university postings he remains in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing civil war.

Death Is Hard Work has a simple narrative: Abdel Latif al-Salim dies on the opening page. His dying wish is “to be buried in the cemetery of Anabiya…beside his sister Layla (also known as Nevine).” His son, Bobol, gathers his siblings, Hussien and Fatima, to undertake the long journey, “hundreds of miles away,” to the ancestral village.

A literal and figurative journey back to simpler, safer times.

Although simple in plot, Khaled Khalifa uses the journey to explore many themes. Syria, like the corpse, is in decay, the matter of fact approach to death in a decimated country, the reconciliation of familial bonds as they are forced to share a minibus together, and a whole lot more.

From the opening pages, there is a blend of horror, tinged with bureaucracy, Bobol cannot remove his father’s corpse without the Director’s signature, but the morgue is quickly filling:

Death is a solitary experience, of course, but nevertheless it lays heavy obligations on the living. There’s a big difference between an old man who dies in his village, surrounded by family and close to the cemetery, and one who dies hundreds of kilometers away from them all. The living�� have a harder task ahead of them than the dead; no one wants to see their loved ones rot.

Once settling the father’s corpse in Hussien’s minibus, and plotting their way out of Damascus and the roadblocks, and oncoming vehicles filled with corpses, the trio work their way out on the open roads towards the ancestral village. Soon they have to leave the highway as there’s a sniper hiding. Beside the road lie the bodies of “a man, a woman, a young man and a girl” victims of the sniper. These repetitive experiences of death reinforce the horrors besetting their nation: “The exceptional had become habitual, and tragedies were simply mundane—perhaps that was the worst part of this war.”

Endless checkpoints and delays hinder their journey, and slowly the corpse begins to decay: “Driving along in the dark, the siblings hadn’t noticed the changes that had overtaken the body.”

This a parallel to the decay of their country, Syria slowly rotting and becoming unrecognizable, storage in local morgues is interrupted as the bodies of soldiers killed in battle take precedence, you can only stall the inevitable decay for so long. And, finally, what once was living and vibrant has now rotted to become unrecognizable. In an interview, at Electric Literature, Khaled Khalifa speaks of this metaphor: “Syria became a corpse not only during the war, but it was also becoming that corpse slowly and day by day during fifty years of dictatorship.”

Bobol’s memories give the backdrop to the escalation of the conflict: “Suspicions alone were enough to lead to corpses lining the streets. Suspicions alone were enough to cause someone to disappear without a trace.”

The history of the escalation blended with the current reality and the hopes and dreams being extinguished: “What was the point of clinging to memories as life went by? They were only good for digging up more pain.”

Having a journey and taking place in a minibus, a restricted environment, the novel allows for the familial bonds to play out between the two brothers and sister: “Hussein didn’t care, Bolbol actively opposed it, and Fatima was too busy trying to play the role of the noble sister reuniting her family after the death of a parent.”

However even under strained conditions there are still hidden family secrets: “He had wanted to tell Hussein all the things he had smothered within himself for years, but there hadn’t been a point during their journey when it wasn’t either inappropriate or simply too dangerous to talk.”

And finally, this is a novel that is also a journey into the unknown: “It was a mass exodus, hundreds of thousands of people heading from the north and the east toward the unknown.”

��A novel that also contains tinges of romance, failed first loves, and even absurdist humor (for example, the corpse requires identity papers), this is a fine example of how literature can parallel and mimic a brutal and inhumane situation. Khaled Khalifa, and the work of translator Leri Price, has brought to the Western sphere a multi-layered book that forces the reader to confront the horrors of the Syrian crisis. The first novel from Syria to make the Best Translated Book Award longlist and a worthy inclusion.

Since I (Chad) used this book in my class this spring, I thought I’d write it up for the series. Hi.

by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (Iceland, FSG)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 62%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 9%

Given Iceland’s population, it’s almost shocking that forty-six Icelandic works of fiction and poetry have been published in English translation since 2008. Over that time period, more books have been translated from Icelandic than from Czech. Or from Greek, Hungarian, or Flemish. In fact, there have been as many books translated from the Icelandic as there have from Hindi, Latvian, Persian, and Yiddish combined.

Sure, 10% of all Icelanders will publish a book over the course of their lifetime, providing a pretty solid pool of titles for publishers to choose from, but still—why Iceland?

Last summer, the Icelandic men’s soccer team took the world by storm, becoming the beloved Cinderella side of the Euro Cup. They rolled into the semifinals behind a slightly disconcerting nationalistic celebration, a feisty style of play fed by a “what do we have to lose?” underdog mentality, and some incredibly fun Twitter taunts from The Grapevine, Reykjavik’s English language paper.

Iceland was having its moment.

But then again, Iceland’s been having its moment for decades.

Björk. Sigur Rós. Múm. Of Monsters and Men. The Northern Lights. Renewable energy. Women’s Rights. Jón Gnarr’s mayorship. Damon Albarn’s bar. The fifth gait of an Icelandic horse. Fermented shark and Brennivén. Cheap flights to Europe if you stay overnight in Iceland. There are dozens of things about Iceland that make it really cool, that have made it an incredibly hip place to visit, or culture to import. (Except maybe the shark and Brennivén. Iceland can keep those.)

Although all of this interest in Iceland and Icelandic culture seems like a boon, there is an underlying tension at play. This is an island nation after all, one that, for most of its early history, was more or less cut off from the rest of the world, floating in the middle of nowhere. Its culture is uniquely Icelandic because it was able to develop on its own, somewhat removed from globalizing trends. Reykjavik is the only capital in western Europe without a McDonald’s or a Starbucks—almost all the restaurants and shops originated in Iceland.

This tension between being separate from the rest of the world while also wanting to participate in global culture plays itself out in Sjón’s most recent novel, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was.

The novel centers on Máni Steinn (a.k.a. Moonstone), a young, gay boy who was born in the island’s leper colony, and who is obsessed with the movies. Moonstone has more of a plot than some of Sjón’s earlier books, but it’s still somewhat secondary to the poetic writing and atmosphere of the novel. A Danish ship arrives bringing the Spanish flu, and lots of people die, especially those who congregated at the movie theater. Máni Steinn also falls ill, giving Sjón the opportunity to show off his musical abilities in a three-chapter fever dream awash in symbolism, gray ooze, and body parts.

The toe of the shoe is thrust out from beneath the skirt and stamped down with such force that the floor creaks. Gray slime wells up between the boards. The air grows thick with the stench of rotting fish.

—A little closer, dear, a little closer . . .

The hands reappear. The figure flings a pair of eyebrows onto the lid. Pain lacerates the boy. He raises a hand to his forehead, but it is shaking too much for him to feel whether his own brows are still there.

—A little closer, dear, a little closer . . .

The figure withdraws its hands inside its clothes.

—A little closer, dear, a little closer . . .

The gramophone voice buzzes inside the wooden box.

The sense of danger from the outside pervades the novel, not just in relation to the actual, literal infection that the Danes bring with them on their ship, but also in the corrupting power of foreign films. Dr. Garibaldi Árnason details this in a mini-manifesto:

_In the same fashion, the cinema audience scrutinizes the light-puppets on the silver screen, and whether it is the curve of Asta Nielsen’s back, Theda Bara’s naked shoulders, Pina Menichelli’s sensual eyelids [. . .] the body part in question and its position will become the focus of the viewer’s existence and etch itself into his psyche, while the size of the image and the repeated close-ups of lips, teeth, and even tongues will exacerbate the effects until few have the strength to resist them.

Film is thus immoral by its very nature, transforming the actor into a fetish and fostering perversion in the viewer, who allows himself to be seduced like a moth to the flame.

The doctor’s viewpoint is brought into even sharper view after Máni is caught with another man:

—It’s clear that the lad is not like other people . . . a homosexual [. . .] Hardly any cases known in this country . . . hasn’t become established . . . will proliferate if . . . My theory . . . a word of warning . . . men are rendered more susceptible to homosexuality by overindulgence in films . . .

I’m definitely oversimplifying this book, but reading Moonstone shortly after Gudbergur Bergsson’s Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, I’ve become fixed on the ways in which these books address the complexities of Iceland in the world, and, more specifically, of the idea of the “Icelandic Man.” Although using vastly different approaches, both novels open up a space through which to examine these tensions.

That’s why I think Moonstone deserves the Best Translated Book Award for fiction.

Friday the 13th! Go catch some black cats before the weekend!

Here’s the beginning of Tiffany’s review:

I would like to pose the argument that it is rare for one to ever come across a truly passive protagonist in a novel. The protagonist (perhaps) of Three Light-Years, Claudio Viberti, is just that—a shy internist who lives in an apartment above his mother and below his ex-wife, and religiously eats boiled vegetables every day for lunch at the same cafe at the same table. Claudio spends over two years obsessing about Cecilia, a doctor and fellow colleague, until the day he is able to stutter out his profession of love for her, only to proceed in engaging with her in his car a safe distance from the hospital where they work. Following and/or during this engagement (not clear), Claudio also stumbles into a relationship with Cecilia’s sister, Silva, who shortly thereafter learns she is expecting. These ingredients and known plot “twists” are the makings of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, except with a passive protagonist as a stand-in for McDreamy. Disappointingly, no attempts were really made to make the characters compelling or interesting beyond those of our typical hour-long sitcoms located in hospitals in Seattle and Los Angeles. The only interesting twist was that this hospital is located in a suburb of a large Italian city, and with that comes the typical romantic stereotypes.

For the rest of the review, go here

After working through Three Light-Years with determination and perseverance, I tried to identify other works that had truly passive protagonist. Honestly, the best I could conjure up were the isolated, solitude-loving types, but not ones who barely cross the barrier of being a prop and being a plot driver like dear Claudio. Perhaps that is the beauty of this work. However, the reader will likely remain skeptical of this model and distance themselves from the work because the reader is never provided with any insights into what is motivating the characters’ actions and decisions, or rather mistakes and poor choices. This is no surprise as the work seemed wholly unconcerned about the reader and more concerned presenting the the narcissistic tendencies of the two antagonists, the two sisters who stumble into affairs with Claudio without any analysis, question, or notion of attraction for him. Further, the reader will have to experience the same episode of the well-known sitcom not only from Claudio’s prop-like existence, but also from Cecila’s and Silva’s perspectives as well.

What was compelling and redeeming about Three Light-Years were the anecdotes about life peppered through the work at just the level to motivate the steadfast reader to continue. The following quotes provide a few examples:

“. . . [T]here is no present that is of greater interest to me than that distant past that I did not experience, about which I know almost nothing, and which I continue to imagine, fabricating other people’s memories.”

“As a general rule, it’s always best to know as little as possible about other people’s business. Not that it’s difficult to keep the things you accidentally come to know to yourself and pretend you know nothing. But even if you pretend not to know, you do know, and your life is invaded by the lives of others.”

“Memory is unfair . . . the person remembering is now older anymore disillusioned and forgetful than the young, deluded, determined protagonist of her memories. That’s why memory is unfair.”

Perhaps I have been reading too much Cesar Aira lately, but I appreciate being captivated by the awkward or self-imposed solitude of the characters of his works. This requires insights into the inner thoughts and motivations of those characters. Without being provided with such insights, the reader has to really justify why he or she has read Three Light-Years and, more importantly, whether engagement with the work was even possible.

Aside from being an outstanding novelist and short story writer ( and are particularly worth reading), Joanna is one of the most beloved English professors here at the URochester and has served on Open Letter’s Executive Committee from day one.

Even if I didn’t know her personally—and hadn’t worked with her daughter a couple summers ago—I would still be really excited about Here’s a bit from the FSG website:

In 1905, a tourist agent and amateur antiques collector named Armand de Potter mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Greece. His body is never recovered and his wife is left to manage his affairs on her own. But as she starts to piece together his life, she realizes that everything was not as he had said. Infused with details from letters and diary entries, the narrative twists forward and backward through time, revealing a lost world of fake identities, underground antiques networks, and a husband who wasn’t what he seemed. [. . .]

Told with masterful narrative agility, De Potter’s Grand Tour is a tale as grand as the tour guide at its center. Drawing on real letters, legal documents, and a trove of diaries only recently discovered, Joanna Scott points delicately toward the story’s historical basis and unfolds a detective tale of the highest order.

Given Joanna’s literary sensibilities and intimidating intelligence, I think this is going to be pretty amazing. My copy is supposed to be available today, and with a weekend of 90 degree temperatures, it seems like the perfect way to end the summer is sitting on the beach with this book.

A couple months back FSG featured De Potter’s Grand Tour in their weekly “Work in Progress” newsletter. So if you’re interested, you can read the first chapter