*

I was ten and stopped taking off my coat. That morning, Mum had covered us one by one in udder ointment to protect us from the cold. It came out of a yellow Bogena tin and was normally used to prevent dairy cows’ teats from getting cracks, calluses and cauliflower-like lumps. The tin’s lid was so greasy you could only screw it off with a tea-towel. It smelled of stewed udder, the thick slices I’d sometimes find cooking in a pan of stock on our stove, sprinkled with salt and pepper. They filled me with horror, just like the reeking ointment on my skin. Mum pressed her fat fingers into our faces like the round cheeses she patted to check whether the rind was ripening. Our pale cheeks shone in the light of the kitchen bulb, which was encrusted with fly shit. For years we’d been planning to get a lampshade, a pretty one with flowers, but whenever we saw one in the village, Mum could never make up her mind. She’d been doing this for three years now. That morning, two days before Christmas, I felt her slippery thumbs in my eye sockets and for a moment I was afraid she’d press too hard, that my eyeballs would plop into my skull like marbles, and she’d say, ‘That’s what happens when your eyes are always roaming and you never keep them still like a true believer, gazing up at God as though the heavens might break open at any moment.’ But the heavens here only broke open for a snowstorm – nothing to keep staring at like an idiot.

In the middle of the breakfast table there was a woven bread-basket lined with a napkin decorated with Christmas angels. They were holding trumpets and twigs of mistletoe protectively in front of their willies. Even if you held the napkin up to the light of the bulb you couldn’t see what they looked like – my guess was rolled-up slices of luncheon meat. Mum had arranged the bread neatly on the napkin: white, wholemeal with poppy seeds, and currant loaf. She’d used a sieve to carefully sprinkle icing sugar onto the crispy back of the loaf, like the first light snow that had fallen onto the backs of the blazed cows in the meadow before we drove them inside. The bread-bag’s plastic clip was kept on top of the biscuit tin: we’d lose it otherwise and Mum didn’t like the look of a knot in a plastic bag.

‘Meat or cheese first before you go for the sweet stuff,’ she’d always say. This was the rule and it would make us big and strong, as big as the giant Goliath and as strong as Samson in the Bible. We always had to drink a large glass of fresh milk as well; it had usually been out of the tank for a couple of hours and was lukewarm, and sometimes there was a yellowish layer of cream that stuck to the top of your mouth if you drank too slowly. The best thing was to gulp down the whole glass of milk with your eyes closed, something Mum called ‘irreverent’ although there’s nothing in the Bible about drinking milk slowly, or about eating a cow’s body. I took a slice of white bread from the basket and put it on my plate upside down so that it looked just like a pale toddler’s bum, even more convincing when partly spread with chocolate spread, which never failed to amuse me and my brothers, and they’d always say, ‘Are you arse-licking again?’

‘If you put goldfish in a dark room for too long they go really pale,’ I whispered to Matthies, putting six slices of cooked sausage on my bread so that they covered it perfectly. You’ve got six cows and two of them get eaten. How many are left? I heard the teacher’s voice inside my head every time I ate something. Why those stupid sums were combined with food – apples, cakes, pizzas and biscuits – I didn’t know, but in any case the teacher had given up hope that I’d ever be able to do sums, that my exercise book would ever be pristine white without a single red underscore. It had taken me a year to learn to tell the time – Dad had spent hours with me at the kitchen table with the school’s practice clock which he’d sometimes thrown on the floor in despair, at which point the mechanism would bounce out and the annoying thing would just keep on ringing – and even now when I looked at a clock the arms would still sometimes turn into the earthworms we dug out of the ground behind the cowshed with a fork to use as fishing bait. They wriggled every which way when you held them between forefinger and thumb and didn’t calm down until you gave them a couple of taps, and then they’d lie in your hand and look just like those sweet, red strawberry shoelaces from Van Luik’s sweet-shop.

‘It’s rude to whisper in company,’ said my little sister Hanna, who was sitting next to Obbe and opposite me at the kitchen table. When she didn’t like something, she’d move her lips from left to right.

‘Some words are too big for your little ears; they won’t fit in,’ I said with my mouth full.

Obbe stirred his glass of milk boredly with his finger, held up a bit of skin and then quickly wiped it on the tablecloth. It stuck there like a whitish lump of snot. It looked horrible, and I knew there was a chance the tablecloth would be the other way around tomorrow, with the encrusted milk skin on my side. I would refuse to put my plate on the table. We all knew the paper serviettes were only there for decoration and that Mum smoothed them out and put them back in the kitchen drawer after breakfast. They weren’t meant for our dirty fingers and mouths. Some part of me also felt bad at the thought of the angels being scrunched up in my fist like mosquitoes so that their wings broke, or having their white angel’s hair dirtied with strawberry jam.

‘I have to spend time outside because I look so pale,’ Matthies whispered. He smiled and stuck his knife with utmost concentration into the white chocolate part of the Duo Penotti pot, so as not to get any of the milk chocolate bit on it. We only had Duo Penotti in the holidays. We’d been looking forward to it for days and now the Christmas holidays had begun, it was finally time. The best moment was when Mum pulled off the protective paper, cleaned the bits of glue from the edges and then showed us the brown and white patches, like the unique pattern on a newborn calf. Whoever had the best marks at school that week was allowed the pot first. I was always the last to get a turn.

I slid backwards and forwards on my chair: my toes didn’t quite reach the floor yet. What I wanted was to keep everyone safe indoors and spread them out across the farm like slices of cooked sausage. In the weekly roundup yesterday, about the South Pole, our teacher had said that some penguins go fishing and never come back. Even though we didn’t live at the South Pole, it was cold here, so cold that the lake had frozen over and the cows’ drinking troughs were full of ice.

We each had two pale blue freezer bags next to our breakfast plates. I held one up and gave my mother a questioning look.

‘To put over your socks,’ she said with a smile that made dimples in her cheeks. ‘It will keep them warm and stop your feet getting wet.’ Meanwhile, she was preparing breakfast for Dad who was helping a cow to calve; after each slice of bread, she’d slide the knife between her thumb and index finger until the butter reached the tips of her fingers, and then she’d scrape it off with the blunt side of the knife. Dad was probably sitting on a milking stool next to a cow taking off a bit of the beestings, clouds of breath and cigarette smoke rising up above its steaming back. I realized there weren’t any freezer bags next to his plate: his feet were probably too big, in particular his left one which was deformed after an accident with a combine harvester when he was about twenty. Next to Mum on the table was the silver cheese scoop she used to assess the flavour of the cheeses she made in the mornings. Before she cut one open, she’d stick the cheese scoop into the middle, through the plastic layer, twist it twice and then slowly pull it out. And she’d eat a piece of cumin cheese just the way she ate the white bread during communion at church, just as thoughtfully and devoutly, slow and staring. Obbe had once joked that Jesus’ body was made of cheese, too, and that was why we were only allowed two slices on our bread each day, otherwise we’d run out of Him too quickly.

Once our mother had said the morning prayer and thanked God ‘for poverty and for wealth; while many eat the bread of sorrows, Thou hast fed us mild and well,’ Matthies pushed his chair back, hung his black leather ice skates around his neck, and put the Christmas cards in his pocket that Mum had asked him to put through the letterboxes of a few neighbours. He was going on ahead to the lake where he was going to take part in the local skating competition with a couple of his friends. It was a twenty-mile route, and the winner got a plate of stewed udders with mustard and a gold medal with the year 2000 on it. I wished I could put a freezer bag over his head, too, so that he’d stay warm for a long time, the seal closed around his neck. He ran his hand through my hair for a moment. I quickly smoothed it back into place and wiped a few crumbs from my pyjama top. Matthies always parted his hair in the middle and put gel in his front locks. They were like two curls of butter on a dish; Mum always made those around Christmas: butter from a tub wasn’t very festive, she thought. That was for normal days and the day of Jesus’ birth wasn’t a normal day, not even if it happened every year all over again as if He died for our sins each year, which I found strange. I often thought to myself: that poor man has been dead a long time, they must have forgotten by now. But better not to mention it, otherwise there wouldn’t be any more sprinkle-covered biscuits and no one would tell the Christmas story of the three kings and the star in the East.

Matthies went into the hall to check his hair, even though it would turn rock hard in the freezing cold and his two curls would go flat and stick to his forehead.

‘Can I come with you?’ I asked. Dad had got my wooden skates out of the attic and strapped them to my shoes with their brown leather ties. I’d been walking around the farm in my skates for a few days, my hands behind my back and the protectors over the blades so they wouldn’t leave marks on the floor. My calves were hard. I’d practised enough now to be able to go out onto the ice without a folding chair to push around.

‘No, you can’t,’ he said. And then more quietly so that only I could hear it, ‘Because we’re going to the other side.’

‘I want to go to the other side, too,’ I whispered.

‘I’ll take you with me when you’re older.’ He put on his woolly hat and smiled. I saw his braces with their zigzagging blue elastic bands.

‘I’ll be back before dark,’ he called to Mum. He turned around once again in the doorway and waved to me, the scene I’d keep replaying in my mind later until his arm no longer raised itself and I began to doubt whether we had even said goodbye.

*

Excerpt fromÌęThe Discomfort of Evening.ÌęCopyright © 2020 by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. English translation copyright © 2020 by Michele Hutchison. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, .

Chris Clarke grew up in Western Canada and currently lives in Philadelphia. His translations include books by Ryad Girod, Pierre Mac Orlan, and François Caradec. His translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives was awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019, and his translation of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s In the CafĂ© of Lost Youth was a finalist for the same award in 2017. He is currently retranslating a novel by Raymond Queneau for publication in 2022 (NYRB Classics).

by Nona FernĂĄndez, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (Graywolf Press)

How do memories differ from dreams? Sure, dreams are all jumbled up, built of slivers and shards, and their combinatory narratives, if they can even be called that, borrow from any perception, experienced or not. They aren’t to be trusted. Memories are supposed to be more concrete, more linear, more factual. But are they? When I think back to my youngest years, I have few memories, and of some of those I can recall, I have since grown suspicious. I remember a great weeping willow in front of our house when I was first learning to ride a bicycle. The bike was red and white with a long banana seat. I feel pretty certain about that one. Even earlier, I remember a hobby horse of sorts, colorfully painted with spots of blue and red on white, which I received one Christmas morning. And yet, while going through old albums during a visit back home, I came across the photograph that lies at the root of that memory. I no longer believe I have a true memory of the horse, or of that Christmas morning, but instead, my mind has incorporated the details of that photograph into its reservoirs and has constructed a memory from its details. Add to these uncertainties other memories that are surely the result of being told a story about my own childhood repeatedly, and it becomes hard to tell what is memory and what is instead internal literary or cinematic construction.=Ìę

Space Invaders was Nona Fernández’s fourth novel, first published in Chile in 2013. She has since published two more. Another in a growing list of stellar translations by Natasha Wimmer, Space Invaders is a labyrinthine investigation of how collective memory is formed during large-scale traumatic events. Fernández presents the layered and fragmented recollections of a group of young classmates during the “politicide” years of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Like their memories, the timeline of the narrative is fragmented and inconsistent: the children are about ten years old, and it is about 1984; the children are no longer children, but in their early forties; or, they are about twenty, around the time the media announced the legal rulings on the Caso Degollados, the “Slit-Throat Case,” bringing the grisly murders back into the public eye. Whether ten, twenty, or forty years old, their thoughts are always focused on that same time period, seeking to construct sense from what they remember, what the evidence tells them, what they have since learned and unlearned.

People remember things in different ways; my wife almost always remembers her dreams, and she seems to have detailed memories of her childhood in a way that I don’t. This variability of memory is evident among Maldonado and her friends, as well. Not only in what they remember, but in how they remember it. But there is one focal point they all share, a girl who became the star of the traumatic mental film reel of their youth. Even though she is a shared feature of all their memories, they all remember her differently. One remembers her hair pulled back in long braids, another swears she wore her dark hair long and loose, framing her face. They can’t agree on the details, but her place in their memory is certain:

It’s her. Nothing else matters, not the style of her hair, the color of her skin or her eyes. Everything is relative except for the sound of her voice, because in dreams, according to Fuenzalida, voices are like fingerprints. González’s voice seeps into us from Fuenzalida’s dreams, invading our own visions, our own versions of González, settling in and keeping us company night after night.

Fernández paints this mysterious central figure, Estrella, with a dash of this dream, a pinch of that memory, from then, from later, from after. Subtle and not-so-subtle repetition and modulation give shape to key scenes and relationships. Strong visual recollections take central places for the members of this group, and these striking elements also mingle and stack. The spare hands of an amputee parent merge alarmingly with the projectiles of their Space Invaders video game. An unmatchable high score left as a challenge by a vanished older brother. A mysterious man with dark glasses and a red Chevy drifts through the background like smoke. The story is built of images, and the images are painted in words. “Maldonado dreams about letters. They’re old letters in the handwriting of ten-year-old girls. [
] Maldonado’s dreams are of reading each of these letters. Dreams are built of words, assembled from letters and sentences.” Our understanding of a troubled past is built on shaky evidence, a binder of news clippings, mental inconsistencies, and remembered childhood correspondence.

Natasha Wimmer’s skilled touch is made evident in this translation through her attention to register and tone. Among the various memories, dreams, and attempted explanations, Fernández intersperses a series of short letters from one of the classmates to another, and here, Wimmer’s attention to detail is on display. She informed me that for her, the difficulty lay in finding “the right mix of lyricism and child-like candor.” And indeed, she has, as the letters are charming without being infantile. Devices of this sort risk overwhelming a book, especially one of this length, but in Space Invaders, these epistolary memory-artifacts are occasional anchors to a time of innocence that faded under the weight of the realizations the characters later faced.

The things I have to tell you are other things. More important things, secret things. But this paper is tiny and my writing is so big and fat. My dad says I have to write smaller and stay on the lines but the lines are so thin they’re hard to see. If I listened to my dad I could write more but since I can’t write small and stay on the tiny little lines I have to write less. I should try to obey my dad.

Beyond the letters, it gets increasingly difficult to tell the speakers apart, to tell which of them is relating events, to be certain of whether they are remembering or dreaming. Carefully-crafted repetitions help to tie some things together, just as they help to further blur chronological lines. This is the composition of a generation’s collective memory during times of shared trauma, and it is taking place at a formative age. As many of us have seen recently, when times are tough, memory and dream tend to overlap more than usual. Dreams color memories, and collective memories tug and pull in all directions at once.

Our ten-year-old sons and daughters must be experiencing something similar right now, in these shared days of pandemic-inspired anxiety and uncertainty. While we’re all stuck indoors, many of us are having trouble sleeping, or perhaps having trouble not sleeping. In such a situation, dreams can take on new forms as, for lack of routine and typical stimuli, they are invaded by older memories, by television and books, by the news. What memories are our youngest generation forming of these peculiar days? What will they remember of the great 2020 pandemic? A house full of anxiety? Boredom? The disappearance of a loved one that they were not able to be present for? When we come to the other side of this, they will all share in the memory of this time, of what it was like to be ten in the spring of 2020. They will each remember it differently, they will have retained different details, but together, they will possess a shared experience, because they all went through it simultaneously.

This is not to say that COVID-19 can be compared to an authoritarian military dictatorship and a complete breakdown of democracy, nor that this pandemic will go on for seventeen years. ÌęI only suggest that there is a similarity between the two along the lines of the formation of collective memory during trauma. And in a way, during all the anxiety and fear that we are facing throughout such an unexpected and unimagined situation, there is something vaguely comforting in knowing that everyone else is dealing with some version of the same thing, to a lesser or greater degree. This was the case for Maldonado, ZĂșñiga, and their friends, and it comes across in the prose of Space Invaders. As Natasha Wimmer put it, “There’s something about the third person plural that is just perfect for this child’s-eye perspective–maybe because as children we’re more likely to feel ourselves part of a collective.”

While it is unusual for a novel of this length to win a major award, clocking in as it does at under eighty pages, even at this length, Fernández’s short book is a fully formed reading experience. There is more than enough enjoyment, introspection, and style here to validate picking it a copy. This is a one- or two-sitting read, and as such, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t dive in and experience this insightful meditation on memory, dreaming, and trauma. As an added bonus, it could provide your pandemic-addled dreams with a bit of spice in the form of green-glowing projectile hands.

Finnish Literature

LR: As you know, Finnish literature is just like the language. It’s different. It’s more different from English literature than, say, German literature is.

CWP: What kind of things mark Finnish literature as “different”?

LR: Well, I think The Colonel’s Wife is a great example. It defies expectation, right? As you read it and you’re like, what is happening in this book? You know, it’s something different, which is a good thing in my opinion. This isn’t always true. Sometimes there’s issues because of the different editing culture in Finland where books aren’t edited as thoroughly as they are in America. This is actually true of most non-English literatures. But there’s also just a different way of thinking and different way of telling stories.

Rosa is fantastic. She’s a real character. And she’s had a really interesting life. She grew up in a tiny, tiny village of reindeer herders in Lapland—the setting of this book is where she’s from. And she was, um, sort of a wandering hippie for a long time. “Rosa Liksom” is actually a pseudonym, and to be honest, I can’t remember what her real name is right now. She chose a pseudonym partially as a sort of playful stunt, but also because she wanted to write about people she knew and didn’t want them to know who was writing about them, you know, so she would appear incognito in funny ways, like with great big over-sized glasses, you know, and a scarf over her head.

She’s goofy and fun and I highly recommend meeting her if you ever get the chance. And this book is interesting too because it’s about a real person—not somebody Rosa knew personally—but that’s one of the reasons the plot is so unexpected. Because it’s very closely based on the life of a real person. Rosa isn’t passing judgment, she’s just explaining what her life was actually like.

CWP: That’s really interesting. I didn’t realize that at all. Is that something Finnish readers would automatically know?

LR: Yeah, I think so. If not by reading the book itself, then through all the publicity surrounding the book. Recently I got a message from Rosa saying that when we do another printing we really should mention somewhere that the novel is based on a real-life person because there’s nothing, nothing at all about that on the English edition. Nor in the publicity materials around it. Even though the publisher and my editor were aware that it’s about a real person.

CWP: That’s wild! “Positioning” is always a hot term in publishing. Figuring out the right way to present a book to reviewers, readers, and booksellers can make all the difference in if a title is ignored or beloved. And without the knowledge that The Colonel’s Wife is based on real person, it comes off as if Liksom just created this out of whole cloth, as if she were simply imagining what might have happened to someone involved in the Nazi Party in such a horrific way. And the, you know, the pedophilia stuff. And although I think you can write great fiction about anything and everyone, it raises the question of why. What’s her point, her rationale for wanting to write about this sort of life? But knowing that this is based in reality really mitigates that and makes it more understandable and, I think, gives touchy, sensitive American reviewers something to latch onto.

*

Paratext—all the elements that surround the text such as cover image, jacket copy, blurbs, bios, where the translator’s name appears (or doesn’t) that subtly influence the text’s reception among reader—comes up regularly in discussions of international literature. Of all literature, I suppose, but for whatever reasons, it’s a bit more heightened when talking about translations.

Which is why it’s so bizarre that Graywolf would leave this off. It’s possible that, given that we have Nazis again, they wanted to make the point that anyone can get caught up in nationalism and align themselves with horrible groups that perform atrocious acts.

But for reviewers and booksellers looking to handsell this . . . having a historical hook to rely on would be incredibly helpful. The justification for the book’s existence could be encapsulated in one simple phrase. Based on a true story, Rosa Liksom’s latest novel is an attempt to understand the mindset of a woman caught between communism and fascism at one of the critical junctures of twentieth-century history.

This may well be the reason that it only received five reviews. As sad or suspect as that might seem.

*

Sympathizing with Evil

LR: It was very interesting the thing you mentioned over e-mail about how the Colonel does some evil stuff—it’s really true. I remember when I was working on it there’s a place in the book where she’s says: “My father made me a daughter of the White Guard. The Colonel made me a Nazi. I’m not ashamed of either one.” When my editor got to that point in the book he asked me, how can she not be ashamed? You know, what can we do about this? What does this mean?

In the original, those sentences are so straightforward. “My father made me a daughter of the White Guard. The Colonel made me a Nazi. I’m not ashamed.” So what we did was add the word “and” to ease you into that final statement. “And I’m not ashamed of either one.” I don’t know how much difference that makes, but Rosa ended up sending a really interesting message to the editor about how the Colonel’s Wife is all the things that she is. She’s like a real person. She’s a nature lover. She loves children. She’s a teacher and an author, and she was deeply in love. She was also a fascist and a pedophile. She’s all of those things and yeah, that’s just who she is.

*

One of the most challenging aspects of this book is the fact that you want to sympathize with the narrator, and she rebuffs you at almost every turn. For example, the moment in which the reader is most empathetic toward the narrator—after the Colonel has beat her unborn baby out of her, and after years of physical and mental abuse she finally escapes—she seduces/rapes a fourteen-year-old boy from the school where she’s moved to become a schoolteacher. Not cool!

There are three things about the construction of The Colonel’s Wife that keep it from sliding off into the great darkness of pure nihilistic evil.

First off, there’s the frame story. Although it’s a bit of an easy trick—the novel opens with a bucolic description of a quiet village where the Colonel’s Wife is awakening and about to tell her story, and ends with her passing, presumably on the same day—it puts a bit of distance between the events recounted in the meat of the novel and the final moments of a life. We can all repent at the end, right? Or at least, as observers, we can take a moment to bear witness to a person’s final breath and withhold judgement for at least a moment. Plus, she seems so old and frail in these two sections, whereas she’s an active, vibrant, enthused Nazi in the rest of the book.

Then there’s the distance built around her “unspeakable” acts. Here’s the full description of her involvement with the prison camps in Finland during World War II. Pay attention to “Russki” and the Finnish locations you’ve never heard of. (Note: Approximately 19,000 Soviet soldiers died in these camps, including 15,000 in 1942 alone.)

At the peak there were twenty-nine prison camps in Inari where they locked up Russians who’d surrendered or been captured. Most of the camps were run by the Waffen-SS, and my job, since I knew German, was to keep an account of the number who died, were shot, or escaped. The Germans paid the Finnish and the Sami a bounty in liquor and tobacco for every escaped Russki they caught. One Russian was hung from a pine tree and left dangling there, another one was shot and left lying in a snowdrift, one was chased to a hole in the ice and drowned, and another one was tied naked to a tree with barbed wire for the mosquitoes to eat alive. Bolsheviks, commissars, politrouks, and partisans got off easier. They were shot on the spot. The enemy soldiers suffered more in the war than their officers did.

I was responsible for keeping track of the camps run by the Finns too—one in Ivalo, one in Palkisoja, plus prisoner-of-war camp number 9 at Ajos Harbor in Kemi, the regional camps in Rovaniemi, KemijĂ€vi, and SodankylĂ€, camp 19 in Oulu, camp 21 in Liminka, number 4 in Pelso, and the one on JÀÀmerenttie. JÀÀmerenttie is the road from Rovaniemi to Liinahaamari. There were eight more camps on that road. I also kept the records of the bodies for Stalag 309, a combination work camp, prisoner-of-war camp, and concentration camp that had branches at Alakurtti, VuolajĂ€rvi, RovajĂ€rvi, KorijĂ€rvi, Kairala, Nurmi, Lampela, SeipĂ€jĂ€rvi, and Rovaniemi.

By my count—if you include the “eight more camps on that road”—she was involved with twenty-seven different prisoner-of-war/concentration/work camps. But the juxtaposition of the vivid descriptions of the escaped prisoners who were killed by others and the simple accounting of the locations of her job give the reader an opening to diminish her actual involvement in what was going on in Finland at this time. (Which is undercut, in part, by a statement made earlier in the book that “If you knew how to read, you knew what the Nazis were doing.”)

The third element that makes her character somewhat sympathetic is the fact that she’s caught up in an abusive, patriarchal system practically from the jump. The Colonel is involved in shaping her life from the time that she’s four years old. If this were a book about a man who got caught up in the sound and the fury of Finnish-Germanic nationalism in the mid-twentieth century . . . it wouldn’t work at all. Even before the final reveal that the Colonel molested her as a child—a memory she had repressed, thinking it had actually happened to an imaginary neighbor girl—readers are already attuned to the ways in which a larger, oppressive system limited her agency, leaving her with only a couple of bad options for being able to survive this period of history.

*

The Dialect Question

CWP: Your editor was Ethan Nosowsky, right? I actually talked to him about this novel at the ABA’s Winter Institute a few weeks ago. We didn’t have much time to talk, but, if I remember correctly, he said that the book is actually written in a Finnish dialect that you both decided to ignore in the English translation. What was your thought process on this?

LR: Ethan was my editor and you’re right—this comes up whenever dialect is used. I discussed it with some of the other translators who worked on translating this book into other languages. And we basically all came to the same sort of solution. Aside from the opening and closing pages, which are omniscient, the book is written in dialect throughout. It’s the voice of the Colonel’s Wife and is written phonetically. We don’t really do this in English anymore. Not really since the nineteenth century and Huckleberry Finn or something. In Finnish, it’s actually not difficult to read at all—it’s actually pretty fun. But reproducing dialect always presents a problem in translation. What am I supposed to write? You know, you don’t want them to sound like they’re from the Ozarks or from Scotland or something. So what I ended up doing is just trying to introduce lots of sort of rural-isms. Which is interesting because there was a little conflict, or, uh, differences of opinion between me and the editor about when I was using “bad” grammar in my translation. There were times when Ethan just couldn’t abide it. For example, I had the character use “me” as a subject throughout the book, or “him,” which is very common in dialect—grammatical “errors” in English among rural and urban and educated people in English. It’s not uncommon at all. And he was okay with that. But I also would use lay and lie “wrong” and this he just couldn’t stand. So the voice gradually became a little more formalized as we worked through the editing process, which often happens when you’re working with editors and copy editors on an unusual style of writing. They just want to fix it because they’re concerned that people will discount the text if it has these obviously “incorrect” things in it.

CWP: Which is one of those like trappings and paradoxes of talking about international literature. There’s a book by Ben Metcalf called , that’s written in a rural American dialect. Sure, it might map onto an actual American style of speech, but the opening phrase is “I was worked like a jackass.” It’s a messy book in terms of grammar and syntax, but that’s why it’s fun to read! It’s a feature, not a bug? But in translation editors frequently try and get rid of all of that because they’re afraid that people start reading it and immediately assume it’s a bad translation because the grammar is non-standard. It’s too weird. And that’s . . . that’s so odd. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s, ugh, the conventional wisdom or something.

I did pick up on the misuse of “he” and “I” and “me” and the subjects throughout, and it wasn’t until page 132 when I finally got it. There’s a line about how she hated reading books and just didn’t, and as I read that the light went on and I scrawled “That’s why her grammar is fucked!” in the margin. It marks her education level, her familiarity with the written word. And that makes sense to me and feels like a really nice payoff for anyone who picked up on the oddness in the first hundred-plus pages.

LR: Yeah. And she says something in the novel also about how when she wrote her first book, she just sent it off to the editor and they fixed all the “wrong language” for her. Something like that. That’s one of the beautiful bits of her character. Unfortunately, a copy editor thought that these inaccuracies didn’t make any sense, since she’s an articulate person. She’s an author, so she would know how to write. And I thought that the message of the book is kind of the opposite of that, right? That you can be an eloquent and gifted author with “bad” grammar. That doesn’t seem that odd to me at all.

CWP: It’s too bad that that particular tension in the character isn’t in the English translation, but you were able to work in a lot of unique word choices—or colloquial sounding phrases—that create the character’s voice. Like the line about “putting the cat on the table and going over it hair by hair.”

LR: I love that, don’t you?

CWP: For sure! And there’s are a number of specific word choices and phrases that create her voice. And I wonder how much thought you gave to that and how it worked in your different versions. Did you look for common English slang, or were you inventing a unique voice for her as you went along?

LR: I bit of both, I guess. That cat expression was just a direct translation. There were lots of sort of novel expressions like that that I could translate directly. But you have to use your own judgment as to whether it’s working or not, whether or not it makes sense.

And since I’m not using the dialect itself, the nonstandard form of the language, how can I indicate the unusual way she has of talking? So I can use, for instance, something like “I reckon” . . . although I don’t think I did that in this book, but you know what I mean? In place of writing in dialect, you can use an expanded vocabulary as a tool. So yeah, you do have to make those kinds of changes to try to express the way that voice sounded in the original.

*

It occurs to me now that Rosa Liksom isn’t trying to create a sympathetic character, she’s trying to create a noble one.

The Colonel’s Wife by Rosa Liksom, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (Graywolf Press)

BookMarks Reviews: Five total—Four Positive, One Mixed

Awards: None

Number of Finnish Works of Fiction Published in Translation from 2008-2019: 65 (5.42/year)

Number of Those Translations Written by Women: 40 of the books were authored by women, 21 were translated by women.

Other Translations of Liksom’s Work: Dark Paradise (2006), Compartment No. 6 (2016), One Night Stands (1993)

Synopsis

At the end of her life, an unrepentant member of the White Guard and Nazi Party—the Colonel’s wife of the title—reflects on her life with unadulterated honesty, providing a very complicated picture of life in Finland in the time around World War II. She recounts her father’s involvement with the Colonel, and how he became a major presence in her life when she was a mere four years old. After the passing of her father, he takes over that role, until she’s old enough for him to marry.

A horrific monster of a man, the Colonel is dedicated to the Nazi Party and the purity of Finland, helping bring his young wife—who eventually is in charge of the “prison camps” in Finland—into the fold. He rapes, beats his wife, kills their unborn child. Yet, she remains loyal to him for far too long before escaping . . . To a remote village where she immediately seduces a fourteen-year-old boy and makes him her husband.

This novel is morally complicated, with a main character who is by turns sympathetic (she is abused by a system she’s not even aware of), charming (the joy with which she helps her young, second husband find an age-appropriate wife), and a monster (“My father made me a daughter of the White Guard. The Colonel made me a Nazi. And I’m not ashamed of either one.”).

Structured with a frame story depicting the day of her death, the book progresses in mostly chronological order, as if written by the Colonel’s Wife herself. The prose is direct, with a hint of ruralness to it, reflected in the grammatical errors and her admissions to neither being educated nor well-read—despite becoming a successful novelist in her later years. The voice is both earnest—even when dealing with the “evil” things she did—and textured with idiomatic phrases and word choices.

There are a number of historical references in here that might require some research and/or explanation for those of us unfamiliar with Finland’s role in World War II. The three wars that they fought in around this time—the Winter War (Finland vs. Russia just before WWII), Continuation War (Finland + German Nazis vs. Russia during WWII), and the Lapland War (Russia + Finland vs. Germans in Lapland following WWII)—are unlikely to be part of most high school world history textbooks. But for a country geographically stuck between two warring ideologies—Fascism and Communism—they were a valuable territory, and one that didn’t always pick a lane.

The novel resonates in 2020 as nationalism is back on the rise—and at odds with a twenty-first century version of “socialism”—and many of the socio-cultural structures that molded the Colonel’s Wife are still in place. (Namely, The Patriarchy.) It can also be read as a rebuke of “cancel culture” by articulating the gray space within which the Colonel’s Wife resides.

For this book to have its intended impact though, it needs to be read in full and reflected upon. Anyone immediately repulsed by the idea of a Nazi main character is unlikely to get past the first third, and the fact that she goes from being extremely sympathetic when she finally escapes her abusive husband into being a pedophile is . . . off-putting to some. The narrative tricks used to make this compelling and the ways in which Liksom plays with the impact of history on a singular human is impressive and startling.

Class Reaction

Generally positive. Uncomfortable in the sense that they really felt for the main character but couldn’t explain why or how that happened. And they all loved talking to Lola.

Origin story

Chad W. Post: I think a good place to start would be if you told us how you got into translating, and how your career has developed over the past few years.

Lola Rogers: Well, I actually got interested in Finnish language when I majored in linguistics. That’s how I became interested in the language—not knowing very much about the culture. I just found the language itself interesting. The grammatical system. I had studied Spanish for many years and as a linguistics major we were required to study a language outside of our native language family. And Finnish isn’t an Indo-European language. So that was one of the options and I was already interested in the language, so I went for it. And then, of course, as soon as I started studying it I realized that it was going to take me years to learn, you know, like ten times as long as it took me to learn Spanish. But I ended up studying it! Well, I mean I’m still studying it after twenty years. So I did that, studying the language off and on, both at the university and on my own. And eventually started just translating kind of for fun. For instance, I had, like, bands I really liked and would translate the lyrics for my friends, things like that.

CWP: I want to assume these were Finnish death metal lyrics?

LR: No . . . Actually, I’m into Finnish folk metal. Sort of neo folk metal. Anyway, at the time there wasn’t an official translation program at the University of Washington where I studied. Which was kind of good actually because I ended up designing what I wanted to do and was able to sort of craft my own master’s degree. Afterwards, I went to Finland, to work as a translation intern at the Finnish Literature Exchange, also known as FILI, which is a part of the Ministry of Education and Culture. I was there for seven months and the best thing was meeting almost all of the publishers and literary agents in Finland at the time. So yeah. At that time, there was a real shortage of Finnish translators. That’s why FILI was so active in training them. So to my great surprise, as soon as I graduated, I had so much work that I’ve worked as a translator full-time ever since.

CWP: Wow. That’s amazing. What was the first book you translated?

LR: It was by Sofi Okasaen (Grove Press, 2010) which was a stroke of luck. To work on such a well-known book for your first translation really helped me in Finland—and even in English, since people looking for a Finnish translator found me, thanks to the success of that book.

*

There are two things about Lola’s origin story that stand out to me: The non-haphazard haphazardness of how she fell into being a translator, and the value in having your first published translation be a pretty successful book published by a relatively large press.

I think the first point will play itself out over the rest of this book. Translators tend to end up being translators for a variety of “random” reasons.

Although, are they actually “random” Or even “haphazard”? That would assume there’s a normalized path to becoming a translator, which, for better or worse, just doesn’t exist. It kind of can’t. Sure, nowadays you can get a degree in literary translation—either to become a practitioner or an academic-theorist, but most of these programs are new, and not the pathway for the translators who paved the way for the modern era—but almost everyone just “falls into” translation. It might be because you were born into a multilingual family and grew up with translation as your natural state of being. Maybe you fell in love with someone from another country. You wanted to share new anime with your friends and then found out this was a profession. There are a million pathways; none of these are standardized.

Which is why actively deciding to study a language for your MA because it’s interesting feels less random than most translators I’ve talked to! But, at the same time, the idea of almost picking a language to study at random—why not study Maori? or Latvian? or Quebecois?—feels very apropos the core concept of literature in translation.

But it’s the second point that interests me: How much does it matter that the first book you translate sells well? Why do publishers decide to publish Book X instead of Book Y? And why do they have Translator G translate it instead of Translator K? What percentage of this decision is based on quality? On the translator’s reputation? On how much they’ll cost (or won’t)? On how well the translator’s other books sold?

Tim Parks got in a lot of heat about the “translation community” about an article he wrote in which he tried to separate the success of a particular translation from the skill of the translator.

Before going on, I feel like I should define “translation community.” This is an admittedly amorphous group of maybe 300 people who have a normal amount of groupthink and tend to take stands on social media platforms about what’s “wrong” or “unfair.” The Venn Diagram between their influence on culture and general readers buying books in translation is undefined and circumspect. The “translation community” might feel a particular review was incredibly biased and unfair using contemporary ideas in translation theory, and they might express this as publicly as they can. The average reader is unlikely to hear, much less be mentally troubled by these allegations.

Anyway, Parks called bullshit on elevating certain translators based on the sales of the translated book instead of the skill behind the translation; the translation community said that he was a dick, since his observation/critique is, at its base, devaluing the work of specific translators.

I’m more interested in the structural nature of this and less into the evaluation of translators because I’ve spent hours and hours with editors at commercial, Big Five presses, and their evaluation of who makes a good translator is 100% infected by marketing opportunities. They openly talk about how no one pays attention to who translates a book, unless that person is a “superstar.” And what makes a “superstar”? The fact that a previous book they translated got enough sales and critical attention that people named the translator. Once you’re known, you’re on the radar for presses looking to profit off your reputation. We shouldn’t be surprised by this, this is capitalism, this is Tik Tok.

*

FILI + Influence

CWP: According to PW’s Translation Database, there have been 65 works of Finnish fiction published in the U.S. since 2008—you must’ve done a healthy proportion of them.

LR: Well, yeah, to be honest, there aren’t that many Finnish translators. I know almost all of them—at least electronically, and most of them in person. So, yeah, I suppose I must makeup, you know, roughly one fifth of the translation since 2008. Because there’s only a small number of titles.

*

Of the 65 works of Finnish fiction published here since 2008, 10 of them have been translated by Lola Rogers. Which is 15%. I could provide comparison points with other translator totals, but even in the absolute, being responsible for 15% of one culture’s impact on another’s seems pretty significant.

*

CWP: Yeah. But there has been, and I don’t know if “boom” is the right word, but there has been an increase in interest in Finnish literature since Purge was published. I remember when this came out. It was around the time I met Iris Schwank of FILI. This was during the London Book Fair, when I was working for Dalkey Archive Press. She told me and John O’Brien that FILI didn’t even bother contacting American publishers anymore because it was just “wasted money.” Nobody in America wanted to publish Finnish books so why reach out to them with marketing materials and books? And then that’s when we ended up doing Rosa Liksom’s Dark Paradise. A short story collection, and her first English publication. That was the beginning of Dalkey’s conversation with FILI. Now that there are a number of Finnish books coming out every year, from various publishers, FILI must feel a bit differently. Why do you think this change came about? What led to this interest in Finnish literature?

LR: Well, they were the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2014 and that made a big difference. Not only were English language publishers made aware of them for the first time, but there were just so many German translations that came out at that time. Far more English publishers were able to read the books. That’s the trouble with Finnish. I mean there’s two things about Finnish. The language is unlike any language an English-language publisher has ever had contact with. None of them can read it. So they have to hire somebody to read it for them.

CWP: I’m spitballing here, but maybe one of the issues with cultivating more translators from Finnish is the fact that, unlike Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, it’s not related to the other Scandinavian languages. And whereas works from those languages are translated into the other two almost immediately, Finnish literature isn’t. Finnish novels don’t get that automatic translation—neither do Icelandic works—and that means that UK and U.S. presses don’t hear about them as fast. But that’s conflating two things: translators from Norwegian can more easily also do Swedish and Danish books, Finnish translators are relegated to Finland; and the idea that the more languages a book appears in (even if they are three sister languages), the more likely an English press will want to buy the rights.

LR: Right. And 20 or 25 years ago, there were almost no Finnish-to-English translators. There were like a couple of people bringing something out every five to ten years. That made a difference.

*

This difference is important, but let’s pause for one second to talk about FILI. Organizations like the Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) are major players in this story about international books and why they get translated.

Living in a country where our current president is trying to defund the National Endowment for the Arts on an annual basis—the only national funding agency for literary arts—and has no such thing as a Ministry of Culture, these sorts of organizations might seem really foreign. But in a significant number of countries around the world, there are “book offices” that allocate not insignificant sums of money to have their cultural artifacts—including works of literature—promoted abroad. It’s a basic idea: How do you know what the country of Georgia is if you’ve never seen/read/heard anything that Georgians created?

These (frequently) governmental organizations provide funding to translators, translator training seminars or schools, editorial visits for international publishers, promotional and touring support, the ability to host events for free in their consulates and embassies around the world, promotion to members of their various cultural and governmental audiences, and, on rare occasions, a scheme in which they purchase copies of the book published in translation to distribute to libraries around the world.

These organizations are key players in what gets translated and how it gets promoted—for some presses. A commercial press doing books for commercial reasons isn’t as concerned with these organizations, which can lead to semi-awkward interactions on editorial junkets. On the one side you have small nonprofits looking for the necessary $35,000 threshold of funding and probably sales to be able to do an interesting book that you want your friends and cohort and junta to read; on the other you have editors looking for the book that will sell no fewer than 25,000 copies and hopefully 100,000 minimum because of your sales machine and the appeal of the book to the average “airport” reader. Squint all you want; these perspectives never completely mesh.

Click here for part two.

by JuliĂĄn Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press)

Moment Number One

“Technique, my boy,” says a voice in my head. “Shuffle the technique.”

To hell with it: in her youth, MamĂĄ was a beautiful half-breed Indian who had five husbands: a fabled pimp, a police officer riddled with bullet holes, a splendid goodfella, a suicidal musician, and a pathetic Humphrey Bogart impersonator. PERIOD.

But we’ll start with a bit about Tomb Song, one of the better works of international literature to come out so far in 2018. It’s referred to as “An Incandescent U.S. Debut” on the press release, which normally would land it on my “do not read” list, but I like the cover. And suspect this is a potential finalist for the National Book Award in Translation (more on that below).

Categorized as “fiction,” it’s a book in which Julián Herbert writes about Julián Herbert writing about the death of his mother from leukemia. (And the death of his father as well.) It resides in that Ben Lerner, or Karl Ove Knausgaard, or maybe Geoff Dyer realm of being a “nonfiction novel,” in which truth and literary technique come together and create something else.

From a

To me, this is a novel. A nonfictional novel, most of the time, though there are some fictional elements. But the protagonist—my mother, Guadalupe—was real. She was a prostitute, and she died of leukemia. Why does it matter if the particular events around her happened in this world or not?

I think novels are novels because of technique, not because the content is made up. I wrote Tomb Song using a novelist’s tools—prolepsis and analepsis, digression, a plot twist that lasts three decades, plenty of characters. It’s always been strange to me that some Spanish-language critics insist that Tomb Song is a memoir and that my other book, The House of the Pain of Others, is a novel. To me, that book is a mix of reportage and narrative history. But honestly, I don’t lose sleep over this. I’ve always written between genres.

We’re always hearing about what a headache the frontier is for the United States because of the drug trafficking. No one mentions how dangerous the United States frontier is for Mexicans because of the trafficking of arms. And, when the subject does come up, the neighboring attorney general points out: “It’s not the same thing: the drugs are of illegal origin, the arms aren’t.” As if there was a majestic logic in considering that in comparison with the destructive power of a marijuana joint, an AK-47 is just a child’s toy.

Back when it was announced that the National Book Foundation was bringing this back, I wrote a long post about how great it was that Lisa Lucas (and her predecessor at the foundation, Harold Augenbraum, two of the most energetic, concerned people in the book world) made this happen, while also wringing my hands over what this would do to other existent translation awards (the BTBAs in particular, which will be greatly overshadowed), and who exactly would able to afford to apply. (We also did a podcast that touched on this, which has been getting a lot of downloads.)

My primary concern was about all the backend fees for books that are finalists. From that first article:

All publishers submitting books for the National Book Awards must agree to:

Contribute $3,000 toward a promotional campaign if a submitted book becomes a Finalist ($750 for presses with income of under $10 million).

Inform authors of submitted books that, if selected as Finalists, they must be present at the National Book Awards Ceremony and at related events in New York City.

Inform authors that the Finalists Reading will be held at The New School on Tuesday, November 13, 2018.

Inform authors that the National Book Awards Ceremony will be held at Cipriani Wall Street on Wednesday, November 14, 2018.

Cover all travel and accommodation costs for Finalists and provide them with a seat at the Awards Ceremony.

Purchase from the National Book Foundation, when appropriate, medallions to be affixed to the covers of Longlist, Finalist, and Winning books. The Foundation also will license the medallion image artwork for reproduction on the covers of Finalist and Winning books.

For presses that are doing well for themselves—Graywolf, New Directions, Europa—this is likely to be less of a concern. (And for other nonprofits with functioning boards, they could probably raise the money if it was a big issue.) But for a lot of other presses, these extra thousands could be prohibitive, leading to questions of who this award is really for.

BUT! When the actual details came out, almost all of those extra fees were eliminated for translation presses. From the updated National Book Award website:

Contribute toward a promotional campaign if a submitted book becomes a Finalist. For presses with income of $10 million or above, a contribution of $3,000; under $10 million, a contribution of $750; and for presses with income under $1 million, the fee is waived. (So this went from $750 to $0.)

Inform authors that the National Book Awards Ceremony will be held at Cipriani Wall Street on Wednesday, November 14, 2018. If the publisher attends, it is the expectation that they will provide a seat for their Finalist (discounted tickets are available for small, nonprofit, and/or university presses) (Still not sure what the cost actually is, but the fact that we don’t all have to pay Big Five rates is reassuring.)

Cover all travel and accommodation costs for Finalists (the Foundation will provide travel support for Finalists in the Translated Literature category). (Even if the NBF only covers part of this, it’s still a big help.)

So there you go! Even though a Twitter conversation established that Lisa Lucas never read anything I ever wrote on the subject, and was only aware of the (which is basically a 1:1 rewrite of everything I said), I’d like to think that maybe Three Percent did a bit of good by remarking on all of this and making the economics of translation publishing a bit more transparent.

(Which is bullshit. The only time anyone reads or responds to any of these posts is when they’re offended. A near weekly occurrence, and something that’s really getting me down and making it hard to fully enjoy writing these. This is how self-censorship happens. Although, to be honest, since it seems that no one actually reads these, I should feel way more liberated!)

This last point must refer to me. I prefer to imagine Mamá—drunk and sniveling—singing to the sham lights of La Habana than to see her as I do today: bald, silent, yellow, breathing with greater difficulty than a chick raffled off at a charity event. For over a week now, my mother has been, biochemically speaking, incapable of crying. The ideology of pain is the most fraudulent of all. It would be more honest to say that, since she fell ill with leukemia, my mother’s political thought can be expressed only through a microscope.

“If you want to move in with that frigging bitch, fine: do it. But she’ll make your life hell. And you’re abandoning me, the person who’s taken so much shit to get you this far. If you’ve already made up your mind, go ahead. But you’re not my son anymore, you bastard, you’re nothing but a mad dog.”

In my family, it’s fine to utter any kind of curse (frigging, bastard, screw, idiot), but obscenities (prick, ass, fart, whore-monger) are prohibited. Although it’s a bit late in the day for me to offer a clear explanation of the difference between the two categories, I can easily intuit which new words belong in one hemisphere and which in the other. The universal term my siblings and I employ to substitute impolite expressions is This.

With Among Strange Victims, I started the process in British English and then, when Coffee House Press decided to publish it, I had to rethink certain passages. I remember that the expletive “bloody” (my translation of pinche) was considered too British when it came to editing, and there was a suggestion of replacing it with “damn.” But the problem was, I’d already used “damn” in other contexts, and wanted something more specific for that very Mexican term. Anyway, after a great deal of thought, I decided on “frigging,” which seems to fit neatly between the two cultures: Daniel liked it too.

Really curious to know if that’s the same situation here. I personally have never heard anyone say
“frigging” before, and would never think of it as a substitute for any swear. It does help maintain the confusion between the categories of “curses” and “obscenities” (bastard and screw are allowed but fart isn’t?), but it stands out to me, especially when his mother says it, and against the larger backdrop of characters who say “fucking” and do a lot of cocaine and opioids.

If there really isn’t a satisfactory match for pinche (assuming that’s the original in this book as it was in Among Strange Victims), it would be bold—and cool—to just leave it. I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant number of readers had come across pinche before, or could at least glean it’s swear-status from context. Which brings me to my last translation-related observation/question:

(Scrawneebly is a word Mónica and I invented to refer to cowards: a mixture of scrawny and feeble. We stand facing each other, arms akimbo, in superhero pose, and recite in unison, “And did you really think I was scrawneebly?”)

Again, not that there’s anything wrong with MacSweeney’s solution. It just stood out to me, and I’m again curious about the thought process and other possibilities.

We occasionally had breakfast with other Latin American poets, who seemed deeply self-satisfied with their own genius. [. . .] The best poets were, naturally, from Cuba and Chile. But when it came to conversation, nothing doing: they would have had to send them over with built-in subtitles.

Since it’s never too early to speculate, based on my pre-existing knowledge of these judges and the eligible books, here are five that I expect to see on the longlist:

Emissary by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions) (I’m assuming this is eligible even though Bernofsky translates Tawada’s German works)

Armand V or T Singer by Dag Solstad, translated from the Norwegian by Steven T. Murray and Tiina Nunnally, respectively (New Directions)

My Struggle: Book Six by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett and Martin Aiken (Archipelago Books)

Tomb Song by JuliĂĄn Herbert, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Graywolf Press)

Blue Self-Portrait by Noemi Lefebvre, translated from the French by Sophie Lewis (Transit Books)

One question: Is it OK to lobby for your own books? Given how small the translation world is, I know four of the five of the people on this committee, which makes me uncomfortable. I’m desperate for our books—and our website, and Open Letter as a whole, and myself personally—to get some national respect, to be considered to be “cool” or “necessary,” but prefer that it happens because people read the work itself and respond to quality. As you surely know, I suck at generating favorable vibes for myself or our press and its programs. It’s a curse I struggle with all the time in ways that I don’t want to share, and that you wouldn’t want to experience. But if I were a good publisher, maybe I could do that extra bit of Oscar-esque soft-diplomacy that creates a warm context within which these judges would more likely appreciate our submissions . . .

There are four books of ours that I think deserve to be longlisted: Fox by Dubravka Ugresic, The Bottom of the Sky by Rodrigo FresĂĄn, Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters by Maria JosĂ© Silveira, and The Endless Summer by Madame Nielsen. If one of those makes the longlist, I’ll be ecstatic.

As a child, I wanted to be a scientist or a doctor. A man in a white coat. But all too soon I discovered my lack of aptitude: it took me years to accept the roundness of the earth. In public, I faked it.

(BTW, the review that went along with the Chicago Review of Books headline is totally reasonable, and Empty Set is totally reasonable as a book as well. It’s not Joyce or anything—which that headline implies—but it’s good.)

So what I decided is that I should go back and change all of my previous posts to reflect this sort of “clickbait” mentality. Hell, I wrote an article once about how no one reads articles, they just glance at the headline, who’s tweeting it, and then click “heart” and/or “reshare.” It’s a complete inefficiency to write long, voice-driven posts that shoot for nuance and call-backs and embedded jokes, but I’d get way way more readers if these posts have BuzzFeed-inspired titles like: “9 Moments That Make ‘Tomb Song’ the Frontrunner for the National Book Award in Translation,” or “How ‘Empty Set’ Revolutionized the Marketing of Translations,” or “10 Paths to Obscure Books That Will Make You Say ‘Wow’,” or “Readers Born in the 1970s Will Recognize These Vargas Llosa Classics,” or “15 Ways Books ÄąčœŽ«Ăœ Chess Can Rewire Your Brain—And Make You Smarter!”

That’s the new Three Percent policy: sell-out when you can. Rochester is lonely enough, there’s no honor in spending four hours a weekend writing shit that no one ever clicks on.

All of a sudden Émil Cioran’s little books on antipersonal development for adolescents come to mind. The one, for example, in which insomnia reveals to him the most profound sense of the trouble with existence: it impelled him toward unlimited spite: walking to the shoreline and throwing stones at some poor seagulls. Jeez, what a punk.

A lot of Book Twitter was talking about in particular, this bit:

You’re not awfully optimistic about the future of the novel, are you?

I think the novel is absolutely doomed to become a marginal cultural form, along with easel painting and the classical symphony. And that’s already happened. I’ve been publishing since 1990, so I’ve seen it happen in my writing lifetime. It’s impossible to think of a novel that’s been a water-cooler moment in England, or in Britain, since Trainspotting, probably.

It’s frequently said that that’s partly because narrative has migrated to box sets. Is there any truth in that?

The relationship between the novel and film in the 20th century was like the relationship between Rome and Greece. Film depended upon the novel, at least in its infancy and youth. The problem is that now that film itself is being Balkanised – carved up, streamed, loaded on to DVDs, watched on people’s phones – it no longer needs its grease, it no longer needs the novel lying behind it. It’s a disaster for the novel, actually – I think the novel is in freefall.

All of the reactions I saw were of the “It’s hypocritical to say the contemporary novel is doomed and not read any contemporary novels!” line. I might be completely off-base, but I thought Self was getting at something different. There are questions about narrative approaches within contemporary novels—and whether good TV is more narratively innovative than, say, a Franzen novel—but I think there’s also the question of the relevance of the novel within culture. It’s really hard to think of a novel that generated the same amount of discussion about non-book industry people as several Netflix shows. And that doesn’t seem to be going away. The centrality of the novel to culture has definitely evolved since 1990—and not in a particularly positive way.

More on that next week . . . Along with some thoughts about Lispector’s The Chandelier.

by Daniel Sada, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Mexico, Graywolf Press)

One Out of Two is a philosophical fable disguised as spinster fiction. From the dream team behind Almost Never (Graywolf, 2012), giant of Latin American literature Daniel Sada and acclaimed translator Katherine Silver, this compact hundred-page book is tightly stitched with the same perfectionism as its twin heroines’ tailoring output. On the surface, it is a delightful romp to be devoured in one sitting, but linger longer with the text and it raises profound questions about the desire for union with another person versus personal independence. “Then: intimacy as an idea that unravels.”

The spinster plot concerns Constitución and Gloria Gamal, identical twins who have only grown increasingly alike with age. Rather than trying to distinguish themselves from one another, the twins delight in accentuating their similarities by wearing matching dresses, styling their hair in the same way, and mirroring each other’s mannerisms. The Gamal sisters are as interdependent as they are fiercely independent. Orphaned as children, they flee the aunt who raised them and her constant exhortations to “‘get married soon and have loads of children!’” as soon as they come of age, and use their inheritance to buy a house in a small desert town and start a tailoring business, which quickly thrives due to their strong work ethic.

Their aunt’s advice continues in the form of increasingly contradictory letters, “Get married, you silly girls, and be quick about it! But don’t flirt with the first young man you meet; you have to be coy, give yourselves airs, or you’ll regret it . . .” But the twins don’t much care, focusing their attention instead on their growing business, until one day they receive an invitation to a family wedding. Now 42, and without any prospects, this might be their last chance to snag husbands! Their aunt suggests they distinguish themselves by hair style, but the twins have spent too many years refining their similitude to have any hope of looking different now. Thus, only one will go to the wedding, and they decide which with a coin toss, the first of many perfectly chosen metaphors for their predicament. When Constitución Gamal returns with a suitor, the twins concoct an elaborate ruse to share the man, thus putting their years of studied imitation to the test, because, “what’s mine is yours.” (The repetition of this marital maxim throughout the novel reminds us that the twins are in a sort of marriage already.) The narrative voice, peppered with folksy interjections and perfectly matched idiomatic expressions, reads like an omniscient town gossip, never letting us forget the twins are being watched. Yet, we revel in their abandon as they decide “To wit: let people think whatever the hell they like.”

This all sounds like a fun farce, but we are in the hands of a master stylist. As Sada pushes every clichĂ© to the breaking point, it springs back with deliciously surprising prose. We can feel the pleasure he takes in crafting the bodice-ripper landscape in which Gloria takes the budding romance to the next level on “ConstituciĂłn’s” second date with Oscar, while her sister watches from a few feet away: “To the chagrin of the observer, this Johnny-come-lately was painting the walls of her own scenario with wild and passionate hues splashed across the distance, cloud pompoms dripping with ocher and deep red settling in between the hills.” ConstituciĂłn contemplates hurling a stick at her imprudent sister, but worries it will only land in the nearby bush, releasing a cloud of butterflies. In every flight Sada takes, Silver hugs his sentences as tightly as the twins press against walls while spying on each other.

The novel shifts seamlessly between genres and low to high literary diction, as when the twins, each falling in love, evolve from “one out of two or two in one” to, “A triangle, to put it simply: three gnawed points and a conjugation: or to put it indirectly: two similar points and a third one far far away. Passion conjugated: repressed, obsessive, in full conformity with the rules of the game”. The unusual, yet consistent use of colons—at times many in a single cascading sentence—sets up constant equations or analogies, and creates a staccato rhythm that heightens the growing tension as the inevitable marriage proposal approaches. Meanwhile, frequent sentence fragments remind us that the twins are only whole together. On a syntactic level, the novel is refreshingly suspicious of virtuous individualism.

But Oscar, a rancher, is hardly an ideal match for either of the twins, and increasingly, they realize their infatuation with him is more fantasy than true love. Oscar’s greatest ambition is “to one day open, next to any road whatsoever, a huge restaurant for truckers only, serving carnes adobadas and fresh tortillas, where there would be a jukebox and a dance floor and some shabby sluts—who would double as grub-slingers—available for pickup.” As Oscar drones on about his current reality, raising pigs and goats, one of the twins “conjured up abstract images that consisted of small arrows being shot at sentences—we could call them precepts—of the most profound transcendence.”

We expect the proposal to end in tears, the story to end in tragedy, with Oscar rejecting the twins when he finds out the truth. But the subversive, even feminist, conclusion to this fairytale is one of its best features. The deal-breaker ends up being the prospect of losing their business, to join Oscar in his distasteful venture: “because it would be unbecoming for the so-called better halves to compete with each other”. Turning the coin toss on its head, the twins make “An about face!” Together they are better halves than either could ever be with another man.

One Out of Two is much more than two in one. In few pages it manages to cover and subvert various literary genres, virtuosically, hilariously, while leaving us to ponder paradoxes such as, can true independence only come from perfect union with another human?

by Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern (China, Graywolf)

Spanning some thirty years of work, Empty Chairs presents readers with the first bilingual edition of Liu Xia’s poetry, augmented by a selection of her work as a photographer. It’s a stark volume, but illuminated by an indomitable interior light that refuses to be extinguished. Living under strict house arrest since 2009—when her husband, poet and activist Liu Xiabo, was imprisoned by the Chinese government—Liu Xia’s poems are hermetic meditations on a larger world at work, both interior and exterior, where the push and pull between absence and presence is a daily conflict. When Xia writes

I must guard these
small fragile things
as if guarding our life

she could very well be referencing her poetic output, while is under the continual threat of an imposed silence.

While political constraints do play a role in much of the work, it is never at the cost of the Xia’s emotional core. If anything, it lends an urgency to the work, the feeling of reading these smuggled words, these poems of disconnect. In their chronicling of Xia’s daily life and feelings, the poems feel traced though the ages to more ancient Chinese poets of the Tang and Sung dynasties. When taken with the original Chinese characters en face, the process of translation is never far from the reader’s mind, the active function of language as it makes a vital voice available.

by Per Petterson, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett (Norway, Graywolf Press)

As a rule I drove home before the first cars came down the hill towards the bridge, but today I had frittered my time away. I hadn’t even started to pack my bag, and the cars that were coming were classy cars, expensive cars. I turned my back to the road, my navy blue reefer jacket wrapped tightly round me. I’d had that jacket ever since I was a boy in Mþrk, and only one of the old brass buttons was still intact, and I had a woollen cap on as blue as the jacket, pulled down over my ears, so from behind I could have been anyone.

Norwegian author Per Petterson’s I Refuse opens in the predawn hours of a September day with the chance encounter between two childhood friends, Jim and Tommy. Now in their mid-fifties, more than thirty years have passed since they last saw each other. Jim, the sensitive and more intellectually inclined of the two, has struggled with mental illness and, as we meet him engaging in his early morning fishing ritual, he has exhausted a year of sick leave after an unsuccessful attempt to return to work as a librarian. He is nearing the end of his emotional tether. Tommy, who dropped out of school at 16 to work at a mill, has benefited from some shrewd investments and a head for numbers, and has worked his way up to a high level position in a financial investment firm in Oslo. However his life, with his fancy clothing and new Mercedes, is hollow. Both men have failed marriages behind them, and lack meaningful relationships. Over the course of the day that follows this early morning meeting, each man will face his own simmering internal crisis and reach differing critical convictions.

While the experiences and reflections of his two main protagonists on this fateful September day, form the central core of the narrative, Petterson employs a winding chronology and a variety of perspectives and characters to frame the peculiar circumstances that helped forge the original bond between Jim and Tommy, and trace the fractured pathways that each has followed after Jim’s attempted suicide, at the age of nineteen, initiated events that drove them apart.

Growing up in a semi-rural region outside a small town, the boys have very different backgrounds. Jim is the only son of an evangelical Christian single mother whereas Tommy comes from a family almost surreal in its dysfunction. He has a sister, Siri, with whom he has an exceptionally close relationship, bordering on incest, and two much younger twin sisters. Their mother disappears off into the snowy distance one night in 1964, leaving the children at the mercy of their violent father. Tommy suffers the abuse until one day an especially brutal beating drives him to break his father’s leg with a bat, effectively forcing this parent out of their lives as well. It is 1966 and he is just shy of fourteen years old. The children try to manage on their own but social services intervene—the twins go to one family in town, Siri is sent to live with another, and Tommy moves in with Jonson, the owner of the mill. From this point on, Jim and Tommy are inseparable as they face the joys and challenges of adolescence together.

Prose as spare and luminous as the northern Norwegian setting, grounds this exploration of time and friendship, loss and longing. First person narratives carried, in turn, by the two main characters are interspersed with cameos from select supporting actors and segments narrated from an open indirect third person perspective. These shifts enhance the melancholy, meditative atmosphere, as in this scene set soon after Tommy’s family has been dismantled:

At the top, near the dam, the bikes were leaned against the railings and they stood by the bikes and leaned against the railing and looked down into the waterfall, and Tommy ran his fingers carefully over the eyebrow and the long gash along it, and over the scabs on his cheek and said, sometimes you feel like jumping, don’t you, just feel jumping over and sailing out like a bird. I know, Jim said, just climb up on to the railings and dive. My mother says it isn’t dangerous to jump off and fly, you can jump off a skyscraper if you like, and it isn’t dangerous. It’s the landing that’s the problem. I’ve heard that one before, Tommy said. I know Jim said. Everyone’s heard it.

Like countless other readers my first introduction to the work of Per Petterson was with his masterful novel Out Stealing Horses which won the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. I went on to read everything that was available at the time, and watch eagerly for new releases as well as the long awaited translations of earlier works that began to appear. With I Refuse, his sixth novel, we see a writer at the height of his powers. The themes that drive Petterson’s creative vision—absent or distant parents, male friendship, the bond between siblings, childhood loss and emotional injury, secrets and unspoken tensions—are all revisited here in his broadest, darkest, and most complex work to date. And in Don Bartlett he has, I would argue, a perfectly matched translator. Bartlett captures this novel’s stark beauty, brooding tone, and shifting voices cleanly and effortlessly.

Petterson’s gift lies in his ability to penetrate to the heart of his protagonists’ insecurities, hopes, and longings. His characters are often haunted by memories, repressed emotions, and by the many things that have been left unsaid or unspeakable. I Refuse introduces us to two men who, over the course of the day that begins with their unexpected meeting on a bridge, are faced with circumstances that will either alter or reinforce the trajectories of their lives. Tommy’s day includes a call from the police asking him to come and collect his father—after forty years his father is alive and needs his assistance. Their reunion is, as one might imagine, charged with unresolved tension but marks a critical turning point for the son:

We both knew why he limped and we had forgotten nothing, repressed nothing, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it, no, that was the trick, instead we would just look at each other with maybe a quick smile on our lips and share that knowledge, that memory, as though it was something that was ours together, his and mine, something intimate and violent, a secret, burning bond that held us together, a bond of blood.

Then I stood up. No peace, I thought, nothing that binds us together. I refuse.

As the day turns into night, Petterson pulls his narrative into the third person, raising the tension as the two men reach their distinct states of resolve. Will their paths collide again or will it be too late? The true power of this work lies in Petterson’s skill and confidence in the reader to leave the space for ambiguity and hint at the possible dynamics that drive the characters without feeling the need to answer all the questions or resolve all the mysteries. He is content to leave us with equal measures of hope and despair, light and gloom. The powerful timelessness of this mesmerizing tale is perhaps the strongest justification for recognizing this achievement with the Best Translated Book Award.

The front cover of Wolfgang Hilbig’s boasts an enormous column of black smoke rising into the sky. This cover is not only fitting, it’s ideal. Ash, smoke, dust, fog, everything a reader might expect to find from an author plumbing the depths of life in communist East Germany abounds in these mesmerizing tales.

For readers of Thomas Bernhard or Laszlo Kraznhorkai, or even Kafka, the settings are familiar; dark, ashen, bleak landscapes. Blocks of dimly-lit apartment houses line the streets; unemployment, illness and futility flourish. It’s a world where the only occupations which exist are seemingly set in boiler rooms and factories, day-long shifts carting ash to large simmering pits on the outskirts of town.

Describing the neighborhood of his childhood, a character writes:

Between the sidewalks was but a straight track of sand, perhaps once light, now since times unknown black-gray, as though in proof that a mix of many colors ultimately yields darkness. Coal dust and ash had blackened it to the pith, and then had come the reddish mass of crushed brick, the rubble from bombed-out houses that was used to even the surface. After each rain you gazed into a bed of murky, vicious mud; in the dry spells of summer the street was an endless reservoir of dust that advanced all the way into stairwells and seemed to glow in the midday sun; it covered barefoot boy’s skin up to the thighs with the black bloom of inviolability.

Happiness and peace are not options for these characters; paranoia and sickness are guaranteed and little else. Yet for all the gloom and despair the glow of Hilbig’s writing illuminates the hidden shadows and obscured corners of this bleak existence. A stunning translation by Isabel Fargo Cole only confirms the immense talent and depth of Hilbig, one of the most awarded German writers of his time.

Born in 1941, Hilbig’s generation lived divided lives: growing up in the world of communism for the first half and the liberated freedom of the West for the second. Hilbig was always a thorn in the sides of the authorities however, writing exactly what he saw with his own eyes and consequently he was able to move (exiled perhaps) to West Germany years before the wall came down. English-language readers now have the good fortune to read this brilliant author whose stories range from seeing an East-German village through childhood recollections to the day-to-day drudgery of a boiler room. Darkness thrives in these stories no doubt, however there is an affectionate, almost mythic quality to these locations; one sees it’s not so much a place Hilbig is describing as a time—ineffable, inscrutable childhood. Like East Germany, it is the place one can never return to.

The final story, “The Dark Man,” swells with paranoia and dark humor. It begins with a disembodied voice seemingly prank-calling the narrator, who insists that they meet, Only as the story progresses—criss-crossing between Mannheim, Leipzig, Frankfurt, amidst insomnia, sickness and sleeping pills—does the narrator realize the caller is an ex-Stasi official who years earlier had spied on him. A dark comedy, a snapshot of an unhappy marriage and an indictment of the German secret service follows. In other hands this may have been messy or imprecise, but the story is rigorous and focused, thanks in large part to the strength of the translation. Isabel Fargo Cole’s translation is so compelling in fact that the title story reads almost like a prose-poem:

The dark divests us of our qualities. Though we breath more greedily, struggling for life, for some fleeting web of substance from the darkness . . . it is the darkness that forms a mute block above us: intangible matter our breathes cannot lighten . . .

One reads these stories and realizes they’re in the hands of an immense talent. There’s a reason Laszlo Kraznhorkai wrote the introduction to this incredible collection, a reason Hilbig is considered the greatest prose writer to emerge from the former East Germany. I’ve mentioned other authors to give a sense of context and aesthetics, however the reader uninitiated to the likes of Thomas Bernhard or Bohumil Hrabal will enjoy the power of these stories on the strength of the writing alone.

It might be generational or simply coincidence, but three of the books I’ve read on this year’s BTBA list have been story collections authored by writer’s whose lives were ostensibly split in half by history. by Andreï Makine and by Mikhail Shishkin were writers that both grew up with Soviet communism and witnessed its collapse. Like Hilbig, all three saw the systems they were indoctrinated into fall apart. Similarly, all three collections are tinged by nostalgia and regret, awash with meditations on worlds gone by. Having read these books in a short period of time has only reminded me that our fates and destinies are tied inexorably to forces larger than ourselves. Read as autobiography or fiction, The Sleep of the Righteous will linger in the reader’s mind for a long time to come. It is literature of the first order.

Before getting to the books themselves, I have to jump on the bandwagon of hating all the insufferable DraftKings and FanDuel commercials. I’ve been complaining about these for months, but with the start of the new football season we’ve now reached the pure saturation point. I’m not even sure there are other commercials or products out there anymore. Even when I check Twitter I’m greeted with a “sponsored post” about how “Parvez” won $100,000 and I could too!

That’s one of my big beefs with the ludicrous way these sites advertise themselves: the winners featured on these commercials are always moronic looking Patriots fans, piss drunk in a bar, wearing their baseball hat backwards, looking cross-eyed at the screen (sometimes not even at the right one), fist pumping the air and screaming like dumb New Englanders scream, then getting a massive oversized check. The overall message? You’re not as dumb as this fucking guy, are you? Just look at him. EVEN HE CAN WIN AT THIS. (Note: DraftKings is from Boston, which is a city that type-casts itself, and why it must be so easy for them to find stupid looking people to be in their crappy ads. Why waste your time casting someone who appeals to your target demographic when you can just hire the demographic!)

And it’s only going to get worse. The NCAA is freaking out since this isn’t considered gambling, therefore allowing people to play this “daily fantasy draft contest” with college football and basketball players. DraftKings signed a $250 million deal with ESPN that will lead to it being “integrated” into ESPN’s sites. They raised an additional $300 million in July. All because regular fantasy isn’t good enough anymore—we Americans need things to be more immediate and more oversized! WE WANT KING SIZED FANTASY!

What changes this from a dumb rant into something sadder is that all the money lost by the suckers trying to outwit “Jimmy from Watertown Mass” will benefit a corporation operating just barely on this side of shady. At least with the lottery, the poor are preyed upon to help fund schools and shit. It’s still awful, but at least the money doesn’t go to someone who says things like “Once they try it, they like it. It’s sticky.” Gross. Just gross.

So fuck their ads. I hope all of those oversized checks catch on fire and some Russian teenagers hack the shit out of their site.

Well, that, or that these “games of fantasy skill” get outlawed in every state. Either or.

Now, to the happy stuff!

by Daniel Sada. Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (Graywolf Press)

Sada made a lot of waves back in 2012 with Almost Never, a novel that’s basically 328 pages of foreplay. It’s a great novel, and I’m really excited that Graywolf is going on with him. (Although saddened by the fact that he died back in 2011. I would love to have brought him to Rochester.) This novel is about identical twins who do everything together, until a man enters the picture . . .

Sada’s writing style reminds me a bit of Alejandro Zambra’s—there’s something direct, anti-metaphorical linking the two in my mind—but is also quite unique, fun to fall into the rhythms of and, I assume, a beast to translate. (Which is why Katie Silver deserves such accolades—for this and all her works.)

Now, how to say it? One out of two, or two in one, or what? The Gamal sisters were identical. To say, as people do, “They were like two peas in a pod,” the same age, the same height, and wearing, by choice, the same hairdo. Moreover, they both must have weighed around 130 pounds—let’s move into the present—: that is, from a certain distance: which is which?

If none of that sells you on the book, maybe the Bolaño quote on the back will: “Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring.” It’s amazing, and very admirable, how many people Bolaño helped out and wrote about. And it’s not a surprise that us publishers keep putting his quotes on all of our books, knowing that he’s probably the one Spanish-language author outside of Gabriel GarcĂ­a MĂĄrquez who normal Americans might recognize. Which brings me to:

by Andrés Neuman. Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. (Open Letter)

Front cover: “Good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature.”—Roberto Bolaño. Quotes from this statement of Bolaño’s—made when he was on the jury for the Herralde Prize, a statement included in Between Parentheses—are also on AndrĂ©s’s earlier books from FSG. It even kicks off this amazing And will be forever!

I actually asked him about this quote when we were in Chicago—and before we sang karaoke at the bar, which, by the way, AndrĂ©s is really good at, although he’s not as good of a singer as he is a ping-pong player—and he talked about how unfortunate it was that Bolaño didn’t get to live long enough to see if his proclamation came true. “Maybe he would’ve hated my later novels.” I can’t believe that would be true, but I understand the anxiety.

Andrés followed that up by telling a story about playing chess with Bolaño, who was super serious when it was his turn to play, then, after making his move, would jump around playing air guitar to the loud music of a Mexican punk band . . .

I really loved hanging out with Andrés and Naja Marie Aidt over the past two weeks, and, I have to say, even though it sounds cheesy and clichéd, that these visits sort of reinvigorated my interest in books and publishing. We all need a jolt sometimes, and coming in contact with literary geniuses is one great way to make that happen.

by Ricardo Piglia. Translated from the Spanish by Sergio Waisman. (Deep Vellum)

No Bolaño quote! But there is one from Robert Coover, which is really cool, and actually references

The only Piglia I’ve read is The Absent City, which was inspired by Macedonio’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel (The First Good Novel), and which is brilliant and narratively complicated in an Onetti, LabbĂ© sort of way.

Although it sounds like this book brings back some of the themes from his earlier novels—life in Argentina during the Dirty War—it also sounds like much more of a definable, noir novel. This is a book that Tom Roberge will be raving about at some point. And I probably will too—just check this bit from Sergio Waisman’s intro:

Experimenting with form, innovating with narrative, recounting gripping tales that revolve around a central plot, Target in the Night starts as a detective novel, and soon turns into much more than that. Piglia takes the genre of the detective story and transforms it into what can be called, using Piglia’s own term, “paranoid fiction.” Everyone in the novel is a suspect of a kind, everyone feel persecuted.

OK, as soon as I’m done with Home, I know what I’m going to pick up . . .