Lori Feathers (±č´Ç»ĺł¦˛ą˛őłŮ,Ěý, , and ) joins Chad and Kaija to talk about prizes—˛Ń±đ±ô±ąľ±±ô±ôĚýis longlisted for the NBCC Greg Barrios Prize for Translated Literature!—the narrative structure ofĚýMelvill, Nico C., and vampires. A lot of fun is had along the way.

The “” t-shirt is still available and still sexy.

Next episode will be in TWO WEEKS and will cover pages 123-188 of Rodrigo Fresán’s .ĚýYou can find the full reading schedule here.

This week’s music is “” by Yellow Ostrich.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on our and on , , etc. Please rate and review! It helps more than you know.

ąó´Ç±ô±ô´Ç·ÉĚýĚý,Ěý , and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

The large image associated with this post is AI generated.

You can also hear more from Lori on the “Across the Pond” podcast (, ).

The music on this episode is “” by Colourmusic.

If you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. And follow and on Twitter/X for more info about upcoming episodes and guests.

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . Next week’s episode (up to page 429) will be broadcast live . And you can discuss this book at the reactivated Goodreads .

This week’s music is “” by Cherry Glazerr.

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available from BOA Editions. And help out by orderingĚýsomethingĚý(an Open Letter title?) from their online store.

You can also support this podcast andĚýallĚýof Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the . (Or by attending our .)

You can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to It really helps people to discover the podcast.

by Domenico Starnone, translated from the Italian by Jhumpa Lahiri (Europa Editions)

The Italian author Domenico Starnone appears to be a guy with a lot going for him, not least the talented women in his life: his purported wife is none other than Anita Raja (aka, Elena Ferrante); and, the versatile author Jhumpa Lahiri is his English translator. Not to mention that Starnone is a smart and entertaining author in his own right. Starnone’s slim novel Ties is a testament to that fact.

Ties is the story of a fifty-two-year-long marriage that sustained the blow of infidelity but decades later still lists sharply to starboard from the impact. The book is divided into three sections with alternating first-person narrators: wife Vanda, husband Aldo, and daughter Anna. Vanda’s section looks back to the time when Aldo confessed his affair with a nineteen-year-old student at the university where he teaches and moved out of their house, leaving Vanda to raise the couple’s two children alone for several years. The action in sections two and three takes place in the present with Vanda and Aldo, now in their seventies, returning after a vacation to find their home ransacked.

Starnone has a masterful way of depicting the fragility of domestic relationships with egos, vulnerabilities, and self-interested bargaining swirling about to create conflict and disappointment. Perhaps most impressive is the way that he builds a quiet but palpable sense of tension in the situation that the family’s dysfunction has created. Ties is a compelling read that takes a rather ordinary extramarital affair as its premise but executes on it to original and extraordinary effect.

The entry below is by Lori Feathers, co-founder of in Dallas, TX.

by Stefan Hertmans, translated from the Dutch by David McKay (Belgium, Pantheon)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 79%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 24%

Regretfully I became curious about what kind of man my grandfather had been, only after his death. I know his life episodically—a wedding, births, jobs, homes, accomplishments—and these milestones orient my fragmented memories of him. Unfortunately, his emotional life, the expectations and disappointments that colored his beliefs and actions, is a blank. Stefan Hertmans’s eloquent novel, War & Turpentine, speaks to this longing to understand.

Compelled by the approaching centennial of World War I, Hertmans immerses himself in the hundreds of pages of memoir that his grandfather, Urbain Martien, gave him years earlier, shortly before he died. Throughout his life Martien was impelled by a sense of duty—the duty to support his mother and siblings after his father died; the duty to fight in the trenches during WWI instead of becoming a professional artist; and the duty to marry the older sister of his fiancé, Maria Emilia, who fell victim to the Spanish flu. These are the episodes, so to speak, of Martien’s life. Hertmans takes his grandfather’s story and determines to “. . . rediscover it in my own way” by visiting the places that Martien writes about and the original masterpieces that he reproduced with his painting. Hertmans reimagines his grandfather’s life, shining a light on the strong emotions of a man who, in Hertmans’s memory, maintained an almost stoical countenance.

Although duty set the course for Martien the enduring passions that gave his life sustenance were painting and his love for Maria Emilia. Amid his “rediscovery” Hertmans uncovers the secretive way that Martien joined the two obsessions that sustained him. War & Turpentine is a sensitive and moving hymn to an ordinary man who each day faced “. . . the battle between the transcendent, which he yearned for, and the memory of death and destruction, which held him in its clutches.” It deserves the Best Translated Book Award because it expresses so well the bittersweet regret of coming to fully appreciate the depths of another, but reaching that point only after it’s too late.

The entry below is by Lori Feathers, co-founder of in Dallas, TX.

by Javier MarĂ­as, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Spain, Knopf)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 38%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 6%

In this dispiriting era of fake “news” it feels ironic to praise Javier Marías’s Thus Bad Begins, a novel centered around the idea that it is better to have been deceived and never know it than to learn that you are the victim of a deception.

Set in Madrid in 1980, Thus Bad Begins is narrated by Juan, twenty-three and the only child of absented diplomats who secure a job for him as personal assistant to Eduardo Muriel, a respected Spanish filmmaker. Most days Juan works at the Muriel’s home where it quickly becomes apparent that Eduardo deeply resents Beatriz, his wife. As Juan’s curiosity about the reasons for Eduardo’s animosity intensifies so too does his pity and desire for Beatriz. He begins eavesdropping on the couple’s conversations to discover what lies behind Eduardo’s inability to reciprocate his wife’s affection. At the same time, Eduardo tasks Juan to uncover a different secret—one related to a family friend’s rumored blackmail and political exploitation. In uncovering truths about the Muriel family and their circle Juan is confronted with moral ambiguities and for the first time his conviction in the infallible demarcation between wronged and wrongdoer is compromised.

A master storyteller, Marías braids Juan’s and Eduardo’s narratives into a taut loop in which Eduardo’s loves, hopes, heartbreaks, and disillusionments intersect and redouble Juan’s. Yet it is the brilliance of Marías’s writing and Margaret Jull Costa’s translation that makes this novel truly exceptional. And it is why Thus Bad Begins deserves this year’s Best Translated Book Award. Marías may be our only living author worthy to be called a successor to Henry James. His prose digs deeper than his character’s impressions, placing us inside Juan’s mind as his thoughts are formed and reformed by experience and emotion. This is writing that is nuanced and introspective yet somehow retains an ample lightness and natural feeling so that it never risks collapsing under its own weight. Marías’s sentences demand to be reread and savored.

For the title of his novel Marías took a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” It is an admonition to leave the ugly truths about the past, in the past; to not seek the truth because once known it can never be unknown. And it is the knowing that irrevocably changes everything.

While it’s still very early days in the months-long process of reading and evaluating the hundreds of eligible fiction titles for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award, I’ve already made some discoveries that impressed me with compelling narratives and expressive writing that is skillfully sustained by very solid translations. In compiling this list I noticed a common theme: each of these books explores an extraordinary relationship, a bond that consumes and sometimes destroys those within it.

by Alessandro Baricco (tr. Ann Goldstein)

In this gothic fable Baricco portrays a family that tries to avoid life’s pain and disappointment by hiding within a meticulously maintained, insular world of its own making. This bubble is threatened by the unexpected arrival of the young Bride, fiancé of the family’s only son. The young Bride assimilates herself into the family’s peculiar household but over time both she and the family are indelibly changed by their relationship. The family’s extravagant lifestyle and hedonistic rituals are described with sly humor and sumptuous detail. As in his prior novel, Silk, Baricco’s characters exude an erotic sensuality that feels honest and natural. This richly decadent prose is masterfully translated by Ann Goldstein. Baricco uses the elements of a fable to their best effect: with fantastic settings and situations Baricco addresses our very real and relatable reluctance to face the pain of loss and our own mortality.

by Lidija Dimkovska (tr. Christina E. Kramer)

It would be difficult to find a relationship more foreign to most of us than that of conjoined twins. Dimkovska places us inside the mind and body of Zlata, joined at the head to her sister, Srebra, with exceptional detail and perspective. The girls’ physical and emotional entrapment to one another is made all the more difficult by their troubled, impoverished home life and the political and economic instability that rocks 1990s Macedonia. As the girls reach adulthood their situation becomes increasingly unbearable, and Dimkovska draws not-so-subtle parallels between the surgical separation of the twins and the rending of the former Yugoslavia. The writing is lyrical and beautifully perceptive, full of sensitivity and nuance for the girls’ affliction and the way that it controls their lives.

by Virginie Despentes (tr. Siân Reynolds)

Gloria, the forty-one year old protagonist of Despentes’s Bye Bye Blondie, is a force of nature: physically violent to herself and others, uninhibitedly honest, and devoid of self-control. Gloria reunites with her old boyfriend and fellow delinquent from teenage years, Eric, and they become entangled in a self-destructive, mid-life romance from which neither has the strength to escape. Despentes unabashedly refuses redemption for her protagonist, and she draws Gloria’s character so completely and authentically that this, along with the punchy momentum of the prose, results in a compulsively readable and exuberant novel.

by Tahar Ben Jelloun (tr. Ros Schwartz and Lulu Norman)

Ben Jelloun’s fictional memoir evokes a middle-aged man’s patient guardianship over the mental and physical deterioration of his beloved, dying mother. The novel explores memory, suggesting that for both the dying and their loved ones memories are the only refuge from the painful realities of death. The son’s feelings about his mother are expressed with a poignant beauty that contrasts sharply with the crude breakdown of his mother’s mind and body. At the same time, Ben Jelloun paces his narrative to artfully mirror the slow, laborious monotony of a natural, age-induced death.

by Tarjei Vesaas (tr. Michael Barnes and Torbjørn Støverud)

The bond between Mattis, a mentally handicapped man, and his older sister, Hege, is the focus of Vesaas’ 1957 novel set in a remote Norwegian farming village where the two share a home. In most ways Mattis’ actions and emotions are those of a child, and he is entirely dependent upon Hege both as a caregiver and only friend. When Hege becomes romantically involved with an itinerant worker Mattis is incapable of sharing Hege’s affections with another. The author portrays Mattis’ innocence and naïve wonder about the world with clean, spare writing that despite its straight forwardness (or perhaps because of it) eloquently carries a real depth of perception and emotion.

UPDATE: Not actually eligible for the award! Peter Owen brought this out in 2013, so it can’t actually win. But that shouldn’t stop you from buying a copy from Archipelago!

by Jakob Wassermann (tr. Michael Hoffman)

This fascinating, autobiographical novel is a husband’s account of his manipulative wife, their volatile marriage, and subsequent (but less than definitive) separation. Alexander possesses a passive nature and is quick to avoid confrontation. So when Ganna, a young admirer of his writing, proposes that they wed Alexander acquiesces. Although Alexander lacks any physical attraction for Ganna a sense of duty, feelings of pity, and her fawning admiration of his writing, keep him in the marriage despite their vicious arguments. Wasserman takes us inside the humiliations and inflicted pain of this unstable relationship. Not only do we understand the damage that this couple inflicts upon each other, we feel it, too, in writing that resonates with pitch-perfect tone in Michael Hoffman’s translation.

Although Gillian survives an auto accident that kills her husband, the crash damages and permanently alters her face. As she convalesces, she recalls the weeks leading up to the accident, in particular her televised interview with Hubert, a local artist, and her post-interview request that he paint her portrait. Gillian shares with Hubert the hope that his painting of her will reveal truths to which she has been blind. All that she understands about herself is derivative of others’ impressions and reactions, and she longs for Hubert to interpret and reveal to her, her true self. Instead, Hubert soon becomes frustrated with his subject. “I don’t see anything in you. I’ll be pleased if I manage the exterior half decently,” he tetchily tells Gillian during a sitting. He accuses her of intentionally concealing her inner self, of “acting,” and of an unwillingness to reveal any vulnerability, an accusation that is not new to her.

With her post-accident convalescence complete, Gillian moves out of the city and relocates to a secluded mountain resort. No longer Gillian, she is simply known now as “Jill.” She seeks to refashion her life, far from the television cameras, cocktail parties, and celebrity status that constituted her existence. Yet in this new world Jill’s authentic self remains elusive. When Hubert re-enters her life, this time as an artist-in-residence at the resort, Gillian again looks to him and his art to “find” her. But now Hubert is undergoing his own crisis. He has lost creative inspiration and self-confidence as an artist, and after succumbing to an emotional collapse finds that he is now able to create art only through the slow work of destruction:

As a boy he had often whiled away the hours like this, had pulled one thread after another from a piece of rough cloth, or picked away at a rope until there were just thin fibers left, broken up a blossom or a fir twig into its constituent parts, hatched and crosshatched a piece of paper with pencil till it made a shiny even surface.

Hubert even negates his many, previous sketches of Gillian through intricate, penciled cross-hatchings that cover his earlier markings, making the underlying picture unrecognizable. And when Jill finds the drawings of her that Hubert has destroyed, she begins to do the same to the ones that Hubert left untouched:

She started covering one of the sketches with her own hatchings, the one of her kneeling on the bed with her hands behind her back, as though chained. The pencil was too hard, so she took another one. She deleted the picture, as though burying her unprotected body under a layer of graphite, making a fossil that no one would ever discover.

This purposeful destruction of the sketches symbolizes Gillian’s and Hubert’s separate, existential battles, and for each it marks a turning point to finally acknowledge the unvarnished, imperfect reality of who they are.

Michael Hoffman’s masterful translation retains the integrity of Stamm’s crystalline prose—precise, clean, and spare. While the writing is strong enough to keep the reader engaged, the novel’s plot, really a pair of character explorations, is not entirely satisfying. It is difficult to empathize with two people so very self-conscious and yet not at all self-aware. And the aimless drift of Gillian’s and Hubert’s lives resounds (perhaps intentionally) in the indecisive meter of the novel as though Stamm himself is unsure how to find a narrative resolution for his two muses—lost souls searching for the means to balance the created and the authentic.

Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic. Follow her on Twitter @LoriFeathers. (And Anne, if you’re reading this, THIS is why I gave you a weird “I THINK I MET YOU BEFORE BUT HOW” look at ALTA in Tuscon—I had just assigned your translation of this book for review, which explains why your name was so very fresh in my memory. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to meet you in person!)

Here’s the beginning of Lori’s review:

Heiner Resseck, the protagonist in Monika Held’s thought-provoking, first novel, This Place Holds No Fear, intentionally re-lives his past every hour of every day. His memories are his treasures, more dear than the present or future. What wonderful past eclipses holding your newborn for the first time or meeting the woman who will become your wife? For Heiner it is the 224 weeks he endured as a political prisoner at Auschwitz. What marks Held’s novel as an important addition to the large body of historical fiction about the lives of camp survivors is her exploration of Heiner’s psychological need to embrace his Auschwitz experiences rather than struggling to repress or overcome them.

The narrative begins in the early 1980s and skips forward and backward across what Heiner calls his “three lives” relative to Auschwitz—before, there (which “lasted forever”), and after. Raised in Vienna, Heiner joins the communist party at a young age and later, after the Nazis occupy Austria, he is arrested on political grounds, sent to Auschwitz and labeled R.U.—“Return Unwanted.” At Auschwitz Heiner does not shield himself from the daily horrors inflicted upon him and his fellow prisoners. He is determined to survive, to be a repository of the camp’s atrocities, and after the war to expose what he witnessed. Following the war Heiner fulfills the commitment he made to himself, publishing essays about survivors’ experiences and testifying as a witness at the Frankfurt-Auschwitz trials. But he never overcomes the guilt of not acting out, of failing to demonstrate his humanity by openly defying his captors at least one time during those years in captivity.

For the rest of the review, go here.

The narrative begins in the early 1980s and skips forward and backward across what Heiner calls his “three lives” relative to Auschwitz—before, there (which “lasted forever”), and after. Raised in Vienna, Heiner joins the communist party at a young age and later, after the Nazis occupy Austria, he is arrested on political grounds, sent to Auschwitz and labeled R.U.—“Return Unwanted.” At Auschwitz Heiner does not shield himself from the daily horrors inflicted upon him and his fellow prisoners. He is determined to survive, to be a repository of the camp’s atrocities, and after the war to expose what he witnessed. Following the war Heiner fulfills the commitment he made to himself, publishing essays about survivors’ experiences and testifying as a witness at the Frankfurt-Auschwitz trials. But he never overcomes the guilt of not acting out, of failing to demonstrate his humanity by openly defying his captors at least one time during those years in captivity. The camp’s constant press on his consciousness, however, is more than survivor’s guilt. Heiner writes to a former prison-mate:

You seem to have made a proper grave for our past, a grave that you can visit, care for, and then leave. You commute between then and now, while I, to carry the metaphor further, walk around arm in arm with a ghost that I frighten people with. I can’t find a grave for this ghost, and, to be honest, I don’t actually want to bury it.

Heiner’s time in the camp is his identity, a painful legacy that constantly torments, but one that he cherishes. That time is inextricable from his person, at once a cancer that consumes his peace of mind and the source of his life’s meaning and purpose.

Heiner’s wife, Lena, is hurt by his preference for the past. “Pain forms a stronger bond than joy,” Lena comes to believe. She tries to create a quiet existence for Heiner and their life together as an antidote to the emotional and physical trauma that he endured. But Heiner needs his past more than he needs Lena, and she is jealous of his memories. She can recite by heart all of the details of Heiner’s and his friends’ oft-repeated stories of life at Auschwitz, but she will always remain outside, able to empathize but incapable of belonging to the experiences that Heiner has placed in the center of his life. Heiner suffers vocally, persistently; as a consequence Lena, too, suffers, but in silence. The author evokes the stress of this implacable situation on Lena and the marriage in finely felt descriptions that, under Posten’s artful translation, reveal Held’s unpretentious and confident writing. And although the novel’s content is heartbreaking Held never exploits her readers’ emotions with language that is overwrought or designed to shock.

In the novel’s last section Heiner and Lena have moved to a small, North Sea village on the recommendation of Heiner’s doctor. Suspecting that one of the villagers, a recluse, is a former SS officer, Heiner feels compelled to confess to him the guilty feelings he carries regarding his passivity at Auschwitz. It is a poignant coda to Heiner’s life that, forty-five years after the war’s end, the demarcation between victim and perpetrator has become less, not more clear to him.