Couple other notes about this episode: In addition toĚý, Mark talks aboutĚýĚýby Rodrigo Fresán, andĚýĚýby Alex Higley.

And for anyone who’d like to listen to “Marcel’s Mix” while readingĚýLesser Ruins, you can find it .

The music on this episode is “” by Felipe Gordon. (Also found on .)

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Here are the show notes from the original airing:

Chad, Brian, and special guest Mark Haber tried their damnedest to bring some levity to our current crisis on this week’s episode. They laughedĚýa lotĚýwhile discussing Chad’s surprisingly dull dream city, the wayĚýThe Dreamed PartĚýjust drops you right into the flow, dream logic, how Fresan is the exception that proves the rule, and Chad’s quarantine situation.

If you’d prefer toĚýwatchĚýthe conversation, you can find it onĚýĚýalong withĚý. You can watch March 25th episode (covering pages 57-111)Ěý. And you can discuss this book at the reactivated GoodreadsĚý.

You can purchase each of the books in the trilogy separately (,Ěý,Ěý, OR, if you don’t have them and are ready for the reading event of 2023, then getĚýĚýfor $40—approximately 30% off.

You can find all previous seasons of TMR on ourĚýĚýaaand you can support us atĚýĚýand get bonus content before anyone else, along with other rewards, the opportunity to easily communicate with the hosts, etc. And please rate us—wherever you get your podcasts!

FollowĚýĚý,ĚýĚýandĚýĚýfor random thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

Ěýby Yannick Haenel, trans. by Teresa Lavender Fagan

Ěýby Ryan Chapman

Ěýby Alia Trabucco Zerán, trans. by Sophie Hughes

Ěýby Sergio Chejfec, trans. by Heather Cleary

Ěýby Rodrigo Fresán, trans. by Will Vanderhyden

Ěýby LászlĂł Krasznahorkai, trans. by Ottilie Mulzet

Ěýby William S. Burroughs

Ěýby T Fleischmann

Ěýby Maria Tumarkin

Ěýby Rachel DeWoskin

Ěýby Ariana Harwicz, trans. by Annie McDermott and Carolina Orloff

Ěýby Deborah Levy

ĚýandĚýĚýby Silvina Ocampo, trans. by Suzanne Jill Levine, Jessica Powell, and Katie Lateef-Jan

by Kjersti Skomsvold, trans. by Becky Crook

Ěýby Azar Nafisi, trans. by Lotfali Khonji

Ěýby Yuz Aleshkovsky, trans. by Duffield White

Ěýby Edy Poppy

Ěýby Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik

This week’s intro music is “” by Stef Chura, and the outro music is “” from the same album, but featuring Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest.

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by Rodrigo HasbĂşn, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Bolivia, Simon & Schuster)

There is a lot to be said for subtlety, the quiet ability to tackle the heavy issues—family, history, politics—with a restraint that conveys deep emotion without being heavy handed. Affections, Rodrigo Hasbún’s first novel to be translated into English is a breathtaking example of this.

Affections, translated by Sophie Hughes, begins with the Ertl family, newly arrived in Bolivia from Germany after World War II. The father, Hans, an ex-cameraman for the Third Reich, is fixated on finding Bolivia’s lost city of Paitití. I suspected, of course, that the novel would follow the patriarch as he went on a quixotic journey into the jungle, a little madness and malaria, perhaps a lost treasure. However Hasbún is not that type of writer and Affections is not that type of book. Instead, a series of short vignettes, narrated mostly by Hans’ daughters, comprises most of the novel. Before you know it a decade has passed, the daughters are young women and Monika, the eldest, has become a Marxist guerrilla.

In many ways Affections is a book about what doesn’t happen, or what happens between the pages, hidden among lost chapters that the reader is asked to fill in. A quiet book that takes so many unexpected turns, so many amazing shifts it begs to be read more than once, not just for the wonderful language (and Hughes’s skillful translation) but to see if you have perhaps missed something.

I found this book so deft and cryptic, so unexpected and light. Affections is an exercise in restraint (the book and the translation). It deals with family and revolution without once hitting a cliché. In fact, this book is a book that refuses any simple answers. This seems a year of loud and maximalist books, which is great, but this quiet gem should be read and revisited and cherished for the story as well as the execution.

Both Selected Stories and Death in Spring are available through the and if you use 2MONTH at checkout, you’ll get 20% off.

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And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Els Surfing Sirles.

The entry below is by Mark Haber from in Houston, Texas. He is also the author of Melville’s Beard, which is available in a bilingual edition from Editorial Argonáutica.

by LĂşcio Cardoso, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Brazil, Open Letter Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 88%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 20%

Have you ever read a book and felt, without anyone telling you, that you were reading a classic, something indipsensable to a language and a culture? Chronicle of the Murdered House is such an example. This book has hints of Dostoyevsky, Garcia Marquez and Antonio Lobo Antunes. Already a classic in Brazil—this book is not only beautifully written and profound, but a joy to read. The dysfunction of a prestigious family in a provincial Brazilian jungle, complete with gossip, backstabbing, cross-dressing and suicide. There’s a fully-formed universe taking place in a run-down mansion rotting away in the jungle. Despite having the weight and breadth of a classic, its 600 pages fly by. I dare anyone to read it and not appreciate its artistry and breadth. The translation, by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, is deft, peerless and worthy of the Best Translated Book Award.

The entry below is by Mark Haber from in Houston, Texas. He is also the author of Melville’s Beard, which is available in a bilingual edition from Editorial Argonáutica.

by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa (Spain, New Directions)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 35%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 4%

A master writer. A collection of stories covering the breadth of his storied career. The first time in English. These are only a few reasons Vampire in Love should win the Best Translated Book Award. A reader needn’t have experienced any of Vila-Matas’s incredible novels to appreciate and enjoy these tremendous stories. Funny, eerie, worldly and strange, Vila-Matas is a master of the form. As Roberto Bolaño said: “Vila-Matas’s excellence is an undisputed fact.” An astounding collection translated by Margaret Jull Costa.

Small in size and epic in scale, is Sjón’s fourth novel to be translated into English from the Icelandic. The setting is 1918 Reykjavik and besides a Europe on the cusp of war, a global influenza epidemic has reached the city. Mani Steinn, the main character, is a young man attempting to survive the threats, both seen and unseen, which arrive from every direction of the city and world. Steinn is also a homesexual at a time when being queer was not only unacceptable, it was unfathomable. Steinn finds solace and companionship in the quiet escape of movies, their titles sprinkled cleverly throughout the novel that make clever nods to periods of time as well as art movements.

The cinemas themselves are seen as breeding grounds for corrupting the imagination of the young as well as eventually becoming sites of the flu contagion itself. The writing is lucid and sharp, and the translation by Victoria Cribb elegant and restrained. It was the first SjĂłn novel I had read and I found it particularly moving. Certain scenes from the book, fumigating a cinema with chlorine, the main characters sheathed in black, stayed with me for weeks. As well as powerful, Moonstone is an exercise in precision, never falling into pretension when it would be all too easy.

Mixing sex and history, even cinema, Moonstone is an inspiring novel that explores the ways dreams and imagination inform our realities while quietly showing a Europe on the edge of apocalypse. Although fiction, the book is something very personal to the author and which only announces itself on the final page. Wonderful indeed.

If you’ve ever had your heart broken nothing has to be said, it’s understood. A psychic anguish and soul-crushing plague that seemingly has no end. The earth seems to slow, every joke is at your expense; it’s like the flu of your emotions. Well, Norwegian author, Tomas Espedal, wants you to know that he’s had his heart broken too. Toward the end of his novel a much younger girlfriend has left the home they shared and moved to Oslo. The protagonist (ostensibly Espedal himself) walks the house, unshaven and often drunk, reminiscing, brooding, attempting to write, seeing in each empty room the emptiness of his own existence. It is one of the closest examinations of a broken heart I’ve ever read, equal parts painful and beautiful.

Espedal was a new name for me until a fellow juror raved about Against Nature, published by Seagull Books and a companion to an earlier volume, Against Art. Both books were translated by James Anderson and based on Against Nature, Anderson is an incredible translator. The language is crisp and lucid, with passages that beg to be reread and underlined and read aloud.

Like fellow Norwegian contemporary Karl Knausgård, Espedal’s novel blurs the line between memoir and fiction, between narrative and navel gazing. In style, however, there couldn’t be more of a difference; Espedal eschews the pages upon pages of exposition and daily minutiae that Knausgaard has mastered; Espedal has a minimalist approach that often borders on poetry (although the comparisons to Knausgård are inevitable, neither should suffer for both have plenty of their own to offer).

Against Nature jumps between periods of time, from the narrator’s youth working in a factory (where his father also works) to a doomed marriage and the daughter from that union. His life, he seems to be saying, goes against nature, from an unhappy marriage to falling in love for the first time at age 48 to a woman half his age, nothing he does agrees with the way things should be. At one point the young parents go to Nicaragua (she’s an actor and planning to take part in a touring acting troupe) and amidst their turbulent marriage a coup occurs, certainly a symbol of their own state of affairs; the couple and their child quickly abscond to Europe. No one, it seems, has a plan. There are bursts of time that pass and not given much attention, only for the lens to slow and a sudden myopic attention attended to relationships, states of mind and nature. Yet, between all the jumping back and forth, a life is formed and examined. Deaths occur, plans dissolve, marriages end.

Espedal is a deadly serious writer and treats his craft with that gravity. Toward the end of the novel, during his lowest ebb, he still writes every day and explains his maxim:

I attempt to write as quickly and directly as possible, without worrying whether it’s bad or good, without correcting or deleting, without troubling about whether it will be read; and it’s here I achieve a vital freedom, I can write whatever I want.

One of the joys of novels is there are no rules. A story can be told in an endless variety of ways, indeed, in as many ways as the human imagination allows. Tomas Espedal proves this case with ease. Gorgeous, profound and exquisitely translated, Against Nature has made me an Espedal devotee and I will seek every book that carries his name.

Tomas Espedal claims he became a writer in order to know his mother, a voracious reader, better. For anyone interested, this short clip is an incredible glimpse at his inspiration for becoming a writer.

Before encountering the massive, indispensable I was already a fan. I enjoyed and was jolted by the existential brilliance of However, enjoying something and writing about it can often be mutually exclusive. You see, I’m in over my head. Lispector looms large in my mind, a giant, and to attempt writing about her work in any critical way will only expose my shortcomings. More than anything, I’m an enthusiast. I love books and authors not because I always understand them but often because I don’t. The beauty and strangeness of the language, the veil of mystery that hovers above the text—this is what I love most about literature. Did I fully understand Bolaño’s 2666? Or Adler’s Speedboat? Or Paul Metcalf’s Genoa? Of course not. Yet my love for them is powerful and authentic. My favorite books are the ones that demand to be revisited, that contain the ineffable, that bring a sense of wonder, even a blissful confusion. And so, being in waters too deep, I’ll simply list the reasons why you should (and you really should) read the Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector

1. She’s utterly, and without exception, a singular writer.

2. She doesn’t indulge the reader or suffer fools.

3. She writes sentences like: “The sun caught in the blinds quivered on the wall like a Portuguese guitar.”

4. The mythology which surrounds her is deserved.

5. Read as a whole, the Complete Stories is the entire breadth of a literary genius’ artistic life expressed in stories.

6. Like many New Directions books, it’s also an object of art. As such it’s something for guests to envy and/or covet. In this spirit, three copies should be acquired: one for the coffee table, one for the shelf with the other Latin American greats and one, of course, to read.

7. She mixes the domestic and the mythical seamlessly.

8. In her stories there exists no “known,” only the act of grasping and searching for the known.

9. She’s perhaps more enigmatic than even Franz Kafka or Fernando Pessoa.

10. There’s often a humdrum, domestic setting softly rearranged by a kind of ecstatic madness (of language, of character, or both).

11. The translation by Katrina Dodson is lucid and a feat of translated literature.

12. Her stories are dense with the mystery of being alive.

13. The story “One Hundred Years of Forgiveness” opens with: “If you’ve never stolen anything you won’t understand me. And if you’ve never stolen roses, then you can never understand me. I, when I was little, used to steal roses.”

14. Epiphanies aren’t cheap and her stories are replete with them.

15. She’s silly, obtuse, complex, irreverent, satirical and mournful often inside a single paragraph.

16. She will undoubtedly lead you to other Latin American greats like Machado de Assis or Silvina Ocampo or Liliana Heker. Trust me, there’s tons.

17. When she smacks against the confines of language, the reader witnesses her frustration and is all the richer for it.

18. She has more registers in a single story than many 500 page novels.

19. The interior world and the exterior world are given equal attention, often at the same time.

20. The story “Brasilia” is worth the price of admission.

21. Her writing is religious or mystical without trying to be; it simply is.

22. Lispector had no regard for the “rules” of writing and this disregard grants a freedom and vigor evident throughout the book.

23. She’s indulgent and pragmatic: she will digress on a whim and then smack the reader with the point that she’s making.

24. A morning of solitude, a cup of coffee or tea and her stories will bring unequivocal bliss.

25. She contains multitudes.