monica carter – Three Percent

“Zama” by Antonio Di Benedetto [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 17:00:00 +0000

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!

Monica Carter is a freelance critic whose nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today, and Foreword Reviews. She curates which is a virtual journal dedicated to international literature and culture.

by Antonio di Benedetto, translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen (Argentina, New York Review Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 80%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 18%

Primal, erudite, hallucinatory, and brutal, Zama is a novel of disillusionment and desire. Divided into three parts by time, it covers a 9-year period between 1790–1799 in the life of former chief administrator Don Diego de Zama. Posted to Asunción in the Paraguayan hinterlands to serve the Spanish crown, he longs to return to Buenos Aires to his wife and family. Zama is a Creole and because he is not Spanish born, he can no longer hold the position of chief administrator. Originally published in the 1956, this is the first English translation of Zama, an Argentinian masterpiece. Esther Allen inhabits the essence Antonio Di Bendetto that makes this translation feel of its time while simultaneously modern.

Zama opens in 1790 with the Zama waiting for a ship to arrive with news from his wife, Marta. Di Bendetto explains right off who Zama is, “. . . was a fighting cock, or, at the very least, ringmaster of a cockfighting pit.” He is a man stuck in time and place desperately wanting to leave. He is second in command of a small port town with no real prospects of escaping. Women are his distraction and play a heavy part in parts one and two contrasting his base desires with his own high self-regard as a faithful and principled man. His action and thoughts betray his own ego when he spots a naked townswoman bathing and she spots him watching her. An Indian girl chases after him and he beats her:

Naked as she was, I took her by the throat, strangling her cry, and slapped her until my hands were dry of sweat, before sending her sprawling to the ground with a shove. She curled up with her back to me. Delivering a kick to her buttocks, I left.

With me went my anger, already yielding to bitter self-reproach. Character! My character! Ha!

My hand may strike a woman’s cheek but it is I who will endure the blow, for I shall have done violence to my own dignity.

When the violent outburst occur, Zama attempts to revert to the man he thought he was—upstanding, respectable and dignified. These periods send him further into paranoia and isolation. He dreams of a beautiful woman and tries to find her in the limited prospects available to him according to his standards. He argues with an assistant and then blames him knowing that he will be sent away. Zama’s digression into ill-fated trysts, gambling and misguided suspicion creates a vertiginous existence of despair and longing for what he lacks—a woman he dreamed, his family, his dignity.

The second part begins in 1794 when Zama is near the bottom of his descent. Unable to afford the inn where he lives and kicked out by Emilia, a Spanish widow whom bears his child, he takes up residence at a house on the edge of town owned by wizened shadowy figure, Soledo. Zama’s time there is marked by fever dreams and impulsive behavior. Di Bendetto gives this section a phantasmagorical feel, with atmospheric darkness and tone, straddling between reality and the imaginary. There are two women in the house, or maybe one. They might be Soledo’s daughter or his wife. Parts of the house are closed off to Zama and his dreamlike states muddle his perception. He grapples the visions of the two women he sees:

Immediately I was at pains to seize upon their vision, fearing it would flow from my head without leaving any clear or lasting impression. The thing was not palpable or real. It was . . . an absence. Yes. What was missing, behind the glass panes, was a pink dress. The young woman wore pink.

The other woman, who had passed in front of me a moment earlier, was dressed in green.

Therefore it was not the same woman. There had been no time for a change of clothes.”

His position and his private life intersect when his new secretary, Manuel, marries Emilia and becomes the father of Zama’s son as a token of friendship. By the end of this section, Zama is recovering from a sickness under the care of Manuel and Emilia. As he ventures back to Soledo’s, he is presented with the reality that Soledo, the women and servants have all moved to Brazil weeks ago. Without a home, a family or money, he is forced to accept years have passed and his life has only become worse.

The third part opens in 1799 with Zama and Captain Parilla leading men across the flatlands to capture Vicuña Porto, a famed bandit. Zama’s existential crisis is all he has along with his hopes that this capture might award him favor with the king. Zama is the only one who knows what Porto looks like have served with him many years earlier. Eventually Zama ends up the prisoner and is left to meet his fate alone.

Di Bendetto presents a violent, tortured character so flawed and unlikeable yet utterly compelling, it’s difficult to ignore this works brilliance. Di Bendetto, a contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, is an underserved writer whose own life is novel-worthy as well outlined by Esther Allen in her preface. Under two hundred pages, Zama feels like we have read a colonial epic. In the end a man becomes victim to his own expectations:

As I cursed the havoc within me, I felt its power. My blood’s yearning defied my bridle. I had to contain myself, punish myself.

“In the Café of Lost Youth” by Patrick Modiano [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 17:00:00 +0000

by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French by Chris Clarke (France, New York Review Books)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 32%

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

“She was taking refuge here, at the Condé, as if she were running from something, trying to escape some danger. “

Danger hovers in the background of this noir novel, filled with malaise and post-Vichy fatigue, and exemplifies Patrick Modiano’s atmospheric, understated style. Plain and simple prose subverts the hazy nostalgia that infuses the narrative. In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Modiano, capturing the elusive qualities of memory where time and place are secondary to the feelings they evoke.

Once the longlist is announced, it’s evident that the aspects of a novel are extremely well executed and translated in all the titles. One must recognize the goals of the author and the impact of the work—what lingers in the mind long after it is read. What makes In the Café of Lost Youth and most Modiano titles a cut above is his ability to capture the intangible, to convey the effect memory has on how a life is lived, and to make the reader reflect on what memories prevail in her own mind. As nebulous and ephemeral as this work is, Chris Clarke’s translation is a simpatico translation. Modiano addresses memory and his story without a tremendous number of specifics and also raises more questions about the “story” as it progresses. It’s as if he presents the hallucinatory remembrance without the typical trappings of narrative structure and objectives of a novel. Yet, in all its slim glory, it is complete.

Told in the voices of four different narrators, the novel’s focus is a young woman who suddenly appears at the Condé. Its regular inhabitants are a mix of hard-drinking young and old bohemians with a dash of small-time criminals. Jacqueline Delanque enters the Condé one evening, a book in hand, sits in the back “where no one would notice her.” Soon she joins the group of boisterous regulars, who name her Louki, while “she remained quiet and reserved, and seemed happy just to listen.” The first part is narrated by a young student who is smitten with her.

The second part is narrated by a private detective, Caisley, who was hired by Louki’s older husband whom she has abandoned. Louki narrates the third part and Roland, a fellow student of Guy de Vere (a mystical philosopher), who becomes intimate with Louki but knows no more than anyone else of her, narrates the fourth.

Through the different narrators, details of Louki’s young life unfold to reveal contrasting lifestyles that she seems merely to exist in without any one of these lifestyles being totally possessing her. Her childhood was poor and lonely as she struggled to survive with her single mother. She escapes into the security of marriage only to have a “feeling of emptiness would come over me in the street.” Her adventures with a drug loving girlfriend circle back in and out of the story until Louki ultimately rests among the crowd at the Condé. It’s there that she is bewitching and unknowable, yet a compatriot in existential despair and loneliness.

This book should win because of the melancholy of memory, what once was so present and undeniable becomes sorrowful nostalgia for youth, a yearning to be where we once were. Wistful and haunting, In the Café of Lost Youth a testament to Modiano’s skill at confronting how memory truly imbues our perception of who we are.

The Architecture of Time, Space and Imagination by Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 20:31:42 +0000

Monica Carter is a freelance critic whose nonfiction has appeared in publications including Black Clock, World Literature Today, and Foreword Reviews. She curates , which is a virtual journal dedicated to international literature and culture.

For more information on the BTBA, “like” our and And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges.

There’s little I like better than small, unique books that can fit into my back pocket. This years BTBA considerations bring tantalizing prospects that contain elements of narrative architecture which intrigue or surprise. It takes courage for an author to take the nuts and bolts of fiction to create a structure familiar enough to the reader but, yet, altogether original. Just as courageous is the translator who sees that architectural construct and recreates it with identical effect using different tools. Here are a few authors and translators who have dared to so and succeeded.

and by Roger Lewinter, translated by Rachel Careau (New Directions Press)

French born Roger Lewinter is the epitome of esoteric. His fiction isn’t immediately accessible – there is an adjustment period when reading his fiction. While most authors use time and space as the foundation of a linear narrative, Lewinter uses time and space to build mini structures within each sentence, crafting concentric sentences the spiral to a fine point. With Lewinter, beginning a sentence is an entryway to a maze that guides you through a labyrinthine use of time that ends back at the beginning. He is at his most intricate in The Attraction of Things, a fictional treatise on the magnetism of things and how we are inexplicably drawn to them without knowing why. His sentences can last pages, filled with clauses, stories, references and narrative ephemera, as evident in the following sentence where the narrator declines an invitation from a friend and delves into the history of a mutual acquaintance:

At the time, connection by means of cross-invasion, where the question of knowing who is who ceases to be relevant – because one becomes the other, completed through him – , was, I though, of no interest to me; while I had prepared myself for it by studying , for a year and a half, through an arbitrary choice that I couldn’t really explain to myself, since it vaguely annoyed me, The Man without Qualities, by Musil, the theme of which is the approach, by a novice, of this state; and when I had taken on the task of translating the Fränger into French, I discovered that it had been translated into English by precisely those who would afterward translate The Man without Qualities; while twelve years later, in 1976 – after having translated, in 1969, a first collection by Groddeck, and indentified, in 1974, through the objective and apparently fortuitous sequence of the translations, a convergence between the redistribution of sexual roles that implicated the Groddeckian understanding of sickness and, in Bosch’s work as interpreted by Fränger, the disintegration of the body, which the spirit, through Adamite eroticism, masters even its transports -, I discovered that an American psychoanalyst, Grotjahn, in The Voice of the Symbol, published in1972, had already drawn a connection, through reading Fränger, between Bosch and Groddeck; when in June 1963, with Geneviève Serreau, during the course of dinner in the kitchen, the conversation naturally turned to The Man without Qualities, I note how much I preferred Tonka, a novella that, in sixty pages, incomparably condenses that which remains vague in the two thousand pages of the novel; not learning until October 1981, after her death, that what had struck Geneviève Serreau in 1954, leading her to work for twenty years for Les Lettres Nouvelles, was her reading Tonka, which Les Lettres Nouvelles had just published I translation; and while I didn’t succeed Jean-Francois in her maid’s room, I recommended to Geneviève Serreau, in September 1963, that Fränger, about which, inexplicably, Jean-Francois had spoken to her; and, equally captivated by this book, she had it accepted for publication by Les Lettres Nouvelles; with a patience that I didn’t understand was intended for me, orienting me then in the space from which, through her gaze, radiated the highest pitch of divine madness.

As intellectual as Lewinter’s style may be, and perhaps intimidating, it leads to moments of poignancy that are luminous, most notably in the short story “Nameless”, found in Story of Solitude. Preceded by two pieces – one a micro fiction about his encounters with a household spider and one, a short story about his dedication to two camellia plants – that seamlessly and oddly set up the yearning and evanescence of a chance encounter with a young man who works at a market he frequents:

… “I’ll mark the price” –, had captivated me by their intonation – in April, at the first book that I had bought from him – he was just starting out at the flea market –, his face had made me look at this fly and the way his jeans fell to his sneakers; from that time on avoiding paying him attention –; thus bewitched by sweetness – although – I realized – the possession burning within me proceeded from the trance that I was in to write, the one nourishing the other to the point where, soon, I was uncertain which would prevail – , particularly since, one Wednesday in September, he had read me – passing by his stand without stopping, I had looked back, not knowing that his gaze had followed me pensively – , responding to my greeting from then on with this conscious candor that, in his voice, had gripped me; his coquetry – sporting at each market another T-shirt – lemon, pistachio, raspberry, lavender, plum –, before stripping his chest bare in the sun, the adolescent suppleness of his body, which made life stay a moment on his most fragile grace, troubling –, in contradiction to the solitude in which he seemed to move, ending in subjugating me; thus finally going to the flea market to subject myself his fascination – antagonist of the book, in which I sought, by grasping my mechanism of ascendency, to exorcise the passions that were binding me to my body, so that in its void something unknown might arise – as one plays Russian roulette, the admission magnetized by his approach wanting to escape me; while now, when I realized that I had left him there, the sweetness he inexorably aroused in me froze, from the evidence that something inconceivable had come to pass at the moment when, in front of the density of his body in its unbearable splendor, I’d drawn back;

The sentence continues to even a more lovely emotional depths, but in this example Lewinter’s uncanny gift for dissecting the abstract and unspoken aspects of attraction and self-awareness raises fiction to a higher level. To this point, Rachel Careau is to be commended for her recreation of Lewinter’s vertiginous prose. I am excited by her translation that serves as a diaphanous scrim for Lewinter’s ornate narrative architecture.

by Marianne Fritz, translation and afterword by Adrian Nathan West (Dorothy, a publishing project)

Just under 130 pages, The Weight of Things is weighty itself, in theme and tone. Fritz, an Austrian novelist, had a cult following and instant critical acclaim with the publication of The Weight of Things, her debut novel. The novel feels both as a step backward in time – it deals with the horrors of WWII – and a step forward because its structure isn’t linear but fragmented and impressionistic producing a singularly innovative style. There are moments in the novel where the reader is displaced, disoriented, looking for some type of structural anchor. But to think this is a weakness or a stylistic flaw undermines the effect of the novel. Tonally, Fritz creates an overwhelming sense of foreboding that proves haunting; the horrific isn’t plainly laid out in all its grotesqueness but constructed in a spectral-like fashion that permeates every scene. Although the scenes aren’t linear, Fritz draws us a tragedy of WWII featuring a two soldiers – Rudolph and Wilhelm, a young, unstable mother of two, Berta, and her shrew of a sister, Wilhemine. There is perspicacity and searing satirical commentary that pops up to ground the novel in the quotidian that Fritz does skillfully in this section “Berta Greets Wilhlem; Does Berta Schrei Have a Visitor?” set in a mental hospital:

By now Head Nurse Gotaharda had left Ward 66 to the visitor and his secrets, and Wise Little Mother watch Wilhelm and Berta closely from the corner of her eye. Scarcely ten minutes had gone by since the Wound of Life had made its treacherous entrance into the Wise Little Mother’s realm. It was that whore of a Head Nurse, who threw herself into the arms of anyone who came her way, who had befouled their corner of eternity, and weighed upon the Wise Little Mother now, a heavy burden. The old woman resolved to alert Berta to the evil forces around her.

“You must reflect on what is happening here, Berta dear. Reflect and be careful. Life is a wound, and this wound…this wound is slow to heal.”

The novel though structurally may feel vague, but it enhances darkness of the themes – madness, motherhood, war, and society – for a lasting emotional impact. Again, translating something demands a translator who truly understands all that the novel encompasses in order to render even something similar in the translation. Mr. West honors Fritz by regenerating her singular voice. Besides Fritz, the Dorothy Project is putting out some fantastic work by women, including another tiny wonder and recent biblio-crush, Nathalie Léger’s .

by Paul Willems, translated by Edward Gauvin (Wakefield Press)

Wakefield Press has become of my favorite presses out there because they consistently put high quality, unique works that make you feel like you’ve just scored something magical and timeless when you read one of their publications. By far, The Cathedral of Mist is going to be one of those works that I will read from time after time, always being inspired by something new within its pages. Williems, a Franco-Belgian fantasist, work is a collection of prose and two essays – on both reading and writing. I couldn’t help but think, after reading The Cathedral of Mist, that Willems had applied Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space and On Poetic Reverie and Imagination to perfection. His Elysian stories transport you to realities so vivid, even knowing they don’t exist, feel otherwise.

Willems voice is humorous, light, hopefully resigned to his imagination, and this combination infuses his pieces with a touching nostalgia. I can’t help but be in awe of Edward Gauvin’s translation (he has many fine translations…) that captures Willems’s essence. Whether it’s a story about a man is visiting a count where he ends up sleeping, with the count’s permission, the Countess in a bed outdoors surrounded by a Finnish forest or traveling through he Balkan Mountains with a German ethnologist accompanied by a shepherd who wears a “the flute of Orpheus on his belt,” Willems is charming. From the beginning of each story, Willems pulls you immediately into his voice and imagination, demonstrated beautifully by the opening paragraph of “The Palace of Emptiness”:

Victor lived like a kite, which is to say, tethered. Storms – he had frolicked on them until the age of twenty-five – strained without ever breaking the string that tied him to childhood. He finished his schooling as an architect, married Micheline, and never knew a moment’s vertigo.

His lyrical, celestial imagination is best displayed in the titular story about an architect who, tired of granite, builds a cathedral made out of mist. Through his description, we only wish we could visit a place as enchanting:

The great nave was worthy of admiration. One hundred and fifty-four columns of mist flowed slowly, upward, meeting in seven keystones. There the capor condensed into droplets of water that fell one by one, at random. The goldsmith Wolfers had sculpted admirable irises to catch them on the ground. The deep blue blossoms bristled with slender steel fillets that each drop of water moved to a sustained song. This music, which the fashion of the day deemed “violet,” replaced the bells the architect V. had not been able to hang in the steeple of mist. But instead of taking wing like the sound of bells, this sound could be heard only by visitors, and traveled to a place very deep inside them. Like harness bells on that little horse pulling a sleigh through the night we bear within it glided toward that farthest part of ourselves beyond which music dies in sweet agony.”

Simply breathtaking.

These works deserve a readership and undoubtedly will have significant ones, although they may be a bit off kilter for the mainstream reader. No mistaking their craftiness or that each author and translator are able architects building something new and original with the elements of fiction.

Sphinx

Chad Post — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 17:00:00 +0000

Founded in 1960 by such creative pioneers as George Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, the Oulipo, shorthand for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, came about in when a group of writers and mathematicians sought constraints to find new structures and patterns on their own writing. Anne Garréta’s visionary debut novel Sphinx, translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, was the first to be writer born after the group’s founding year to be inducted into the Oulipo, although not until 2000. Sphinx, originally published in 1986 in France, it is just now, almost thirty years later, being introduced to American readers by the impressive new publisher Deep Vellum.

In the past, most Oulipian works have dealt with self-imposed literary constraints such as lipograms or the strictly mathematically structured Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Garréta has upped the proverbial literary stakes and not merely played with the textuality or form of the work, but she has taken gender out of the language and put the constraint only on the imaginative limits of the reader. Sphinx is innovative in the way it is written—without assigning gender to the narrator and the narrator’s love obsession, making it a cutting-edge work for queer and feminist theory and an avant-garde novel that is more effective with the Oulipian constraint than without. Considering the grammatical calisthenics performed by Emma Ramadan’s translation, these points wouldn’t have been evident as Daniel Levin Becker aptly states in his introduction (via clever footnote):

If Garréta’s composition of Sphinx was a high-wire act, then Emma Ramadan’s task in carrying it over into a language with at least one crucially important constitutional difference, is, near as I can figure it, akin to one tightrope walker mimicking the high-wire act of a second walker on a steeply diverging tightrope, while also doing a handstand.

It’s not simply Garréta’s genderless constraint or Ramadan’s dazzling translation, but it’s the power of the novel itself: sensual, provocative, a hypnotic mix of nightclub noir and midnight morality that plays out in the dance clubs of 1980s Pigalle. Thematically, Garréta explores the power of obsessive love to control our identity, the consequences of completely surrendering to carnal desire as a means of spiritual fulfillment and how memory can haunt and fail us.

From the very first pages, the narrator’s obsession with A✭✭✭, an American dancer ten years the narrator’s senior, is unmistakable:

So I must have first spotted A✭✭✭ during a melancholic, disinterested contemplation of a succession of bodies I wasn’t trying hard to distinguish, on the stage of a cabaret where some obliging alcoholic had decided to drag me, coming from a club where we’d mingled our disappointments. Asking myself afterward what had made the place so appealing, I couldn’t describe it. In that blur, something must have struck me: something started operating underground, a digging, a tunneling in my mind following the blinding impact of a fragment on y retina. A body, just one, that I hadn’t identified, surreptitiously had filled the place with a seduction that permeated so deeply I couldn’t discover the cause, I couldn’t uncover the root of it.

The narrator is cursed with ennui, an incessant melancholy that is not being soothed by following theological studies and, in fact, becomes so disgusted with the teachings of a particular theologian from Freiburg, decides to abandon university study in favor of finishing a thesis at home and under the tutelage of Padre✭✭✭.

Padre✭✭✭ is an important character because he ushers in the extended metaphor that compares the narrator’s obsessive love with A✭✭✭ and the late-night life they live at cabarets and dance clubs to religious experiences. Padre✭✭✭ introduces the narrator to a nightclub he frequents, The Apocryphe (possibly an allusion to the non-canonical biblical works), which had an “illuminated entrance sheltered from the rain by a white canopy . . .” as if it were a heavenly gate to the demimonde. When the DJ at the Apocryphe dies unexpectedly one night, the narrator is lead by the owner of the club and Padre✭✭✭’s longtime friend, George, to the “DJ booth, a sort of podium that loomed over the dance floor. This glass-enclosed den was attached to one of the walls of the club, which was organized around it in concentric levels, making it the focal point . . .” as if it were a lectern. Then again:

It was settled that until I found another job I would remain the resident DJ. The Padre couldn’t help acting as sort of a moral guide—he had decided to view this adventure as an ablution, as a necessary submersion in the world of terrestrial passions. It was a type of trial, a confrontation with the excesses of evil designed to steel my character.

Garréta makes clear from the beginning that when the narrator and A✭✭✭ are introduced to each other at the club where A✭✭✭ dances, ironically named the Eden, “den of inequity,” the there will be a fanatical element, an obsessive devotion on the part of the narrator. After continually trying to convince A✭✭✭ that they should consummate their relationship, the narrator finally confesses one night that “the inversion was complete: I made myself into a demon, and A✭✭✭ symmetrically put on the mask of the angel that I had abandoned.”

The narrator and A✭✭✭ spend more time together, visiting each other’s clubs, hanging out in a group, and traveling through the early morning hours among flashing lights, pulsing music and the mirrored walls of dance clubs. When they part, desire amplifies the memory of A✭✭✭’s presence, but cannot recreate it:

A hallucinatory sensation, as if my body had suffered an amputation. This sensation that, even after the split, the separation of our two bodies kept scalding me, kept me awake. I oscillated the entire morning between the rage of embracing only a void, and the memory, the bliss of an instant, of the past night that I was trying so hard to mentally recompose.

Sphinx is an inquest of memory, of why it can remind us of what once was but not reproduce it. Memory becomes the torturer, the unreliable witness and the keeper of people lost, love lost; Garréta creates the narrator’s desire and loss through remembrances of ephemeral sensations—the sight of A★★★’s hips, the feel of A★★★’s skin, and the smell of A★★★’s t-shirt. Then there is the narrator’s memory of being introduced to America so that the narrator can meet A★★★’s family and walk around the Harlem neighborhood where A★★★ grew up:

An anxiety wells up and distills in me, the feeling of having lost, of having let this setting swallow up, a fragment of my substance that I can’t place or describe, but whose absence makes itself felt throughout my body, invading and voiding it insidiously. A bitter cold, an abyss full of wind cuts through me, the same wind that cut through me as I walked through the streets of Harlem all those years ago. Harlem’s devastation now resides in me, my body haunted by the soul of this spectral city.

Garréta’s prose throughout this five-part narrative is expressive, fluid and intense. There is also the language of violence used to describe desire, the scourge of obsession, and the torment of memory; terms comparative to the destruction left behind after war. This choice she makes and one that Ramadan creatively remains loyal to, enhances the primal, nearly destructive elements of abandon, desire, loss, those emotions which we cannot succinctly express:

Why give voice to the unarticulated? Because the inexpressible doesn’t articulate itself in the least; it shatters into pieces before even taking form. I felt distinctly that something was breaking under a kind of assault; an obscure combat was taking place, syncopating my breath with its blows.

Sphinx is a novel of passion and loss that transcends gender and speaks to the universality of desire and loss, morality, spiritual crisis and the need to connect and belong. It’s also a novel that captivates and propels the reader to question the boundaries of desire and memory—and which one ultimately holds us captive. This was a powerhouse pick for Deep Vellum to publish. In addition, the editorial choice of Daniel Levin Becker’s Introduction and Emma Ramadan’s mini-translation course in the Translator’s Note are both a delight to read and only strengthen the caliber of the work. Sphinx is a work that should be read because the narrator is genderless, A★★★ is genderless, and isn’t it about time we let go of “he said, she said?”

Three Percent #98: The 2015 BTBA Finalists!

Chad Post — Fri, 15 May 2015 17:35:30 +0000

For this week’s podcast, we invited Best Translated Book Award Fiction Chair Monica Carter on to talk about the finalists for this year’s awards. Monica graciously gave us some insight into the voting process, revealed which of the final ten was a “personal pick” of one of the judges, and managed to make us second guess who we thought would win the award.

Additionally, we talked about the differences between the UK vs. U.S. book scenes, and had some rants, raves, and sports talk.

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REMINDER: Next week, Feminist Press editor Julia Berner-Tobin will be our guest to discuss “Apocalypse Baby” by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Siân Reynolds, the latest book in the Three Percent Book Club. Go out and get a copy! It’s a fast, vicious read, and if you have any questions for the three of us, send them to threepercentpodcast@gmail.com by Tuesday morning.

ANOTHER REMINDER: Our 100th episode is coming up, and to celebrate, we’d like to do one that’s all about “listener appreciation.” So send any and all comments and questions to threepercentpodcast@gmail.com—we’ll answer anything you’d like . . .

This week’s music is from the new Dick Diver album. (Dick Diver being a reference to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.)

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

And you can email us with complaints and comments at threepercentpodcast@gmail.com

Why This Book Should Win – Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Tue, 05 May 2015 00:47:16 +0000

Monica Carter is a writer whose fiction has appeared in , , , and is a freelance critic.

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

At thirty-six years old, Ondjaki is one of the most prominent figures in Angola with a stream of diverse works to behind him to solidify his status as a mainstay African writer. Not to mention his list of awards: winner of the 2013 Jose Saramago Prize, an Africa39/Unesco City of Literature 2014 African Writer Under 40, a Guardian Top Five African Writer 2012, and winner of the Grinzane Prize for Best Young Writer 2010. His novel is the little novel that could. It came up slow on the judges, but it won’t leave. It’s a tough sell amongst the Cortázar, the ubiquitous Ferrante, the brilliance of the Hrabals, the seriousness of the Echenoz, or the linguistic leaps and narrative complexity of Can Xue. Admittedly, I am reluctant to get excited about a coming-of-age novel. Perhaps I am too old with too much cynicism. But that is what is beautiful about this novel – despite the historical setting of the civil war that lasted decades which would cause any country’s citizens to be cynical, especially their artists, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret is light, almost effervescent, a testament to the true nature of resilience and hope.

Why should it win?

1. Rarely does a novel make me laugh out loud and I often question the mental state of reviewers who say “this book kept me laughing out loud,” but these few lines got me.

We ran forward, then went in stealthily along the side of the veranda so that Granma wouldn’t call us. The yard was dark. The parrot His Name shouted out to expose us: “Down with American imperialism.” We made an effort not to laugh: the words came from a television commercial that hadn’t run in a long time. Just Parrot finished off: “Hey, Reagan, hands off Angola.”

Humor that is political, intelligent and done believably between two parrots is sometimes better than all the gravity of a three hundred page novel when it makes you want to tell other people how funny it is.

2. The originality of Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret is present in his characters, in his scenes and in the overall narrative. It’s fun. It’s fun book to read but not in a “guilty read” type of way, but in a stylized, well-crafted literary way. The unnamed narrator’s cast of characters is unique and refreshing. Residing on Bishop’s Beach in Luanda, there’s Granmas, Soviets or “blue ants”, Comrade Gas Jockey whose gas pump is just water, Comrade Gudafterov because of the way he says ‘good afternoon’, and Pi. The way the narrator explains how a friend arrives at a particular is always entertaining:

That was how he got his name, Sea Foam, there on the shoreline of Bishop’s Beach, where there was a huge blotch of white foam deposited by the breaking waves to ensure that the water merely lapped against the sand. Only if you walked far out did you lose your footing. There the foam disappeared, but closer in, where we also liked to pick up pretty seashells, it was just clean white foam, completely white as you looked to the right and the left, with Sea Foam’s body making a dark stain in the whiteness.

“Oye, niños, es el cabello del mar… The hair of the sea, do you understand? I mean, hahaha…” He went under for a second, dipped all of his hair in the foam awash with sand and shattered seashells, came up almost breathless and then puffed a like a little whale. “I mean…I’m just a louse in the white hair of the sea.”

3. With a text this full of language – Spanish, bits of Russian, made up words – one can only imagine the level of Stephen Hennighan’s creativity to properly convey all of Ondjaki’s playfulness, nostalgia, and wistfulness without becoming mawkish, too flippant or irreverent. I don’t know how much, if any, Ondjaki and Hennighan collaborated, but it seems as if Hennighan recreates the energy of Ondjaki’s prose well. Hennighan also translated Ondjaki’s previous work, , which I’m sure added to his finesse with his style. In the back, he also included an index of cultural references which I like and I think adds to understanding some of Omdjaki’s humor regarding the convoluted political history of Angola.

4. The voice is so winsome. We don’t know the narrator’s name, but his voice just captivates with its loss of innocence and his love for his friends and his Granma. Yet, it never becomes syrupy or sickening. It is simply poignant:

And I stood still.
It wasn’t only the fingers or the toes, the legs or the head and the eyes, that liked to look one way then the other. It was the stillness itself. Within me. The voice that speaks within me had nothing to say, or else it wanted to practice silence just like that.

Still from not thinking.

To feel the evening? To await a signal from the wind, a whistle like a segregated conversation taking account of the fact that the birds cried in a far-away and I could hear them? Wanting to hear mysterious sentences from Granma Catarina? Contemplating the things of Bishop’s Beach that I thought I alone saw?

Inventing minutes that were mine within the minutes of time?

Growing up with a heart and body that were fleeing from childhood? “Is someone running behind the child?” Granma Nineteen was in the habit of asking. Was time pursuing me with a body to frighten me? I felt the whole world there in the small square of Bishop’s Beach.

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret is one of those rare charming novels full of spirit, humor and the craziness of politics and power’s effect on its victims. It’s not often that a gem like this can be delivered through the voice of a young boy in such a whimsical way. The styles of Ondjaki and Hennighan are simpatico and deserve the for this redemptive and enchanting work.

Why This Book Should Win – Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Thu, 30 Apr 2015 10:00:00 +0000

Monica Carter is a writer whose fiction has appeared in , , , and is a freelance critic.

– Elena Ferrante, Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, Italy
Europa Editions

Elena Ferrante is everywhere now. Yet, I remember when she was obscure, when she wrote dark, suffocating first person narratives about women coming undone. She laboriously outlines, emotion by emotion, the protagonist’s shunning of a traditional female role, whether it is wife or mother or both, in favor of her own desires. In and , we are stuck in the protagonist’s mind while she struggles to reckon with her own betrayal of tradition and patriarchy. I felt these intense novels were mine from the beginning – sordid, angry and unknown. Then came , the first novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, and the literati was roused from their stateside slumber to take notice of a book about an Italian female friendship between two girls Elena and Lila.

After My Brilliant Friend, came which solidified Ferrante’s status as an international writer and the first time she was recognized by the Best Translated Book Award (2014). This year, Ferrante and Ann Goldstein, her faithful translator with whom she has been paired with for all seven of her works, make the list again for Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. It opens with Elena in her mid-sixties, walking with Lila, when a boy finds a body in the bushes that Lila identifies as their childhood friend, Gigliola. From there Ferrante takes us back in time to the 1960s and the long 1970s of Italy, to the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Naples, the middle-class restaurants and homes of Florence and the university classrooms where Marxist rhetoric echoes through the halls, giving hope to the students and the local workers that change will come.

Things have changed for both Elena and Lila. Lila is no longer under the thumb of Stefano Carracci, but living in a rundown apartment with a boy she grew up with, Enzo Scanno, and working at a sausage factory. Elena has graduated from university, published a well-received novel and is fiancée to a young professor from Florence. When Elena returns to Naples from Pisa, she comments on the city and it’s deterioration:

Lodged in my memory were dark streets full of dangers, unregulated traffic, broken pavements, giant puddles. The clogged sewers splattered, dribbled over. Lavas of water and sewage and garbage and bacteria spilled into the sea from the hills that were burdened with new, fragile structures, or eroded the world from below. People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable. As soon as I got off the train, I moved cautiously in the places where I had grown up, always careful to speak in dialect, as if to indicate I am on of yours, don’t hurt me.

Elena views Lila as an extension of the city and when she first encounters her after a long while, she notes that Lila is “even thinner, even paler, her eyes were red, the sides of her nose were cracked, her long hands were scarred by cuts.” Lila is her touchstone but also her constant reminder of where she came from and that no matter the education or distance, she can never escape it. The control of the Camorra, the violence, the dialect and the oppression of women follow Elena to Florence no matter how much she tries to distance herself and her family from her neighborhood. Her bond with Lila drags her back into the fray, through pleas from Lila but also through Elena’s own necessity to measure up to her, to gain her approval. Yes, this friendship is symbiosis at its most brutal, honest, humiliating and twisted.

What Ferrante, and in turn Goldstein, both do so deftly is ensconce you into the narrative voice and the pace of the novel from the beginning. Even if one hasn’t read the first two of the series, the emotional investment is set forth on page one and instead of feeling that you have missed something, at book’s end the only urge will be to run out to buy the first two. Each page adds layer upon layer so that the friendship between Elena and Lila becomes inextricable from the Godfatheresque battle between the communists and the fascists for control, the struggle between Elena’s role as wife and mother versus that of writer, the role of patriarchy in defining everything that women are or have been, and the ubiquity of violence in their neighborhood and how it even manifests itself through the dialect.

Through all of this, Lila remains the intelligent dropout who is detached and hard, relying on Elena for vicarious success. Elena lives as if she were living partly for Lila, thinking always of Lila’s reaction, of her approval or rejection. Their fidelity to one another feeds itself off their competition and it isn’t till Elena’s husband, Pietro, finally meets Lila and explains to Elena her relationship with Lila:

Pietro shook his head energetically, he explained, surprisingly, that Lila had seemed to him the worst person. He said that she wasn’t at all my friend, that she hated me, that she was extraordinarily intelligent, that she was very fascinating, but her intelligence had been put to bad use—it was the evil intelligence that sows discord and hates life—and her fascination was the more intolerable, the fascination that enslaves and drives a person to ruin.

Yet if Elena didn’t have Lila, she wouldn’t have tried to become what Lila couldn’t.

As with her other novels, Ferrante’s writing does make this seem effortless. It wouldn’t seem that way if weren’t for Goldstein’s translation. Speaking of symbiotic, Goldstein has such a feel for rhythm of Ferrante’s prose that we don’t miss a beat in her cadence. Goldstein also recognizes the directness of Ferrante’s style without becoming melodramatic or heavy-handed. Although the is brutality in the dialect, nothing ever stops or stultifies you because Goldstein has which notes she can strike that will keep the narrative harmonious. Ferrante is lucky to have the loyalty of Goldstein!

Besides all the accolades given to her writing, her skill and her consistency, the media still can’t quite believe in her existence. Ferrante is reclusive. Yet because she doesn’t show herself in public and because she can write violent scenes, some have actually contended that she is a man. What woman could possibly write of violence and brutality so openly? There is nothing that makes me angrier than when mostly male critics doubting the art of a woman. If Mailer was allowed to write sex scenes than Ferrante can write violence. Putting the obvious reasons of craft and success aside of both writer and translator, what other author in the longlist has been accused of being a man because she writes so well?

Why This Book Should Win – 1914 by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 15:11:27 +0000

Monica Carter is a writer and freelance critic.

– Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, (France)
The New Press

Jean Echenoz’s novel, 1914, delivers the punch of a heavyweight yet moves with the speed of a flyweight. In fewer than 120 pages, Echenoz gives us the exhausting thirteen rounder full of power and finesse, each word making an impact, their total making a lasting impression on the reader. Like a well-trained fighter, Echenoz’s prose is spare, lean, not an inch of fat to be found – only the muscle of self-discipline can be seen.

1914 is his version of the requisite war novel for men of a certain age, or plainly, the stories of five young men sent off to be ravaged by the horrors of World War 1. The novel begins quietly enough with a detailed description of the idyllic countryside as the twenty-four year old protagonist, Anthime Sèze, cycles through it to the top of the hill as he surveys his town below. Then, from the distance, “up in those church towers, the bells had in fact begun tolling all together, ringing out in a somber, heavy and threatening disorder in which Anthime, although still too young to have attended many funerals, instinctively recognized the timbre of the tocsin, rung only rarely, the image of which had reached him separately before its sound.” Thus, war begins. Anthime, his older brother Charles, Padioleau, Bossis, and Arcenal – his “café comrades” – don their ill-fitting uniforms as if in a game of dress-up, boot through town amidst parade fanfare, wave and smile as they march off to one of the worst wars in world history.

With that set-up, a reader would expect a 600-page novel. Yet, this is where Echenoz’s mastery of language shows what brevity can do. The Echenoz brand of wit is subdued while his detached, meticulous eye for detail lets us in to every scene as if he and the reader were watching everything unfold through high-powered binoculars. Echenoz’s details are hypnotizing, seemingly innocuous at first, almost wasteful, but when the scenes of war appear, that same eye for detail makes you wince, want to look away from the image in your mind that he has created.

Then you turn the page and encounter one of his devastating conclusions about war:

The sweat from fatigue and fear, take off the greatcoats to work more freely, and might hang them on an arm sticking out of the tumbled soil, using it as a coat tree.

All this has been described a thousand times, so perhaps it’s not worthwhile to linger any longer over that sordid stinking opera. And perhaps there’s not much point either in comparing the war to an opera, especially since no one cares a lot about opera, even if the war is operatically grandiose, exaggerated, excessive, full of longueurs, makes a great deal of noise and is often, in the end, rather boring.

It’s true; we know it all to well – the death and destruction of war. With the centennial anniversary of World War 1 and the focus on its literature, Echenoz confidently creates an intense, gripping narrative that is just as heartbreaking as first person accounts from soldiers who actually fought in it. Equally important and no less creative is Linda Coverdale’s translation. When a novel such as this is translated, it requires a translator who can rewrite the novel with the same economy of prose and richness in description. Coverdale’s ability to remain so loyal to Echenoz’s style and tone feels effortless, which makes the translator all the more gifted. Also, Coverdale’s notes at the end of the text are fantastic. She tells you the historical context of a reference as well as the exact phrase to google to see a particle painting Echenoz is referring to or what the soldier’s rations looked like.

1914 should win the Best Translated Book Award because it has all the marks of an epic but is scarcely over one hundred pages. To create that kind of emotional depth of character and expansive narrative is more challenging to do in fewer pages than when a writer is allowed five hundred-plus pages. It should win because it takes World War 1, a much written about topic, and makes the distillation of Anthime represent the horrible damage that any war does to a soldier. It should win because the novel wouldn’t have the significance that it does have without the superb translation of Linda Coverdale. It should win because the message is too important to ignore – even if it’s a beautiful day out, we still carry the possibility of war within ourselves.

Why This Book Should Win – Last Words from Montmartre by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 10:12:58 +0000

Monica Carter is a writer and freelance critic.

– By Qiu Miaojin, Translated by Ari Larissa Heinrich
NYRB

Last Words from Montmartre is a loaded piece of work before you ever begin reading it. Qiu Miaojin, the young Taiwanese lesbian writer, committed suicide at the age of twenty-six before it was published, before it became “a bible for lesbians” in Taiwan and before her first novel, Notes of a Crocodile, won the esteemed China Times Honorary Award for Literature. The dramatic way she lived and ended her life does not overshadow this novel, but becomes an intense, self-examined manifestation of how desperately she wanted to engage in it.

Yes, as it begins, it may seem to be the paragon of the break-up novel with page after page of incriminations, recriminations, pleading, apologizing, proselytizing, and declaring. Will writer and reader both make it through this emotional excoriation? Yes because Qiu quickly and deftly makes this epistolary novel explore places emotionally and intellectually she’s been to, hold them up to the light and examine them no matter how much it hurts her or us. Last Words from Montmartre is not about these experiences, it is these experiences: being left to sob on the floor as your lover walks out the door, the harrowing pursuit of artistic expression, and the torturous yearning endured at cross-section of sex and desire. Yet, it is also so much more.

“My purity is comprised of my physical body, my soul, and my whole life, and I’ve never given this ‘purity’—as unblemished as a piece of white jade—to anyone but you.”

This is a novel of self-revelation. Composed of twenty letters, don’t take Last Words as if you’re reading someone’s letters to an ex-lover. You are reading an artist fighting for her life albeit with the awareness and control to use novelistic elements. A master of controlled inner chaos, Qiu instructs the reader before she begins that the letters, which are numbered, do not need to be read in order. This is true, they don’t. Yet since Qiu also hints at her own suicide in her dedication, there’s no pull to begin anywhere – one wants to start where she wanted the story to begin. The letters cover the gamut of emotions, but the purity of her passion is tempered the self-consciousness of a novelist. These letters are for you, the universal reader, the one ‘out there,’ not for her lover to whom they are never sent.

“Sincerity, courage, and honesty will deliver humanity. I’ve realized this since coming to France. With sincerity, courage, and honesty, one can face death, extreme physical pain, and even extreme psychological pain. One can resist persecution from individuals, society, or government. To live in preparation of adversity and finding ways to preserve your core values—this is what it means to learn ‘how to live.’”

This is a political novel. By the sheer act of honesty in her writing, Qiu was a political writer. Both of Qiu’s novels, as Qiu herself, are treasures and guides for the Taiwanese queer community. She did not want to be invisible, as the government prefers of their queer population; she wanted to be heard and seen as an artist and her sexual identity was inextricably threaded through her works. Compartmentalizing parts of herself would have only meant compromise as an artist—and lack of purity. This is precisely why Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation is so skillful because he is able to understand Qiu as an artist, including all her tiny nuances, and her importance as an artistic figure, which he so aptly addresses in his Afterword.

“Because I have a fatal, mortal, terminal passion for you. Ultimately I have no choice but death: an unconditional allegiance, an eternal bond to you. (The ultimate rule of desire/eros is this: At their peak, ‘sexual desire’ [erotic desire], ‘desire for love’ [romantic longing], and ‘desire for death’ [the death wish] are all the same.)

This is a novel of passion: the passion to love, to understand, to know, to express, to connect, to live and to die with reason. When these desires are placed in the hands of someone as youthful and sensitive as Qiu, it creates organized chaos, a one-woman show, live on the pages in front of us, making us feel uncomfortable that it is all slightly too real. Yet anxious as she may make us feel, Qiu mining herself on so many levels for the purity and honesty of art commands our respect, our admiration. As readers, when a writer lays bare for us with such brutal honesty, truth will always be what we see.

Qiu gave her life for art, desire and love. This isn’t a book of love letters or a book of suicide notes; its a testament to the power of artistic courage in the face of pain, misery and isolation. Last Words from Montmartre deserves to win because of what it represents for Taiwan’s queer history, what it represents for truth in literature and what it represents for those who have loved and lost.

The Fringe Elements by BTBA Judge Monica Carter

Monica Carter — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 10:00:00 +0000

Monica Carter is a freelance critic.

Discerning how one should approach a written work for translation is a challenging task. The approach of some publishers is to accept the writer’s work as is, with no editorial input, which means the translation is as close to the original text as it can be, disregarding cultural, historical, or stylistic choices a translator might make to ameliorate the text for the proposed audience (for the sake of this post, an English-speaking readership). Another approach is to take into account the work’s historical and cultural references, weigh their importance, and interpret those for the reader. If the translator is allowed to work more liberally with the original text, that creative license allows her to be truer to the overall tone and rhythm of the original. Chad Post and Tom Roberge have an interesting discussion about this on the recent Three Percent podcast.

Although it is admirable to hold the words of an author in such high esteem that the translator must produce a copy verbatim, it’s impossible in so doing to capture an author’s cultural, historical, and/or stylistic intent for a different readership. This point seems clearest with fiction that dwells closer to the fringe than the mainstream. Fiction that is experimental, transgressive, surrealist, fabulist, folkloric, or geographically charged with a storied political history cannot rely on a word-by-word translation if the goal, as it is in this case, is to introduce and engage an English-speaking reader. The translator must decide how to provide a context for the that readership and how much detail is necessary for the reader’s understanding of the text and what the author is trying to do.

As the judges near the end of the decision-making process for the BTBA longlist, it felt important to give praise to a few titles that are extremely well-written and translated to as close to perfection as possible. All are boundary-pushing titles in their own way. They have had little mainstream coverage but deserve it. Challenging the English-speaking readership shouldn’t be done quietly or timidly; it should be done loudly and often. The ideas these three titles contain speak to the difficulties we face in the world today in a new and exciting way.

by Dorothy Tse, Translated by Nicky Harman
Muse Publishing

There are a few short story collections floating around the BTBA longlist discussion, but for my money Dorothy Tse’s collection is by far one of the most captivating, original, and intriguing that I’ve read this year or in the past few years. Tse is a Hong Kong writer who writes mostly in Chinese and readily admits that her writing is never an act “that naturally brings one to the theme of nationality or cultural tradition.” Yet without Nicky Harman’s superb translation, Tse’s style of measured detachment and meticulous prose might be lost. Yet the reader is skillfully led into her surreal worlds, steeped in magical realism and tinged with fabulism. Whether it’s a woman turning into a fish in “Woman Fish,” the ultimate story of psychological gaslighting between wife and husband (“Black Cat City”), or “The Mute Door” about a building where the tenants are in constant search for their own front doors, it’s Tse’s confidence that lures the reader forward, introducing the grotesque, the absurd, and the scatological with such a deft hand and direct style that the reader never feels deceived or that the writer is using any of the surreal twists as a mere conceit.

There’s the feeling of crowded urbanity in most of her stories, the lingering impermanence of reality, and phantasmagorical imagery that offsets the emotionally charged topics of abortion, loss and incest. In “Bed,” a sleep-deprived young girl shares a bed with her father and her older sister and expresses her feelings in a nightmare:

“She pulled back the mound of bedding and discovered her father and her big sister had taken up the whole bed. But they seemed not to need those brightly colored pajamas anymore. They were completely naked and tightly embraced, their fingernails dug deeply into the skin of each other’s back. They seemed fast asleep, curled together like a pair of fetuses. No matter how hard the girl tried, she could not pull them apart, and they were too heavy to push out of bed. The girl just had to sit on the floor, listening all night long to her father and sister emitting low groans like an insect makes just before it pupates and the sound is cut off midstream. The air seemed full of butter about to precipitate, stiflingly hot.”

Many of Tse’s stories seem horrific, but her character’s responses are relatable and often touching. The environment and parameters of each story may appear eerie and bleak, but there is always an empathic underpinning that simmers below the surface. The characters are not intentionally evil; they are the damaged creating their own worlds to inhabit. As in the opening of “Mute Door,” Tse offers an allegorical answer for the reader and her characters:

“Among all the doors I have come across, it is only the invisible doors of the mime artists that capture the essence of the door. Whether in streets occupied by the language of colonizers or in a red square in the month of June, mime artists can always silently create a house that is theirs alone. All that is needed is a pair of hands and a posture that implies the actor walking close to a wall, and an enclosure instantaneously appears and spins. No groundwork is necessary for a house like that, no foundation on rock—this house is built from the poetry of the body and the mystery of bones and flesh in motion. The room has no boundaries, nor does it have cracks to let anyone in. It dawns on the audience that a door is no more than a fish slipping constantly out of their grasp. One of the sayings of mime artists is, ‘A door is not outside of you.’”

In Snow and Shadow, Tse opens a door for the reader to experience worlds she doesn’t know, but the emotions Tse elicits are familiar. Each story raises provocative questions. Many short story collections can dazzle and amuse, but it is the mark of a quality collection that it also makes one think.

by Josef Winkler, Translated by Adrian West
Contra Mundum Press

With proponents such as Elfriede Jelinek and Thomas Bernhard, it’s difficult to understand why Josef Winkler hasn’t garnered more of an English-speaking audience. He’s won many literary prizes in Germany and his native Austria, including the Alfred Döblin Prize for his novella, Natura Morta, in 2001. Winkler hasn’t had many works translated into English but thankfully, that seems to be changing with the release of in 2013, Natura Morta in 2014 and Graveyard of Bitter Oranges in 2015, both by Contra Mundum Press and translated by Adrian West.

In Natura Morta, a novella that reads like a demonic script version of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin directed by Michael Haneke, Winkler stays true to his themes of Catholicism, homoeroticism and death. In just over ninety pages, his indefatigable sensory detail pulses and throbs, rots and stinks, foams and drips, sweats and sticks so that the reader cannot escape the suffocating reality of the Roman marketplace, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele. Natura Morta is fragmented, visceral, primordial—a work that uses endless imagery, mostly Catholic iconography, and the sexuality of a teenage boy to dramatize the moral psychomachy of our modern day world. In these snapshots of the marketplace, Winkler chooses Piccoletto, the fig vendor’s son, as the Christ-like object of sexual desire for men and women, desire that subtly buoys the character’s own sense of power:

“One of the girls, folding her hands behind the nape of her neck, turned her head toward the two young men and bit her upper lip coquettishly. The girl tore a piece of fabric, pressed the scrap against her lips, which were smeared with red lipstick, and threw it in the branches of the pine tree. The two boys fetched the lipstick-streaked cloth from the tree and, each snatching the scrap from the other’s hands, pressed it against their noses. One of the bathroom attendants in the park of Piazza San Vittorio, nibbling a green fig, worked a crossword puzzle while the other sank herself deep into the liberally illustrated crime reportage of the Cronaca vera. In exasperation, a gecko dodged the black ants with red heads over the sun-drenched walls of the market bathrooms, trying frantically to return to his niche, which had just been plastered over by a bricklayer. Near the entrance to the market bathrooms, Piccoletto pulled a splinter from the elbow of the alimentari owner’s son and smeared his spit over his friend’s wound.”

With Winkler’s use of repetition, imagery and inference, Natura Morta had to be masterfully translated in order to stay true to the essence of Winkler’s work while also conveying the tone of each fragment and the importance of each image that buttresses the book’s conclusion.

Winkler, like Tse, doesn’t go in for plot. He’s internal and reactionary, in a way, writing his way around those provocative questions that continue to mystify him, anger him, or shackle him. Yet, these are the questions that matter, the questions that should be asked but are too often ignored by many writers. I look forward to Winkler’s next exploration of the world we live in and the hypocrisy of it.

by Bogdan Suceavă, Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
Twisted Spoon Press

Out of the three books out on the fringe, Miruna, A Tale, is the most accessible. It has a plot, a traditional structure and a few main characters that drive the story. What makes this book more challenging and enjoyable is that it harkens back to the adult fairy tale. Set in Evil Vale, a small hamlet in Southern Romania, Miruna, A Tale is actually many tales woven together and retold by Niculae Berca to his two grandchildren, a seven year-old boy named Trajan and a six year-old girl named Miruna. It’s an older version of the latter child who narrates the book. Most of the stories center around Trajan’s and Miruna’s great-grandfather, the seemingly mythical Constantine Berca, and his archetypal village mates Father Dimitrie, Old Woman Fira the fortune teller, and Oarță Aman, a bandit who robs the rich on their way to Bucharest.

The oral storytelling tradition is so vibrant that it doesn’t take much for the reader to feel herself sitting by the fire listening to Trajan relay the long ago stories of Old Woman Fira’s exorcism for witchcraft by Father Dimitrie, or how Niculae the Welldigger found a water source on a barren hill, or that the ghost of Oarță carved crosses on the faces of Germans during World War I. Many of these fables have a basis in truth or involve an historical element, but Blyth does well not to call attention to these events. There are notes at the end of the text, but they are not numbered or italicized within it; the reader never feels the heavy hand of the translator pointing out the importance of something that the reader might not find necessary to know.

The young Miruna is the heir apparent as keeper of the tales, and over three summers, her grandfather’s stories grew more complex and detailed until “Miruna eventually [comes] to conceive the world in the form of a fairy tale, living for years in a world full of the fantastical, which gave her the air of being a child prodigy, one of those who know something of history and geography before they even start attending school but cannot say for sure if King Carol and Prâslea lived at the same time or before one another.”

Even as some of the tales are magical or enchanting, sounding like a postcard from the rural hills of Romania, where “the fays lifted him up by the arms, as if he, the giant of Evil Vale, were light as a snowflake, and they bore him toward the palace of crystal and porphyry,” they’re still serious in tone, planting the seeds of the Russo-Turkish War and World War I and stressing the geographical isolation of the village.

This book is a bewitching tribute to the Balkan tradition of oral storytelling and to Suceavă’s loyalty to the traditional culture of his grandparent’s small town in the Carpathians. Paired with Blyth’s vivid translation, this is work that hopefully will be passed on as many times as the stories within.