nick caistor – Three Percent

There Are Worse Timelines [An April 2020—Is It Still 2020?—Reading Journal]

Chad Post — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 15:00:28 +0000

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

—Andrés Neuman,��Fracture

Is this thing on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHOULD we even be marketing right now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, oh, how times have changed!

Sort of.

#QuarantineBody

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WELL!

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

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

Four by Four is the second of Sara Mesa’s novels to appear in English (the first being Scar, which came out a couple years ago from Dalkey Archive Press, and which I highly��recommend). It’s a novel about power structures and how they’re abused. Ģ��ý the dangers of walling yourself off for the sake of protection. Of a private school where very sinister things happen. Of a pompous, annoying wannabe writer who impersonates a teacher to get into this school and spends his days trying to unravel what is actually going on there. It’s a sly novel, where a lot of key moments take place off-screen, so to speak. It functions like a mystery novel, requiring the reader to pay attention to subtle clues that reside beneath Sara Mesa/Katie Whittemore’s cool, precise prose. It’s a novel that—when you finish—you’ll be thinking about for months.

And it seems incredibly timely. (A bookseller told me it was the “quarantine book that readers need right now”.) I’ll let Katie and Sara talk about this though (from a forthcoming interview on Lit Hub):

Katie Whittemore: Thinking about power and how it is expressed, where it resides, let’s turn to Four by Four specifically. I first read the book in 2018, and at the time, there was a great deal of attention in the U.S. media on the situation of undocumented children being separated from their parents at the border and housed in cage-like facilities. That resonated really sharply for me, as I wrote you in one of our first email exchanges. The novel felt so timely—power and subjugation, language as wielded by the powerful to shape reality, disregard for the humanity of someone weaker. More recently, as I was translating the novel, I followed the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, with its horror stories of sex trafficking of underage girls passed around among a cohort of powerful men, and I thought, wow, okay, Four by Four is really timely in this way, as well. Now—as we write—two-thirds of the world is confined at home and normal life has been suspended, all in an effort to protect ourselves and others from an outside danger—a virus, in this case—and this seems so timely as well: the idea that we can somehow remove ourselves from danger, safeguard ourselves against the threat “outside,” as well as the anxiety about whether something even more destructive is produced when we retreat and build walls to protect the places we deem safe. What is it about the themes present in Four by Four that seem so continually resonant with “current affairs”? It was published in 2012—almost a decade ago—but it reads as so continually relevant.

Sara Mesa: Honestly, this is the best praise someone could give one of my books: its adaptability, flexibility, the capacity to open itself up to the outside and take in distinct moments��Ի��societies. I think this happens to the extent that when I write, I don’t think about anything in particular, or at least not about anything that’s happening outside. I don’t write with��regard to the present moment, to what’s topical. That would be really hard��for me to do (I actually have to confess that I don’t really pay close attention to current affairs). If my work��is political (and I believe it is), it’s political in that other way we’ve discussed. And I’m not really worried about whether or not readers find��my books wanting on the level of��composition, style, etc. I’m not worried about whether or not they think my books are beautiful or sublime. The worst thing that can happen to a book is for it to sound obsolete, to be��read only with archeological curiosity.��Kafka always sounds contemporary, even though his books were written a century ago. For me, this is the grand goal, but I’m happy with the��fact that my books manage to survive a decade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THIS.

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

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

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

“The Things We Don’t Do” by Andrés Neuman [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 19:00:00 +0000

This entry in the Why This Book Should Win series is by Tiffany Nichols, who will start her Ph.D. studies this upcoming fall and is a contributor at to Three Percent. We will be running two (or more!) of these posts every business day leading up to the announcement of the finalists.

by Andrés Neuman, translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia (Argentina, Open Letter)

My first rather obvious reason as to why The Things We Don’t Do should win the Best Translated Book Award relies on the prestige already gained by Andrés Neuman. Neuman was introduced to the English-speaking audience with Traveler of the Century, a work which I personally believe is the War and Peace of the twenty-first Century. As Jeremy Garber points out in his Three Percent review of the work, Neuman “has been celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, having attracted a number of prestigious awards.” Further, Neuman was celebrated by Roberto Bolaño (in verified print— Between Parentheses). In discussing Neuman’s first novel, Bolaño states:

In it, good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature, the kind written by real poets, a literature that dares to venture into the dark with open eyes and that keeps its eyes open no matter what. In principle, this is the most difficult test (also the most difficult exercise and stretch) and on no few occasions Neuman pulls it off with frightening ease. . . When I come across these young writers it makes me want to cry. I don’t know what the future holds for them. I don’t know whether a drunk driver will run them down some night or whether all of a sudden they’ll stop writing. If nothing like that happens, the literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman and a few of his blood brothers.

Personally, I believe we can drop the mic here as to why Neuman should win the BTBA. Namely, (1) Neuman is still writing, and (2) Neuman has assumed a position of literary prestige in the Spanish-speaking world (and the English-speaking world)—All of Bolaño’s criteria having been met. . .

Most works of literature stay with us for a short period of time upon completion. However, there are a select few that sneak into our thoughts weeks and months (even years) after completion. These works are challenging and thought-provoking not only during the act of reading, but also appear in one’s thoughts without provocation when the mind is busy handling our daily lives because the subconscious needs time to make its own assessment of the work within the greater context of time and the reader’s own identity. The Things We Don’t Do (along with his other works) is one of such work. Neuman’s aforementioned prestige and now his ability to write literature with staying power—the case is building for a winner.

Focusing on the work itself, The Things We Don’t Do is divided into five parts, which appear to be based on thematic similarities between the short stories in their respective sections ending with a section containing clever aphorisms on writing within the short story form. The strength of the collection lies in Neuman’s ability to craft short stories covering topics, on which people remain silent or often forget completely while carrying out their day-to-day activites. These topics range from terminal illness to suicide to the contents of hotel guest books to experiences of sex intertwined with birth and the clues one can observe from a clothes line.

True to this established style, Neuman places observations that are so globally ubiquitous that anyone could engage with his work as if there was a direct channel between the reader and the work. These observations are so simple and stated with such finesse that any reader will be forced to provide his/her undivided attention to the work. Examples (absent context) include:

. . . [I]n today’s session he declared that people born in the ‘70s are orphans through excess. That is to say, a generation that feels unprotected due to its parents’ overprotectiveness.

Ariel was, so to speak, a classically envious person. And, like all people of his kind, his fury turned against his own interests and slowly ate away what little happiness he had.

. . . [M]y male neighbor on the third floor, who takes the trouble to sort out his washing by size, type, and color. Never a shirt next to a hand towel. He lives alone. I am not surprised. How can anyone possibly sleep with someone unable to trust in the hospitality of chance? No doubt about it, my obsessive neighbor is a master of camouflage.

Scattered through the entire collection, the reader will also stumble across clever mind games, which add to the intrigue of the work as a whole and demanding the reader’s attention (and later that of the reader’s subconscious) despite the deceivingly simple and unencumbered prose. Further, Neuman’s playfulness when it comes to these mind games, result in a work that becomes quite endearing to the reader without a scintilla of kitschiness. In addition, each story starts from a point of zero and flourishes into concepts that cannot be predicted or sensed until they occur, amplifying the suspense which is often laking from a short story collection. As Neuman himself states:

The extreme freedom of a book of short stories derives from the possibility of starting from zero each time. To demand unity from it is like padlocking the laboratory.

Turning to the end of the work, the last section of Things We Don’t Do is comprised of series of statements—not meant to be “dogmatic poetics” but are “happy to contradict each other”—serving as an enjoyable reference pertaining to the art of writing short stories. The section’s placement serves as a dare to the reader to apply the preceding stories to the statements to test whether the collection passes muster which can only come from an author who is aware of not only his craft, abilities, comfort with language, and peers, but also one who understands what came before and what will come after. To contain such a dare in one’s work is yet another reason why The Things We Don’t Do should win.

In closing, just as Patti Smith carried Albertine Sarrazin’s Astragal throughout the world in a small metal suitcase, I have done the same with The Things We Don’t Do (albeit, a generic polyester Samsonite suitcase). Like Astragal for Patti Smith, The Things We Don’t Do has become a “trove of bittersweet memories” probably because The Things We Don’t Do is “a book [that] tells me something I was trying to say, I feel the right to appropriate its words, as if they had once belonged to me and I were taking them back.” I rest my case as to why this book should win.

(It should also be noted that The COOP at Harvard University believes that The Things We Don’t Do is a perfect alternative to doing your homework. So you do not have to take my word for it.)

Latest Review: "The Things We Don't Do" by Andrés Neuman

Kaija Straumanis — Fri, 06 Nov 2015 19:00:00 +0000

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by Tiffany Nichols on The Things We Don’t Do by Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, and published by Open Letter Books.

Here’s a part of of Tiffany’s review:

Many authors are compared to Roberto Bolaño. However, very few authors have the privilege of having a Roberto Bolaño quote on the cover of their work; and at that, one which states, “Good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature.” You will find this on the covers of Andres Neuman’s works. In addition, Music & Literature claims “Neuman has transcended the boundaries of geography, time, and language to become one of the most significant writers of the early twenty-first century.” Based on Neuman’s introduction to the English-speaking audience with his novel Traveler of a Century_—which I still personally believe is our modern-day _War and Peace or Anna Karenina_—I find absolute truth in the quotes from both Roberto Bolaño and _M&L.

The Things We Don’t Do_—Neuman’s latest work in English translation—does not disappoint. Admittedly, I was very reluctant to shift to a male author in the midst of my Elena Ferrante and Clarice Lispector binge. However, I was quickly reminded of why one should read Neuman. Neuman’s work consists of the combination of the reasons you should read Elena Ferrante and Clarice Lispector with the caveat being that Neuman’s talent is in his ability to capture the voices of all genders, ages, and backgrounds in his works while bringing sparse language to a new level. As _M&L said, Neuman transcends time, but also literary history and talent.

For the rest of the review, go here.

The Things We Don't Do

Kaija Straumanis — Fri, 06 Nov 2015 19:00:00 +0000

Many authors are compared to Roberto Bolaño. However, very few authors have the privilege of having a Roberto Bolaño quote on the cover of their work; and at that, one which states, “Good readers will find something that can be found only in great literature.” You will find this on the covers of Andres Neuman’s works. In addition, Music & Literature claims “Neuman has transcended the boundaries of geography, time, and language to become one of the most significant writers of the early twenty-first century.” Based on Neuman’s introduction to the English-speaking audience with his novel Traveler of a Century —which I still personally believe is our modern-day War and Peace or Anna Karenina —I find absolute truth in the quotes from both Roberto Bolaño and M&L.

The Things We Don’t Do —Neuman’s latest work in English translation—does not disappoint. Admittedly, I was very reluctant to shift to a male author in the midst of my Elena Ferrante and Clarice Lispector binge. However, I was quickly reminded of why one should read Neuman. Neuman’s work consists of the combination of the reasons you should read Elena Ferrante and Clarice Lispector with the caveat being that Neuman’s talent is in his ability to capture the voices of all genders, ages, and backgrounds in his works while bringing sparse language to a new level. As M&L said, Neuman transcends time, but also literary history and talent.

The Things We Don’t Do is divided into four parts, which appear to be based on thematic similarities between the short stories in their respective sections, and ending with a section containing clever aphorisms on writing within the short story form. The strength of the collection lies in Neuman’s ability to craft short stories covering topics, on which people remain silent or which they often forget completely. These topics range from terminal illness to suicide to the contents of hotel guest-books, to experiences of sex intertwined with birth and the information one can learn from a clothesline. The collection is also quite compelling due to Neuman’s playfulness when it comes to mind games, which are scattered throughout the entire collection. Each story starts from zero, embellishing the suspense of the collection as a whole and causing the reader to finish reading the work in one sitting. As Neuman himself states:

The extreme freedom of a book of short stories derives from the possibility of starting from zero each time. To demand unity from it is like padlocking the laboratory.

Perhaps the most notable short story was “The Innocence Test” because of its relevance to the discourse focused on police power-limitations, which now is front and center in the news cycle. The story starts with a protagonist proclaiming:

Yes, I like it that the police question me. We all need someone to confirm to us that we truly are good citizens. That we are innocent. That we have nothing to hide.

Right away, the reader is left to wonder what sane person would ever make such a statement. As one can guess, the tale quickly shifts into the murkiness of police power in situations where there is no threat and instead only mere suspicion and unchecked power on the part of the government. The story is timeless, yet relevant at the same time. As the future approaches, each story in this collection will have only its relevance in relation to discourses of the time as it moves forward into the future.

The last section of The Things We Don’t Do is comprised of a series of statements—not meant to be “dogmatic poetics” but are “happy to contradict each other”—serving as an enjoyable reference on the art of writing short stories. The section’s placement serves as a dare to the reader to apply the preceding stories to the statements as a test of whether the collection passes a muster that can only come from an author who is aware of his language, his peers, and what came before and what will come after.

Another Important Open Letter Book: "The Things We Don't Do" by Andrés Neuman

Chad Post — Fri, 23 Oct 2015 16:02:26 +0000

Back in September, when first came out, we were going to release the video below as a trailer. That didn’t end up happening, but seeing that we’re less than 100 copies away from selling out the first printing of the book, it seems like as good a time as any to share this fantastic piece.

The video was made by Lucía Martínez and the Spanish version originally made the Internet rounds some time ago, but this version features the final text in Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia’s translations, which is available at better bookstores everywhere.

Enjoy and share with others!

from on .

The Lasting Impact of Bolaño's Quotes [3 Books]

Chad Post — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 18:19:45 +0000

After a couple weeks of touring and hosting events, I finally have time to get back to my “weekly” write-ups of new and forthcoming books. Last time I talked about a couple Indonesian titles one of which, Home by Leila Chudori, I’m greatly enjoying. I also complained about school starting before Labor Day, arguing that that should be illegal. Well, guess what? In Michigan it is! This is why the Midwest rules.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, to the happy stuff!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why This Book Should Win – Talking to Ourselves by BTBA Judge Jeremy Garber

Monica Carter — Wed, 22 Apr 2015 11:20:58 +0000

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for and also a freelance reviewer.

– Andrés Neuman, Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, Argentina
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Perhaps the question shouldn’t be why Andrés Neuman’s Talking to Ourselves deserves to win this year’s Best Translated Book Award – but why it doesn’t. That would be a silly query, however, as Neuman’s novel is an outstanding accomplishment in every regard. Despite being a mere 150 pages, Talking to Ourselves offers a rich and rewarding reading experience the likes of which are difficult to discover in a book two or three times its length.

Neuman, born in 1977 in Buenos Aires, has already garnered international acclaim and a number of prestigious awards (including the Alfaguara Prize and Spain’s National Critics Prize). When he was merely 22, Neuman’s debut novel, Bariloche (as yet untranslated into English), was the only finalist for the Herralde Prize – losing out to Marcos Giralt Torrente’s (coincidentally, a fellow longlist title for this year’s BTBA). Neuman likely first garnered the attention of English readers via the effusive praise of the late Roberto Bolaño.

The Chilean’s claims rang more than true when Neuman’s spectacular was published in English translation in 2012. Traveler of the Century, a nearly 600-page epic of beauty, wonder, politics, poetry, love, and translation, could not be more dissimilar from Talking to Ourselves. In fact, it’s marvelous to think that these two exceptional books were even written by the same hand (or imagination, for that matter). Whereas Traveler of the Century was a weighty novel of ideas, Talking to Ourselves is a succinct look at illness, loss, literature, and familial bonds.

Writing in the voices of three disparate, but unifying characters (a wife/mother, husband/father, and their 10-year old son), Neuman captures the individual personalities and nuances of the trio with impressive dexterity. As father and son embark on what may well be their last journey together (on account of the elder’s terminal cancer), each of three characters strives to share their innermost thoughts – at least with themselves, if unable to do so with one another.

While Talking to Ourselves is a doleful work of fiction, it radiates a warmth and authenticity that is entirely compelling. Both Neuman’s lustrous prose and his keen insights into the inner world of the individual (and, ultimately, the questions of life, love, and death itself) meld with his natural gift for storytelling – resulting in a novel that is so beautiful, so sad, so brilliant, that one cannot imagine a single sentence out of place. It’s simply that good.

Talking to Ourselves was the very first book I read in 2014 and 51 weeks later, there wasn’t another title that had moved or captivated me so entirely. Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia’s translation reads fluidly and their efforts in rendering three distinct voices is in and of itself a merited accomplishment. Andrés Neuman writes gracefully and his compassion, intellect, and sheer love of storytelling are evident on every page. Talking to Ourselves deserves to win this year’s Best Translated Book Award, perhaps most of all because it does everything masterful fiction ought to: it dazzles with prose, affects our minds, touches our hearts, and, not least, reminds as that the stories we may think are ours alone are, in fact, the same the world over.

…a question only kids ask themselves for real, and then we sick people ask it again: is it okay to lie?, is it okay to be lied to?, a healthy grown-up won’t even give it a thought, the answer seems obvious, right?, we learn to tell lies the same way we learn to talk, they teach us how to talk and then how to be quiet, I don’t know, like when you play football, for example, first you kick the ball and then, unless you’re stupid, you learn not to kick it, to move around tricking the other players, kids lie too, of course, I lied all the time when I was a kid, but, what I’m saying is, until you get to a certain age, you think it’s wrong, that is the difference, I don’t think we grown-ups are any worse, you know?, every kid contains the beginnings of a possible son of a bitch, this much I know, it’s just that kids, and perhaps we adults are to blame for this, start by dividing the world into good and evil, truth and lies, the only time it’s okay for them to lie is when they’re playing, then it’s allowed, so kids become grown-ups when they play, sort of the opposite of us parents, we play so we can be kids again, well, and then you grow up, and you lie and are lied to, and it isn’t wrong, until one day, when you’re sick, you begin to worry again about lies, you worry about them every time you talk to the doctors, your wife, your family, it’s not a moral question, it’s, I don’t know, something physical, deep down you’re scared stiff of the truth, but the idea of dying with a lie scares you even more, lies help us to carry on living, don’t they?, and when you know you aren’t going to carry on, you feel they’re no use anymore, do you know what I mean?

Latest Review: "The History of Silence" by Pedro Zarraluki

Kaija Straumanis — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 14:00:00 +0000

The latest addition to our Reviews section is by P. T. Smith on The History of Silence by Pedro Zarraluki, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia, and published by Hispabooks Publishing.

Here’s the beginning of Patrick’s review:

Pedro Zarraluki’s The History of Silence (trans. Nick Caistor and Lorenza García) begins with the narrator and his wife, Irene, setting out to write a book about silence, itself called The History of Silence: “This is the story of how a book that should have been called The History of Silence never came to be written. Although common, failure is not easy to explain.” I prepared for a self-aware, post-modern, and concept-heavy work. While Zarraluki never abandons his exploration of silence, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The narrator and Irene dive into the philosophies of silence, into religious ideas, into odd experiments with it, but this is a novel about relationships, about complicated, emotional, thoughtful, sexual people. Zarraluki creates whole, original characters in the brush of a couple sentences, builds their relationships with the others, and then plays out all the shades of those human interactions. It’s in the midst of that, of what people say and don’t say to each other, in the way things are said and the silence behind words, that the history of silence is uncovered.

When the pair are focused on their work of silence, they experiment and run tests—they try to not speak to each other for a week; Irene collects photos of loud events and posts them all over the apartment, till it drives their housekeeper to panic at the intensity of them. They push the boundaries of silence as they and their friends push the boundaries of relationships. The History of Silence begins in the intimacy of a single couple, moves to the intimacy that couple shares with their group of friends, and from there to the individual lines between each and every one in the group. It isn’t elaborate, it isn’t a complicated step-by-step move around the group, but a work of finesse.

Go here for the rest of the review.

The History of Silence

Kaija Straumanis — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 14:00:00 +0000

Pedro Zarraluki’s The History of Silence (trans. Nick Caistor and Lorenza García) begins with the narrator and his wife, Irene, setting out to write a book about silence, itself called The History of Silence: “This is the story of how a book that should have been called The History of Silence never came to be written. Although common, failure is not easy to explain.” I prepared for a self-aware, post-modern, and concept-heavy work. While Zarraluki never abandons his exploration of silence, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The narrator and Irene dive into the philosophies of silence, into religious ideas, into odd experiments with it, but this is a novel about relationships, about complicated, emotional, thoughtful, sexual people. Zarraluki creates whole, original characters in the brush of a couple sentences, builds their relationships with the others, and then plays out all the shades of those human interactions. It’s in the midst of that, of what people say and don’t say to each other, in the way things are said and the silence behind words, that the history of silence is uncovered.

When the pair are focused on their work of silence, they experiment and run tests—they try to not speak to each other for a week; Irene collects photos of loud events and posts them all over the apartment, till it drives their housekeeper to panic at the intensity of them. They push the boundaries of silence as they and their friends push the boundaries of relationships. The History of Silence begins in the intimacy of a single couple, moves to the intimacy that couple shares with their group of friends, and from there to the individual lines between each and every one in the group. It isn’t elaborate, it isn’t a complicated step-by-step move around the group, but a work of finesse.

Zarraluki crafts these unique people and relationships by making them just a little odd, without dodging off into the quirky, playful ground. When we meet François and Silvia, the closest friends of Irene and the unnamed narrator, we find: “Another of their habits (a result of their first) was never to arrive together. They preferred to bump into one another, in an eternal re-enactment of their first meeting in that bygone Paris café.” From there, I understand something of them, and start to glimpse the outline of what I don’t know. Even more, from all these perceptive insights into those the narrator cares about, I see that for all he hardly speaks to them, how intimate he is with each of them. His observations are trustworthy, it seems, but there are still lines to be read between, and his flaws, his desire to ignore what he does not want to see, threaten the group, and our trust in him.

This is a book of one great strength: Zarraluki’s breaths of life into his characters, and their relationships, the way one relationship brings one side of a person to dominance while another brings out a different side. This isn’t appreciative of just the way that relationships change and change people, but of the specific vitality of an individual. Of their friend Olga, our narrator says: “She never spoke to more than one person at a time. She used to say that small talk drove her crazy, and she was only interested in people’s secrets.” Part of what makes this group of friends so enjoyable to spend time with is how well they all know each other, and the way they use that to care, even in slight ways, as when Irene displays an unneeded gift because “Silvia got depressed when she bought people the wrong presents.”

Likeable characters can be overrated, but so can unlikeable ones. I imagine that if after finishing History of Silence, a dozen readers were asked to rank characters most likeable to least, those lists would be varied. Those readers likely wouldn’t have the same list at the end of the novel as halfway through. At the same time as we’re getting to know them, Zarraluki puts them through the strains of life. There are events out of their control that change them, as their reactions to those events also do, and they all necessarily react differently, which comes with its own consequences. Any time one member of the group enters a new phase of his personality, it triggers others: in and through relationships, individuals grow into someone slightly altered, and the hope is that those relationships can live in the change.

For the most part, the narrator does not pay specific attention to these changes; there are not moments of pure telling. It is aesthetically graceful, while also one of the silences of the book. Thought it isn’t what dominates the narrator’s and wife’s research, the silences between people are the silences that dominate History of Silence, for health and for pain. They exist in passing moments, in quiet, emotional moments: “Motionless (the inevitable stupid grin on my lips), I thought that one day I might learn to banish my obsessions, or make them real, or at least conceal them from others.” It’s that “inevitably stupid grin” that makes him so necessarily silent, a breath held between two people, before anything else can happen.

Eventually, the silences between the friends, between partners, becomes a betrayal, and the breaking of that silence is something that threatens to destroy the lives they have built. The unsaid preserves relationships and it harms them; Zarraluki’s book unfolds both of those routes, and which one a silence will be, preservational or harmful, is uncertain till it breaks. Along the way it can be one or the other; it can even switch from time to time until the end. The History of Silence does this one thing, this rich manifestation of these people’s lives so well, so beautifully, and in so few pages. It feels as if every aspect of relationships are explored, including one that so many books falter at: sex, sexuality. The History of Silence is one of the most sensual, intimate books I’ve read. The sex is physical, can be simple and rough, it is passionate, but it is also caring, messy, and kind. Let that be a synecdoche for everything else that Zarraluki does with his characters.

Judge Jeremy Garber Shares Two of His Favorites So Far of BTBA 2015

Monica Carter — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 09:34:58 +0000

Jeremy Garber is the events coordinator for and also a freelance reviewer.

With so much reading left to do (as submissions continue to fill our mailboxes daily), a handful of books already stand out as some of the year’s finest original translations. Although it remains to be seen whether any of the below titles will make the longlist cut – let alone one of the ten coveted spots on the shortlist – each is an exceptional book in its own way, deserving of an audience larger than is likely and offering considerable recompense to anyone who affords it their readerly faculties.

Gonçalo Tavares ~

The first volume of Gonçalo Tavares’s remarkable Kingdom series, A Man: Klaus Klump (translated from the Portuguese by Rhett McNeil) is the last of the four to be translated into English (after Jerusalem, Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique, and Joseph Walser’s Machine). Like the others, however, this one explores themes of alienation, brutality, impotency, and power. The slimmest of the four works, Klaus Klump shares an essence with the others while being perhaps the most staccato in story and prose.

Spanning several decades in the lives of a handful of characters, Klaus Klump is set in an unnamed city – beginning amidst an ongoing war and later in the years following the cessation of (armed) conflict. With juxtaposing imagery, stark metaphors, and tight, yet evocative language, Tavares entwines the disorienting horrors of senseless ultra-violence with the psychological detachment of conflict-survival. The intensity of Klaus Klump seems all the more pronounced given how much is omitted from the story – allowing a menace or foreboding to loom throughout.

Neither Klaus Klump nor the rest of the books in the series seek to seemingly do more than show the inconsequentiality, indifference, disposability, and vapidity that so characterize 21st century culture. Klaus Klump (like Ernst Spengler, Lenz Buchmann, and Joseph Walser in the earlier books before him) populates a world where war and commerce function in codependency. Obedience is nearly superfluous, as long as appetites remain insatiable. To serve within such a system, one needn’t resort to nihilism – simply passive resignation will do.

Gonçalo Tavares is an exceptional talent and his writing seems almost limitless in scope (garnering the attention and acclaim of luminaries like the great José Saramago and Enrique Vila-Matas). The Kingdom series (cycle? quartet? tetralogy?) offers a world that could not be more dissimilar to the one found in Tavares’s . One not familiar with the provenance of these respective books would swear they were written by authors possessed of disparate literary tastes and temperaments. That Tavares can move so freely between works exuding terror and dread to those offering humor and charm is quite breathtaking to behold. With poems, short stories, plays, and other fiction as-yet untranslated, hopefully more (much more!) of Tavares’s work will soon be forthcoming in English.

Andrés Neuman ~

Talking to Ourselves (translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia), the second of Andrés Neuman’s books to be rendered into English, could not be more unlike its predecessor in translation – be it thematically or stylistically. Whereas an epic novel of ideas, Talking to Ourselves is a far more intimate, personal work dealing with loss and mortality. There are no early-19th century self-rearranging German towns or cave-dwelling organ grinders to be found herein, but instead a small family forced to confront a reality teetering precariously upon the cusp of sorrow and uncertainty.

Set across an ambiguous landscape that appears to encompass both Spain and Latin America, Talking to Ourselves transcends geographical borders as easily as it does those of fidelity and compassion. Mario, afflicted with a cancer that brings him ever closer to death, sets out on (what he knows to be) a final road trip with his young son, Lito. Staying behind is Mario’s wife, Elena, heartbroken over her family’s impending fate, yet able to find mild comfort within the pages of literature. With Mario’s illness looming, husband/father, wife/mother, and son are left to make sense of their inevitable realities however best they can – longing for intimacy and release, yet unable to overcome the emotional alienation imposed upon them by imminent dissolution. Told, in turns, from the perspective of each of the three main characters, Talking to Ourselves is, narratively speaking, a most ambitious effort.

Talking to Ourselves considers a host of subjects, not the least of which being death, sickness, caretaking, parenthood and filial responsibility, devotion and infidelity, sex, passion, the duality of pleasure and pain, mourning, dishonesty, individual experience, and the inherent differences between men and women. If Neuman’s novel seems rich with life, it’s not only because his characters and their situations are so well-conceived, but also on account of his story being the stuff that life is so often composed of. To be sure, there are moments of tenderness, joy, and humor to be found throughout the book (especially when narrated by young Lito) – but Neuman’s capacity for unyielding compassion in the face of unflinching circumstance speaks volumes about the depths of his empathy and ability to synthesize through fiction the often unsettling realities and conflicting motivations of mortal existence.

With but a pair of works currently in translation, it is still rather evident that Andrés Neuman possesses a formidable talent. Talking to Ourselves, despite its solemnity (tempered though it may be by beauty and bittersweetness), is an exceptional work of considerable emotional breadth. While the story itself may well be dolorous, it radiates with an authenticity that can often be elusive in fiction. There’s a vibrancy and liveliness to Neuman’s writing (as well-evidenced, too, in Traveler of the Century) that is irresistible. Even if one were not captivated by his arresting tale, persuasive characters, or sonorous prose, the impassioned effects of his storytelling are inescapable.