Ondjaki – Three Percent

Transparent City [Why This Book Should Win]

Chad Post — Tue, 14 May 2019 21:30:25 +0000

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles .��

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn and the author of the books Reel and Transitory. He writes the Watchlist column for Words Without Borders.

by Ondjaki, translated from the Portuguese by Stephen Henighan (Angola, Biblioasis)

For some writers, contradictions within a narrative might end up topping the whole thing. For the Angolan novelist Ondjaki, contradictions are the stuff out of which a deeply compelling narrative can emerge. Transparent City, his latest book to be translated into English, abounds with dissonances and moments of narrative static—but, in tech-world parlance, that’s a feature rather than a bug. Transparent City abounds with a kind of controlled chaos that ultimately reveals itself to be something more deliberate, and ultimately more sublime.

To start, there’s the prose, which is written in a style that recalls free verse. It’s not quite the auspicious technique of a novel written in the form of a single sentence; instead, it’s an unconventional use of punctuation that causes each passage to flow into the next without any delineation. Alternately: this is one of the paragraphs you’ll find on the first page:

in a hypnotized voice, Seashell Seller moved where the heat pushed him and led Blind Man down more or less safe paths where the water gushing out of the burst pipes opened passageways for anybody who dared to move in the windlashed jungle of the blaze

This is crucial to the style of the novel: just as each sentence fades into the next, so too is protagonist Odonato slowly fading away into the sprawling, bustling city around him. It’s probably worthwhile to say that this would make for an intriguing literary double feature with Stephen King’s Elevation, about a man stricken with a similar malady. The two books have little else in common, but they serve as intriguing studies of how two very different writers can take a similar concept in radically different directions.

In Stephen Henighan’s translation of Transparent City, Ondjaki also blends surrealism (specifically, Odonato’s condition) with more realistic depictions of urban life. It’s here that the free-flowing prose allows for sentences that evoke a moving camera, a perpetual tracking shot that summons up quotidian moments of joy, fear, desire, and connection.

when he reached the fifth floor, Comrade Mute was smiling patiently, almost inside his head, guardian of the secret of his vinyl music, a perpetual soundtrack—even when silenced—of life rambling in celebration through that mysterious, broken, poor building

As some of the names listed might suggest, Ondjaki is also riffing on archetypes somewhat here. On one hand, you have elements of realism present, including corrupt officials, income inequality, and violent rivalries; on the other, there’s Odonato’s condition and the stylization of many of the characters. It keeps the novel unpredictable, and creates a space within which Ondjaki can incorporate anything from the metaphysical to the deeply tactile.

But for all of that, all of the contradictions and head-spinning narrative turns, Ondjaki also allows for moments of sublime grace. Ģ��ý two-thirds of the way through the book, Odonato sets out on a walk:

Odonato wandered as he hadn’t done for a long time, absorbing the voices and the noises, the honking of car horns and the shouted insults, the finely tuned horizontal beauty of the National Bank of Angola, the smells of Baleizão Square now with no ice cream for sale, the strangely chaotic vision of the ruined buildings beneath the hilltop foundations of the São Miguel Fortress, the bay’s extensive, elongated breadth, like the smile of some Luandan adolescent, the peaceful murmur of the coconut palms that had withstood time and construction on the Marginal’s sidewalks, taking in the spectacle of billboards announcing the latest and most expensive cellphones and jeeps

he smiled in the manner of those accustomed to smiling to themselves

There’s a world of detail in those two paragraphs—about place, about character, about motion. At the scale of a book, it becomes something else indeed: not a world but a city, rendered with transparency, verve, and joy.

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.

CHILDREN OR SOVIETS OR BOTH: THE BOOKS THAT HAVE MADE ME LAUGH By Madeleine LaRue

Monica Carter — Thu, 27 Nov 2014 18:56:49 +0000

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of .

The news has been worse than usual this year, so I’ve been particularly thankful for books that make me laugh. Here are some of the funniest contenders – in what I’m sure is just a coincidence, they all take place in the 1980s and involve either children or Soviets or both.

by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey) is narrated by a little boy named Orestes who lives in a very small, very poor town in Mexico. His father’s favorite activity is cursing the police, while his mother spends most of her time making quesadillas to feed Orestes and his numerous siblings (all similarly named after figures of Greek tragedy). When the family’s two youngest children, the twins Castor and Pollux, disappear, it sets off a chain of wild events that culminates with the appearance of some extraterrestrial visitors.

But before the aliens get involved, Orestes runs away to make his fortune, and so the book becomes a kind of sad, but hilarious, parody of a poor boy’s rags-to-riches story. Villalobos’ novel, originally titled Si viviéramos en un lugar normal (“If we lived somewhere normal”), criticizes a system of poverty and corruption that is, of course, not limited to Mexico, all while delivering lines so colorful and surprising that you can’t help but laugh.

Another tale narrated by a clever, resourceful, and chronically poor child, by Ondjaki (translated by Stephen Henighan) moves the scene to Angola. The novel is populated by a cast of odd, lovable characters, including the eponymous Soviet, called Comrade Gudafterov by the children for his habit of greeting everyone with a solemn “Gudafter-noon,” no matter the time of day. Though there are moment in the plot when things seem to be getting dangerous, nothing really terrible actually happens, and we are left with an unusually vivid sense not only of the Angola of Ondjaki’s own childhood, but of the general texture of childhood itself. Stephen Henighan has done a particularly fine job conveying the range of Ondjaki’s style – the Soviet’s comically broken Portuguese and the narrator’s fleeting moments of poetry, for example, seem to arrive in English with equal ease.

by Sergei Dovlatov (translated by Katherine Dovlatov) is not narrated by a child. Rather, our hero is Soviet version of the superfluous man – poor, highly sensitive to literature, perpetually drunk, and somehow badly equipped for life. After a divorce and at the end of his rope, he arrives one summer at Pushkin’s country estate, looking for work as a tour guide. His ensuing adventures are punctuated by witty-one liners worthy of a vodka-soaked Oscar Wilde (“Are you good friends [with Mitrofanov]?” someone asks the narrator, who replies, “I’m good friends with his bad side.”), but overall, the novel owes more to Bulgakov, whose humor builds slowly, almost imperceptibly, until suddenly the entire situation is absurd. The book, like all my favorite Russian tales, is a tragicomedy, one of the saddest and funniest to appear this year.