Anyway, I thought to myself that it would be a good idea to try and read all of these before the award ceremony (I’ll be cutting it tight, and I don’t think the Solvej Balle book comes out before the ceremony) and write something kind of frivolous about each title. Like, in the vein of the old “Why This Book Should Win” posts for the Best Translated Book Award (R.I.P.). So here goes . . .

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Author: Layla Martínez

Translators: Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott

Publisher:

Publication Year (Original Text): 2021

Page Count: 153

Goodreads Rating: 4.16 with 11,800 ratings and 2,283 reviews

Notable Amazon Sales Ranking: #286 in Ghost Fiction

Publisher Description: The house breathes. The house contains bodies and secrets. The house is visited by ghosts, by angels that line the roof like insects, and by saints that burn the bedsheets with their haloes.��It was built by a smalltime hustler as a��means of controlling his wife, and even after so many years, their daughter and her granddaughter can’t leave. They may be witches or they may just be angry, but when the mysterious disappearance of a young boy draws unwanted attention, the two isolated women, already subjects of public scorn, combine forces with the spirits that haunt them in pursuit of something that resembles justice.

In this lush translation by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott,��Layla Martínez’s eerie debut novel is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as “a��house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge,” this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.

Previous Familiarity:��So, I wanted to do this book for Open Letter and read a sample back in the summer of 2022. And then blew our chance by not getting in an offer in time for the auction. Which we likely would’ve lost. And that’s fine—Two Lines is excellent! But I did know the outline and general themes of the book before starting it this week.

Translators: Sophie Hughes & Annie McDermott are both absolutely fantastic. I edited their translation of��Montevideo��by Enrique Vila-Matas (pub date ???) this past spring, and it was such a gifted, assured, excellent translation. Allowed for very strategic editing suggestions, whereas some translations feel like they need one more pass by the translator.

My Reading:��It’s a book about intergenerational trauma and, to some extent, the impact of Spain’s Civil War. I mean, there are��literally��skeletons in the closet in this. It also addresses the divisions between social classes, with the two narrators— granddaughter and grandmother—and isolated and not well off, yet are entangled for generations with the very wealthy Jarabos.

Reflections on Style:��The language in the book is a bit off-kilter, which is fitting with the gothic horror elements present throughout. (The scratching, the spirits inhabiting the house, the grandmother’s conversations with the “saints,” etc.) That said, it’s not wildly experimental or anything, just clipped with interesting word choices, such as in the opening line: “I walked in and the house pounced on me.” The chapters go back-and-forth from granddaughter to grandmother There were times where I’d put the book down, and when I picked it back up have to reorient myself as to who was talking since the voices are rather similar, but that’s a minor complaint.

Any Big Reviews?: In the��New Yorker, who said, “Shadowed by the Spanish Civil War and the remarkable cruelty of men, the violent tale unspools into a potent consideration of inherited trauma and the elusiveness of justice.”

Will It Be Discussed in Five Years:��I would say that’s not assured. If it wins, sure! But otherwise . . . maybe? And this isn’t a slight on the book! It’s just that most books fade from public consciousness after a couple three years—until they’re “rediscovered” a decade later. This does fit a certain type of book that’s quite popular now, so it should have great word-of-mouth.

What Authors/Books Does the Publisher Compare This To: Samanta Schweblin and Fernanda Melchor. And throw in Mariana Enriquez, who blurbed it.

Any Books You Would Recommend for Fans of��Wormwood:����by Lucío Cardoso and����by José Donoso.

Will it Win: My sense of things—from Winter in Sokcho through��The Words that Remain—is that short, localized, slightly strange fiction does really well for the National Book Award. And this book has those qualities! It’s the first I’ve read so I can’t judge it against the field, but, it has a 10% chance right now (shortlist hasn’t been announced), and based on these qualities, I’ll bump it up to 15% (and may adjust this later).

Your Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

The entry below is by Jennifer Croft, who is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. She has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a Founding Editor of the Buenos Aires Review.

by Laia Jufresa, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Mexico, Oneworld)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 53%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 8%

Umami is that rare novel that becomes the world it depicts, inviting us to inhabit it in the gentlest, kindest possible terms through Sophie Hughes’s delightful translation of Laia Jufresa’s perfectly crafted structural wonder in prose. With the alternating metaphors of creating and tending the garden at the center of Belldrop Mews—the building where all the book’s characters reside, in the heart of Mexico City—and remaining afloat or drowning in streams of consciousness, pressures and mourning, Umami calls our attention to attention, binding us to protagonists who instantly become beloved and whose crimes of inattention we both understand and feel deeply devastated by.

Ana, the twelve-year-old gardener who opens Umami and recurs as its soothingly emphatic refrain, describes the atmosphere of her family’s home following the death of her sister Luz at the age of five (though Luz always told everyone she was “almost six”):

. . . it’s not quite a river, our sadness: it’s stagnant water. Since Luz drowned, there’s always something drowning at home. Not everyday. Some days you think we’re all alive again, the five remaining members of the family: I get a zit; some girl calls Theo; Olmo plays his first concert; Dad comes back from tour; Mom decides to bake a pie. But later you go into the kitchen, and there’s the pie, still raw on the wooden countertop, half of it pricked and the other half untouched, with Mom hovering over it, clutching the fork in midair. And then you know that we too, as a family, will always be ”almost six.”

Her directness is disarming, and here—and throughout the book—the tone is a magic trick, the perfect mix of light and dark that enables us to understand that both life and death are in little details, like selfhood itself, the primary pursuit of Ana’s neighbor Marina: “Marina distrusts her own malleability and is attracted by the possibility of the opposite: the fascinating and at the same time terrifying prospect of being someone.” Marina is an artist with a severe eating disorder who spends her days inventing colors, or rather, words for colors, learning English from Ana’s American mother Linda because “English takes the edge off things, makes them feel less serious, a bit like scribbling mustaches on photos.”

Language and even translation are consistently integrated into the plot—a potential translation hurdle cleared with apparent effortlessness, and even pleasure, by Hughes—as another neighbor’s parallel project of cultivation begins alongside Ana’s garden. Alfonso is an academic taking time off after his wife Noelia dies of cancer; when he gets a new laptop, he decides to use it to create a chronicle of the couple’s time together, a kind of textual monument to commemorate their love. The details he remembers and loves about Noelia are so touching they are worth a novel on their own, while Alfonso’s growing understanding of his own process simultaneously takes the reader through the basic framework of the novel, its reason for existing as well as why we might read it and what reading it might help us to find:

What I like about writing is seeing the letters fill up the screen. It’s something so seemingly simple, so perfectly alchemic; black on white. To plant worlds, and tend them as they grow. If you’re missing a comma, you add it, and now there’s nothing missing. Everything this text needs is here.

And white on black, too. The pauses, the spaces, or as my friend Juan the philosopher would say: the ineffable. Everything missing from this text, its absences and silences, is here too.

Umami’s balance—of light and dark, of cultivation and deluge, of presence and absence—is what makes it such a welcoming home for the reader, one that feels profoundly lived-in (one can almost sense the neighbors’ heartbeats) as well as haunted (one can also sense the hovering shadows of Luz, Noelia, the children Alfonso and Noelia did not have, the parents Marina never quite had, the mother Ana’s mother might have been—but never was—and the abandoning, abruptly returning mother of Ana’s best friend Pina). When, in order to begin her garden, Ana stays home for the summer for the first time ever (instead of spending it with her grandmother in the States), she gets to go to the cemetery with her parents to mark the anniversary of her sister’s death:

I’d fantasized about this moment, about what I’d say to Luz. But in my fantasies it was raining and Luz was somehow able to listen to me. Now the sun is beating down and there’s not a patch of shade in the whole cemetery. She’s dead, and I have nothing to say to her. Was she beloved? She was my sister.

A little later, she goes home:

One by one, Pina and I pull off the little flowers. It occurs to me that if I’d known, I could have taken them to the cemetery. It’s a silly idea: they’re tiny. But Luz was too. Tiny, I mean. She used to sit on my lap, hug her legs, then curl into a little ball so that I’d hold her.

“Squeeze!” she’d say.

Sometimes I was scared I’d hurt her or break something, and I always let go sooner than she wanted me to. We all did. My brothers held on a bit longer, but not much. Luz always wanted to be squeezed more.

“Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze!” she begged Dad, and he would squeeze her with a single arm.

I don’t want to, but I can’t help imagining her in her box, in the cemetery. But that’s another silly idea because there’s not even anything in that box. It was too expensive and complicated to bring her body back to Mexico.

“What?” I ask Pina, who’s staring at me.

“Are you crying?” she says.

“Are you stupid?” I say, and she goes off in a sulk.

Jufresa’s warmth and restraint, along with the poise and inventiveness of Hughes’ translation, make Umami a novel I deeply hope people will contemplate and savor.