Tobias Carroll is the author of the booksĚýReel,ĚýTransitory, and the forthcomingĚýPolitical Sign.

Ěýby Rita Indiana, translated from the Spanish by Achy Obejas (And Other Stories)

Rita Indiana’s Tentacle is a novel I’ve written about , which might give you a sense of how I feel about it. Some short novels use their size to deliver a hyper-focused dose of plot and setting to the reader—immersing them in a character’s psyche or exploring the ramifications of a particular action. Tentacle goes in the opposite direction: part of the novel’s charm is in checking off all of the things that Indiana includes in the narrative. A partial list would include environmental catastrophes, time travel, gender and society, and the Caribbean’s relationship to the rest of the Americas.

As translated by Achy Obejas, Tentacle is a compelling combination of seemingly disparate elements. Its protagonist, Acilde, leaves a dystopian future for a voyage back in time, to avert the catastrophic circumstances that led the world down such a bleak path—but it’s also a journey that effectively bifurcates Acilde’s consciousness. Acilde finds a fulfilling life once he arrives in the past, and there’s an ecstatic element to some of these passages—the allure of an idyllic life in a scenic location while great music can be found. (If you’re a fan of Giorgio Moroder’s work, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here.)

Indiana deftly illustrates Acilde’s existence in simultaneous times, sometimes in the same paragraph:

He thought the late twentieth-century life in Sosúa playing out in his head might be a side effect of the Rainbow Brite. Back in Sosúa, in the little house where the natives revered him, in front of the mirror that hung from a nail over the faucet in the yard, he assured himself, like a midwife with a newborn, that this new body didn’t need anything else.

Acilde’s adventures in time are juxtaposed with a more overtly satirical plotline set in the past timeline about a misanthropic, frustrated artist named Argenis. The way the novel’s two plotlines eventually converge isn’t initially apparent; instead, Indiana plants clues to the novel’s resolution throughout the narrative, and does little hand-holding of the reader as Tentacle reaches its conclusion.

In other words, there isn’t just a contrast between Tentacle’s blissed-out segments and its dystopian elements. There’s also a greater one between its familiar segments and the subtler plotting that Indiana does throughout the novel. This is a book which rewards multiple readings, in a way that’s oddly reminiscent of the works of Gene Wolfe. (Despite the fact that this is, otherwise, very far removed from the fictional territory that Wolfe covered.) Did I mention there were pirates? There are pirates, too.

in The Guardian last year, Suzi Feay observed that “Tentacle reads like Kathy Acker with a tighter narrative grip.” Indiana’s novel has plenty in common with the work of Acker or Iain Sinclair, including an unruly and politically charged blend of realism, satire, and the uncanny. And if you think that comparing Indiana’s work to two other writers whose work is famously difficult to pin down is a bit of a paradox: exactly. This is an author whose fiction carves out its own distinctive space, both familiar and fresh.

The next episode will focus on the first eight chapters of this third volume (pages 345-406). The complete schedule can be found here.

Announcements! Season 9 of the Two Month Review will kick off at the end of July and will featureĚý. Get your copy now!

And Season 10 will be the first English-language title to be included:

Follow and Ěýfor more thoughts on and literature in general, and for information about upcoming guests. And follow Tobias Carroll for information about all his writing, including his story in the forthcoming anthology.

And be sure to preorder Brian’s book,Ěý, which is coming out this fall from BOA Editions.

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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. Ģą˝´«Ă˝ 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.