OK, here we are, at the final match of the first ever Women’s World Cup of Literature. If you missed any of the earlier games, or just want to read about all the incredible books that were included in this tournament, just click here.

The Championship pits two very different books against one another. On one side is Germany’s by Alina Bronsky, translated by Tim Mohr.

Rosa Achmetowna is the outrageously nasty and wily narrator of this rollicking family saga from the author of Broken Glass Park. When she discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, “stupid Sulfia,” is pregnant by an unknown man she does everything to thwart the pregnancy, employing a variety of folkloric home remedies. But despite her best efforts the baby, Aminat, is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. Much to Rosa’s surprise and delight, dark eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother’s eye. While her good for nothing husband Kalganow spends his days feeding pigeons and contemplating death at the city park, Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother. When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray.

Told with sly humor and an anthropologist’s eye for detail, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine is the story of three unforgettable women whose destinies are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic. In her new novel, Russian-born Alina Bronsky gives readers a moving portrait of the devious limits of the will to survive.

On the other side of the field, there’s Canada’s Margaret Atwood and the first book in the MaddAddam Trilogy. (Already a soon to be an )

Oryx & Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.

An aggressive, dysfunctional mother against the apocalypse. Bio-modified animals against Tartar cuisine. These are very different books . . . Both of which you should read!

Anyway, on with the match!

Emily Ballaine: Germany

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine for the win! Rosa is clearly the Carli Lloyd of this match and should be awarded a golden boot for subterfuge, force of will and outright trickery.

Hal Hlavinka: Germany

My Europa Editions-love won this one.

Lizzy Siddal: Germany

Adopting an attack-is-the-best-form-of-defence strategy, the German team comes out and plays with astonishing brio. Their striker, the ruthless dynamo that is Rosa Achmetowna, never lets the goal out of her sight. Canada in Jimmy the Snowman, their one man guardian of the human race, have a resilient defence in the integrity that Rosa does not possess.

But in extra-time, Snowman is tired. Crake’s victim inevitably becomes Rosa’s victim and the ball lands in the back of the Canadian net. Rosa’s sheer bloodymindedness (and younger legs) carry the day.

Kalah McCaffrey: Germany

Lori Feathers: Canada

As much as I loved the imperious Rosalinda and cheered on Bronsky for being the lesser known author, I just can’t get the voices of Oryx and the other Crakers out of my head. Bronsky gives us an extraordinary narrator but Atwood creates an entire world. Atwood gets my vote.

Meredith Miller: Germany

Sticking with Germany as my pony!

Sal Robinson: Canada

Oryx & Crake! I love Tim and I get the masterful thing that Hottest Dishes is, but I just couldn’t ever warm up to it (ha ha).

Rhea Lyons: Germany

TARTARRRRRRR!

Hilary Plum: Germany

In a wicked upset, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine defeats Oryx & Crake. Germany’s game is streamlined, comical, and always a little bit nasty, and it triumphs over the elaborate world-building of its opponent.

Rachel Crawford: Canada

Atwood!

Margaret Carson: Canada

Oryx and Crake all the way! Time for a ticker-tape parade!

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine wins!!!!!

Congrats to Alina Bronsky and Tim Mohr, and special thanks to all of our great judges who helped celebrate women’s literature and the world cup in a fun, interesting way.

Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood is already set to represent Canada in the WWCOL championship, so now we’re ready to find out who she’s going to face off against between Colombia’s representative (Delirium by Laura Restrepo) or Germany’s (The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky).

Laura Restrepo’s Delirium (Colombia) got to this point by by getting past England’s Life After Life and then Mexico’s Texas: The Great Theft before knocking out Costa Rica’s Assault on Paradise by the convincing score of 6-1.

Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine cruised into this semis, earning a bye after beating up on the Thailand entry, The Happiness of Kati by the score of 5-1, then taking apart Côte d’Ivoire’s Queen Pokou, 4-1.

And now . . .

Hal Hlavinka: Germany

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine wins in a cover art penalty shootout!

Meredith Miller: Germany

I’m picking The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, because Rosa is the type of manipulative, dirty-playing, spit-firing character you would not wish upon your worst enemy, but is so fun to explore her inner psyche as she wreaks havoc on her fictional world.

P.T. Smith: Colombia

With the tension and suspense spread across and between the varied narrators, Delirium continues its run to the Cup.

Kalah McCaffrey: Colombia

A tough call—both teams sport unhinged but powerful women and constant, unsettling action. My personal favorite is Germany, with Rosalinda carrying the team in the fashion of Lionel Messi. But as Colombia’s got more depth to the roster, they eke out the win.

Hilary Plum: Germany

Alina Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine edges out Laura Restrepo’s excellent Delirium, if only because Bronsky’s cruel and indefatigable protagonist, Rosa Achmetowna, is willing to do anything to win. Both novels are very compelling, but a Women’s World Cup should maybe have a special place for a character as boldly “unlikeable” as Bronsky’s remarkable Rosa

Rhea Lyons: Germany

I can’t decide between Delirium and Tartar . . . Tartar is so good!! ARGH, I’ll go with that.

Mythili Rao: Germany

Three generations of quirky Soviet women, what’s not to love?

There we go! The two favorites after rounds one and two—Germany’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine and Canada’s Oryx & Crake—will face off in the first Women’s World Cup of Literature championship this Friday!

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I’m flipping the schedule this week, and instead of posting the results from Germany vs. Colombia today, we’re going with Canada, represented by the incredibly famous Margaret Atwood up against Australia, represented by debut novelist Hannah Kent. The Germany-Colombia match (which is incredibly close at the moment, by the way), will go up tomorrow, with the WWCOL Championship taking place on Friday.

Before we get to Atwood vs. Kent, here’s a new bracket for all of you keeping track at home:

Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent got to this point by first beating Sweden and Camilla Läckberg’s The Stranger and then upending Nigeria and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah before defeating Cameroon’s Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano by a score of 4-2.

Canada’s Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood made the semis by defeating Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain and then Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries by a combined score of 6-3, earning Atwood a bye into the final four.

So, here we go:

Hannah Chute: Canada

You know from the very beginning of both of these books that terrible things are going to happen to everyone, but Atwood manages her characters with a grace and humor that Kent just doesn’t have (yet). Plus, I’m a sucker for lushly imaginative world-building.

M. Lynx Qualey: Canada

Compared to Oryx & Crake, Burial Rites seems exceptionally ordinary.

Sal Robinson: Canada

Atwood’s tale of bioengineering gone very, very wrong handily beats out Kent’s turgid historical melodrama; any novel where a character says “But we are peasants” goes straight into my personal trash compactor. Go Canada!

Margaret Carson: Canada

The recent appearance of “pluots” (a merger of plums and apricots) at my local Farmers Market made me wonder: is this the result of grafting, forced seed fusion, DNA splicing? Fruit mash-ups still on my mind, I picked up Oryx & Crake and discovered with delight that Margaret Atwood has taken this all to the logical next level, i.e. dystopia, with pigoons (pig + human), wolvogs (wolf + dog), rakunks (raccoon + skunk), snats (can you guess?) churned out by OrganInc., the biolab from Hell. With its deep bench of interspecies players, Atwood’s wild, entertaining ride to Extinctathon triumphs over Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites.

Lizzy Siddal: Canada

You could say I have season tickets to both these teams, and I was very happy to reread both for the WWCOL. Both played as well as I had come to expect. Canada scores the winner though by being a spell-binding one-sitting read even on third outing.

Lori Feathers: Canada

Although I found Burial Rites to be a more enjoyable reading experience and its characters more relatable, the imaginative genius of Oryx and Crake is nothing short of stunning. Atwood’s original, rich storytelling skills are on full display.

And there you go. Atwood comes to the semifinals and destroys. She’ll meet up with either Alina Bronsky (Germany) or Laura Restrepo (Colombia) on Friday.

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From here on out, multiple judges will be voting on each of the matches and the “score” will be an accumulation of these votes.

Just to recap, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Australia) got here by first beating Sweden and Camilla Läckberg’s The Stranger and then upending Nigeria and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.

Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano (Cameroon) is here by beating Switzerland and Noëlle Revas’s With the Animals and then sneaking by Ecuador and Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands.

The winner of this match will go up against Canada and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake next Wednesday, July 8th.

Here we go!

M. Lynx Qualey: Cameroon

Both novels have a murder at the center. But while Burial Rites feels like an ordinary Anglophone novel set in nineteenth century Iceland, with ordinary plays at character, plotting, and change, Dark Heart of the Night—although flawed—moves through its material with power, ambition, and a twinned fear and fearlessness.

Rachel Crawford: Cameroon

I chose Dark Heart of the Night over Burial Rites because of Miano’s honest portrayal of the frightening human capacity to survive. More impressively, of its sheer slap in the face to anyone who thinks they have read Heart of Darkness, one of the canonical works we have all read, and finished it thinking they had any understanding of the affects of the colonization of Africa. A worthy winner of the quarterfinals in my opinion.

Lizzy Siddal: Australia

While Cameroon fields possibly the most shocking contestant in this competition, the storytelling is subservient to the polemic. There’s too much telling, not enough showing. After the—let’s just call it, harrowing—event at the centre, the pages thereafter lost any form of narrative drive or interest for me. The dilemma at the end is the same as at the start. While this may be true to life, it’s not my kind of literature.

Australia, on the other hand, fields one of finest debuts I’ve had the pleasure of reading. A way of life is recreated making the reader experience the entire discomfort of living in nineteenth century Iceland. The dilemma of housing a convicted murderess awaiting execution in the bosom of one’s own family is portrayed convincingly. Characterization of hosts, spiritual counselors and murderess possesses a subtlety that is entirely lacking in the Cameroon entry. The ending, no surprise given that it is a historical fact, is approached with such finesse that it nevertheless left me feeling a little teary,

Hannah Chute: Australia

While both of these novels are powerful tales of death and guilt in harsh lands, Burial Rites pulls ahead through the energy of its characters.

Lori Feathers: Australia

Both novels succeed in conveying a fully realized, unusual setting and interesting moral ambiguities

But with its wonderfully executed narrative and precisely drawn characters Burial Rites compels you to devour it in great, greedy gulps and as such, out-scores Dark Heart of the Night.

Margaret Carson: Australia

Grotesque crimes figure in both Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites and Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night, but Kent’s expansive narrative field and versatile storytelling, not to mention the knock-out first-person voice of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the convicted murderess who revisits her past while awaiting execution, give Burial Rites the edge over Dark Heart.

Australia! To be honest, I wouldn’t have given Australia much of a chance going into the overall competition, but whatever, Hannah Kent is now in the semifinals, ready to meet up against Margaret Atwood!

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From here on out, multiple judges will be voting on each of the matches and the “score” will be an accumulation of these votes.

Just to recap, Tatiana Lobo’s Assault on Paradise (Costa Rica) made it to this point by beating Brazil’s Crow Blue and Spain’s The Happy City.

Laura Restrepo’s Delirium (Colombia) got here by getting past England’s Life After Life and then Mexico’s Texas: The Great Theft.

The winner of this game faces off against The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Germany) on Tuesday, July 7th.

On to the match!

Hilary Plum: Colombia

Delirium is gripping and seamlessly made, even its seeming asides proving vital and resonant, and so it outmatches its worthy opponent, whose game is beautifully picaresque but thus less firmly organized.

P.T. Smith: Colombia

Delirium wins, as books of madness usually do for me, and Natasha Wimmer proves her adeptness at translating unsettled reality.

Meredith Miller: Costa Rica

Again, I’m choosing Assault on Paradise for the win. Both books involve a mystery surrounding the characters’ plights, and I am still blown away by the epic reach Lobo gives Pedro’s story. I found the revolving nature of Delirium’s narrative beautifully hypnotizing, but it failed to create the same sense of urgency that is experienced reading Assault on Paradise.

Mythili Rao: Colombia

Delirium. Because the 80s are more fascinating to me than the 1800s, and Agustina seems to be lost in more interesting ways than Pedro is.

Hal Hlavinka: Colombia

By turns light-footed, twisted, and toothy, Delirium out paces the great Assault on Paradise in this North v. South American quarterfinal faceoff!

Katrine Jensen: Colombia

I vote for Delirium because it manages to combine a fast pace and punchiness with elegance and musicality on a sentence level, which is quite an accomplishment. Because of this, Delirium seems more complete than Assault on Paradise, which can be slow and confusing at times. Plus, Natasha Wimmer’s translation is simply masterful and difficult to compete with.

Rhea Lyons: Colombia

I personally just love the perspective in Delirium, the voice, and it’s just more straight up entertaining.

There you have it—the first semifinal is set, with Germany’s Alina Bronsky set to go up against Colombia’s Laura Restrepo for a spot in the first ever Women’s World Cup of Literature championship!

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our

And check back tomorrow for the second quarterfinal featuring Burial Rites (Australia) up against Dark Heart of the Night (Cameroon). Promises to be a very tight match . . .

Australia: by Hannah Kent

Cameroon: by Léonora Miano, translated from the French by Tamsin Black

Canada: by Margaret Atwood

Colombia: by Laura Restrepo, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

Costa Rica: by Tatiana Lobo, translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz

Germany: by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr

Which, after re-ranking the teams based on goal differential from their first two wins, results in this bracket:

So, we have five matches left . . . the two quarterfinals matches, two semis, and the championship.

These last rounds will kick off tomorrow and will run like this:

Thursday, July 2nd Quarterfinal #1: Assault on Paradise (Costa Rica) vs. Delirium (Colombia)

Friday, July 3rd Quarterfinal #2: Burial Rites (Australia) vs. Dark Heart of the Night (Cameroon)

Tuesday, July 7th Semifinal #1: Assault/Delirium vs. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine (Germany)

Wednesday, July 8th Semifinal #2: Burial/Dark Heart vs. Oryx & Crake (Canada)

Friday, July 10th Championship: Assault/Delirium/Hottest Dishes vs. _Burial/Dark Heart/Oryx)

So come back tomorrow to find out who will be going up against Alina Bronsky, the German juggernaut.

This match was judged by Hilary Plum—you can learn more about her writing and editing at her or on Twitter at @ClockrootBooks.

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

The stands are packed on both sides, tension palpable. Mexico’s entry into this year’s tournament: Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft, in Samantha Schnee’s endlessly sly translation. The novel kicks off in 1859, in a lightly fictionalized version of the Mexican/Texas border, along the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande (depending on where you’re sitting) and in the twin cities—or, a Mexican city and a sad Texan excuse for one—of Matasánchez and Bruneville. As the title reminds us and the novel renders in profound detail, this border was drawn in bloodshed and greed: land that is now the state of Texas had first belonged to Mexico, until the Republic of Texas was declared in 1835, for among other reasons the desire to legalize slavery, which was counter to Mexican law. In 1846, Texas joined the U.S., resulting in the war of 1848 that our textbooks know as the Mexican-American War, but which could just be called a U.S. invasion. The US declared a new, more southerly border and land north of it was redirected into American hands—i.e.: stolen. Amid all this, the conflicts with and among the American Indians who were either of or had been relocated to the region continued. If this sounds like a highly complex geopolitical moment in which to set what seems to be a comic novel, you’re right on.

On one dusty high noon in July in Bruneville, the sheriff/mediocre carpenter of Bruneville insults Don Nepomuceno, son of a prominent Mexican family. Shots are fired, conflict ensues—an intricate and bloody chain of consequences that our narrator relates with relentless Pynchonian inventiveness. The pace is fast, the tone witty, the speed may be manic but this novel won’t lose its cool. When I picture this team, its game is soccer as spectacle: moves showy as hell, hairstyles unprecedented. Each short passage in Texas zips into the next, into and out of the lives of a massive cast of characters, ever precise but never not flip. Boullasa’s form of procedural improvisation is her own, though one thinks too of Aira and Bolaño: this is art along the high-tide line, style poised, glittering, mid-crash, before exhausting itself. Through the snap and pizazz of the prose, the horrors of this conflict surface; we recall how close we are to the landscape through which Cormac McCarthy’s Judge raged, the kid with his mindless taste for violence.

Daring, even absurd, Mexico’s game starts strong: Boullosa’s nonstop stand-up routines, winking and shapeshifting, take us to halftime with a 2–1 Mexican lead.

We turn then to the Colombian side, where Laura Restrepo’s Delirium sets a quite different pace: a fluid elegance, a taut lyricism that, we’ll come to see, can both give and take real devastation. The achievements of Restrepo’s novel—in Natasha Wimmer’s translation—are curiously hard to describe. Its structure is more conventional than Texas’s, without really being conventional; setting the two novels side by side illuminates how Restrepo, too, is playing with genre, though more quietly, so that the reader may almost not notice. The novel is centered on Agustina, a young Colombian woman of upper-class background who is deep in an episode of—one could call it delirium, or madness, or mania: in any case she is far from reality. She has spent her life, as we’ll learn, in and out of such episodes, while also believing herself, perhaps being believed by others, to possess visionary powers. Agustina is a sort of absent center, then—even though she is one of the novel’s four narrators, sometimes referring to herself in the first person, sometimes in the third, she also constitutes its vital mystery. What has caused the new and terrible instance of madness in which we discover her in the novel’s opening scene? This is the question her lover, Aguilar—former professor of literature; current dog-food salesman—sets out to answer, and which seems to drive the book’s plot, against the background of 1980s Bogotá. Aguilar narrates the course of this search, while Agustina’s sections are set during her childhood, amid the layers of secrecy and oppression that make up her deeply patriarchal family. Agustina’s grandfather, a German musician obsessed with a young student, occupies the third, haunting narrative strand; the fourth belongs to the propulsive voice of Midas McAlister, Agustina’s one-time boyfriend and a money launderer who may have just run dangerously afoul of cocaine king Pablo Escobar.

The novel seems, then, to be driven by suspense, infused by noir: a madwoman, a mystery, a detective on the hunt. Yet gradually—no spoilers here—Restrepo sets aside the simplifying logic of cause and effect and refuses any expectation of easy resolution. One narrator yields to the next, ongoingly, and the instability of each character’s story reflects a greater instability, a vulnerability intimate to each voice and yet which also belongs to the societal and political moment—drug traffickers running the nation, guerrillas claiming the highways, bombs detonating downtown—in which they live. In Wimmer’s translation, Restrepo’s syntax is capable of swift architectural feats (you may think of Sebald), suddenly building a world that is half-reality, half-dream, and just as quickly replacing it with another, each creation given life by a vivid sensual glimmer or an offhand flash of her intelligence.

The match is a tense one; both teams play at the top of their games. In the stands you all should have Texas in one hand, Delirium in the other, not able even to pick up your beer till you’ve finished reading. It could go either way, but today, since I’m the judge, I see Colombia pull away in the game’s second half, a greater range of moves at its disposal. Texas is so insistently various and vaudevillian that it becomes, in its way, consistent, and loses a bit of momentum: all short fast passes, less chance of the long desperate lob toward goal, of sinking to one’s knees on the field. We end with a hard-fought 3–2, victory Delirium, in what has surely been another incarnation of the beautiful game.

There we go! All six countries in the quarter- and semi-finals have been decided: Germany, Canada, Cameroon, Australia, Costa Rica, and Colombia. (Very much different from the actual semifinals!)

In terms of pairings, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine gets the top bye and will play the winner of Assault on Paradise vs. Delirium. Oryx & Crake gets the other bye and will face off against the winner of Burial Rites vs. Dark Heart of the Night.

More info soon about these final match-ups. For now, enjoy today’s actual Women’s World Cup quarterfinals . . .

This match was judged by Katrine Øgaard Jensen, blog editor at Asymptote. You can follow her on Twitter at @kojensen.

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

This match between Tatiana Lobo’s Assault on Paradise (translated by Asa Zatz) and Elvira Navarro’s The Happy City (translated by Rosalind Harvey) is really a battle between the epic and the subtle. Representing Costa Rica we have a novel depicting the Conquistadores and the Church invading Central America in the early 1700s, and may I just say that I’ve rarely encountered such a larger-than-life opening (entitled “Pa-brú Presbere dreams of Surá, Lord of the Nether World”!!)

Here’s a random sentence from the very first page, which is almost written as if God herself were the narrator:

The fire slowly expired and the shadows fell, the darkness good for thinking and meditation but not about the external things that anguish us in the officious light of day, rather about the secrets of the womb.

In contrast to this opening from “above,” The Happy City—a novel in two separate yet connected sections, representing Spain—begins very much from below, with the first pre-adolescent main character, Chi-Huei, spying on his father and his aunt from a garden (yes, this boy is witnessing something in a garden; need I say more about where the story is going?):

From the bushes, a chorus of crickets rose up, monotonous and precise, drowning out the hum of the traffic and the neighbors’ voices issuing from open windows. The sultry summer atmosphere oozed with the sweet, acidic scent of the loquats, and Chi-Huei liked to stand beneath the tree, breathing in the strangeness of the night, although he was not aware of its mute vibration just now.

As mentioned, The Happy City consists of two sections, and both of them follow a pre-teen (in the first section it’s Chi-Huei, while the second section is dedicated to his friend Sara) discovering the disturbing complexities of the adult world. This novel is written with a sharp clarity, which Assault on Paradise at times fails to achieve. The “epic” nature of the latter almost forced me to keep a notebook in order to remember certain characters and events—which some readers like, I just happen to not like it—and that earns Spain a goal during the first half of this match.

*

In the second half, however, Costa Rica takes revenge. Although The Happy City covers some steps towards sexuality, it doesn’t stand a chance against the intriguing misadventures of main character and admirer of women Pedro Albarán from Assault on Paradise. Just take a look at this opening sentence for chapter two, which pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the book:

Bárbare Lorenzana and Pedro Albarán arrived at the city of Cartago at the same time, slept under the same roof, made love to the same woman, and had not spoken to one another for the past ten long years.

Pedro’s encounters include—but are not limited to—La Chamberga the innkeeper; a local prostitute called The Mother of Travelers; Agueda, wife of an officer in the army; and finally, a mute native woman who embodies the culture that Pedro Albarán’s compatriots seek to terminate. Well done, Pedro. You’ve scored a goal for Costa Rica.
With a score of 1-1, here comes the divine FIFA-like corruption scandal: I’ve decided to leak an out-of-context quote from an email sent to me by fellow judge Meredith Miller, who scandalously allowed Costa Rica to win over Brazil last week. Here’s what she wrote about Assault on Paradise:

Don’t get bogged down by all of the names or disoriented with the mythology in the opening pages.

Well said, Miller. The truth is, Assault on Paradise is epically ambitious in many ways, but it also manages to enthrall the reader with its clever use of low-brow humor combined with an elevated language when the story calls for it. Costa Rica scores the final goal of this match, because reading Assault on Paradise is an utterly entertaining and unique experience.

Costa Rica 2, Spain 1

With only one match left to come, we can speculate a bit on what the quarterfinals will look like. Germany’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine has clinched a bye, and unless Texas wins by 5, or Delirium by 4, Canada’s Oryx & Crake will automatically advance to the semi-finals as well. The rest of the seedings are still a bit in flux, with the current standings being Australia (+3), Costa Rica (+2), and Cameroon (+1). Tomorrow’s winner could finish anywhere in there . . .

Speaking of tomorrow, the last match of the second round will be judged by Hilary Plum and feature Texas: The Great Theft by Carmen Boullosa (Mexico) against Delirium by Laura Restrepo (Colombia). And following that, we’ll be able to specify who faces who in the quarter- and semi-finals.

This match was judged by Meytal Radzinski whose writings you can find at and on Twitter @biblibio.

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

The game looks mismatched from the onset. Nigeria comes with star power—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a rising star in the literary world, not only for her powerful stories but also for her blatant politics (in Americanah especially). Australia meanwhile comes with a smaller, slighter team: Hannah Kent managed to comfortably sweep her first round competition, but can this debut author really stand up to the powerful politics of Nigeria’s team?

Adichie is the first to score, quickly and bluntly. Ifemelu is such a bold character, engaging and enticing from the start. In her portions of the story (since the novel is divided into Ifemelu and Obinze sections), Adichie tackles large social issues like race, racial identity, and feminism. It’s the sort of intelligent, honest storytelling you always wish you could find, but most writers shy away from. Not Adichie, who gives a nuanced and thought-provoking subtlety to her storytelling. However Obinze’s story is far less interesting—while Adichie stumbles around the implications of his parallel story, Kent snatches the ball and scores neatly with her own sharply defined Agnes Magnusdottir. Kent makes Agnes a complex, confusing and utterly entrancing character in about half the words spent on Obinze. 1-1.

Now the dynamics of the game have shifted somewhat. Kent employs use of both present and past tense in her storytelling (a personal pet peeve), yet the interplay between the two is practically flawless. Kent’s control of the ball is instantly recognized as better, as she manages to pull off character passes Adichie totally fumbles. The adjustment from Ifemelu to Obinze and back starts to feel tiresomely pointless and clumsy. Meanwhile the character shifts (accompanied by the tense change from Agnes’ narration to anyone else’s) flow comfortably. 2-1 Australia.

Adichie reclaims the ball quickly and slams another point with her hard-hitting commentary on being black in the U.S. and more importantly, being foreign in the U.S. The cultural impact rattles the goalposts. Adichie’s brilliant writing makes the fans tremble. It’s a book for the ages. 2-2.

But as the books near their end, it’s clear that one team can play to all its strengths and the other can’t quite. Despite the overwhelming importance and political strength of Americanah (and its lasting power), it fizzles out at the end into a very different sort of novel. It lacks the stamina of the quieter Burial Rites, which plays until the very end and scores a neat goal moments before the game ends. Burial Rites is ultimately the better novel, with a more controlled narrative and a truly inspiring elevation of a character mostly lost to history. The humanity of Burial Rites makes it a powerfully emotional read, while its writing is “contained” in the very best way. Americanah is big—big ideas, big writing, big stories—but it can’t quite control all of its different threads as nicely.

Australia: 3
Nigeria: 2

Well, that was a bit of an upset. Much like Australia knocking out Brazil in the actual Women’s World Cup . . . Hmm. Maybe a conspiracy is at work for the Aussies. Anyway, Hannah Kent marches on solidly, although given the goal differentials for Germany (+7) and Canada (+4), Burial Rites will be playing in the quarterfinals. (As will Dark Heart of the Night. The final two matches—tomorrow’s and Saturday’s—will determine which two books get byes and who gets ranked where.)

Speaking of future match-ups, tomorrow features Costa Rica’s Assault on Paradise by Tatiana Lobo versus Spain’s The Happy City by Elvira Navarro. Tough one to call . . . .

Tomorrow’s match features Nigeria’s Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie up against Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent.

This match was judged by Margaret Carson, who co-chairs the and crunches numbers for (WiT).

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

In today’s match, Ecuador is represented by Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands, translated by Amalia Gladhart, and Cameroon by Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night, translated by Tamsin Black.

Here’s one of those odd WWCOL matchings that other judges have commented on: under what circumstances would these two novels have otherwise been paired? The playing fields could not be more different. Beyond the Islands takes its cues from that well-worn playbook, magic realism, while Dark Heart of the Night tangles with cruelty, horror, violence, blood and guts. This is a match in which Miano’s dangerous writing squares off against Yánez Cossío’s safer and somewhat recycled magic realist storytelling.

In eight, mostly self-contained chapters, Beyond the Islands (in Spanish, Más allá de las islas Galápagos, and what’s so clunky about “Galapagos” that it was left out in the translation?) draws from a rich storehouse of imagery and fantastical elements to portray eight characters, each with something a little “special.” Morgan, a green-eyed pirate with a peg leg, Iridia, a tenderhearted prostitute, Alirio, a poet whose pockets are stuffed with abandoned poems, others. Each one meets a mist-shrouded end and gets transported elsewhere, often on wings. That’s where the magic comes in. Iridia, for example, ascends to the great beyond in a grand Chagallian flourish. As translated by Amalia Gladhart:

Iridia began to ascend the celestial ramp . . . [she] might have lost her balance, but a supernatural force was carrying her obliquely upwards toward the center of the sun, with the mechanism of an automatic staircase. Iridia was light and she kept walking; she was slowly gaining altitude like a weightless figure from the brush of Marc Chagall. From time to time she paused to breathe and reestablish her balance, although she knew that her shoes had sprouted soft suction pads that stuck to the ray, which was the same one that trapped the white butterfly that emerged from Morgan’s foot, and that illuminated the viscous dampness, like semen, that had been Alirio.

Exuberantly fantastical passages like this happen over and over in the novel, and they might be just your thing. But as someone who has been hearing about and reading Latin American magical realism for over thirty years, I wanted at times to yell, “ya basta,” enough. It felt as if the team were dribbling in circles, running down the clock, indulging in flashy play for its own sake. Look! Another player has sprouted wings and is suspended midair!

But it’s a tenacious genre. To my surprise, the game would pick up, new players would be introduced, each with an idiosyncratic tic. Long dull stretches would be followed by something stupendously ridiculous, like the story of the life-size woman doll that when filled with warm water turns into a kind of high-maintenance sex toy. It’s almost all harmless, with metamorphoses rather than outright death, except for the cruel burning of the plant-gatherer and healer Brigita, who’s taken to be a witch.

You might ask why a magic realist novel first published in 1980 comes into English thirty years later, well after the heyday of Latin American magic realism; but put those questions aside. Here it is, still playing with zest and wacky energy, winging its way down the field to score a few goals.

On the other hand, Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night (published in France in 2005 as L’intérieur de la nuit) plays a much more disturbing game. Set in a remote village in an unnamed African country, the novel tells the story of Ayané, the only child of the Aama and Eké, a couple who ignore the traditional customs and rules of the village and are ostracized as a result. But it’s just as well, because it allows Ayané to escape the destiny of other girls whose mothers “taught them to live as they had done, with gritted teeth, a ramrod-straight back and vanquished hope” (in Tamsin Black’s translation). Ayané is sent away to school and grows up, mostly off stage, to become an enterprising and spirited young woman.

Up to this point the novel seems like a rare coming-of-age story of a young African woman, but then it suddenly turns into gruesome bloodbath. Ayané’s return home to tend to her dying mother coincides with the arrival in the village of a band of drug-crazed revolutionaries in need of soldiers. There is resistance, followed by page after page of unbearable brutality, witnessed by Ayané from the high branch of a tree. You might find yourself recoiling from the descriptions of decapitations, castration, the murder of a child, disembowelments, the cooking and eating of entrails and brains, sustained for over forty pages. Once again, you want to yell, “enough!”

When I first read this novel I hated it. Its violence and cruelty seemed gratuitous, over the top, frankly sadistic. But just as the sporting world has its “extreme sports,” maybe literature too has its “extremes” that deeply disturb and push at whatever limits are out there? Of course it does; the orgies of violence in Dark Heart make you think of the Marquis de Sade, Alejandra Pizarnik in The Bloody Countess, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker. Contrary to what we might think, Miano is not doing social realism. She’s not chronicling horrendous acts of violence in Africa (which of course are not unique to Africa) in order to cater to the expectations of outsiders. Whether or not she succeeds is another matter, but she could care less about enchanting the reader. She’s asking herself: can this be described in words?

I won’t overdo the soccer analogies, but I considered: which of the two novels “goes for it”? Which one scuffs up the turf, does some damage, earns a few red cards, challenges some notions about what women write about when they write novels?

For her more ambitious game plan, Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night advances, beating Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands 4-3.

And now half of the final six are set, with Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night joining Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine and Atwood’s Oryx & Crake in the upcoming quarterfinals.

Tomorrow’s match features Nigeria’s Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie up against Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent.