{"id":294276,"date":"2013-06-11T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-06-11T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/06\/11\/anatomy-of-a-night\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:38","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:38","slug":"anatomy-of-a-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/06\/11\/anatomy-of-a-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Anatomy of a Night"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“At night Amar\u00e2q is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what\u2019s left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of light in a sea of light.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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At night Amar\u00e2q becomes a broad plain that melts the two dimensions into the third, the earth with the sky\u2014suddenly everything is sky.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Immediately, Anna Kim’s Anatomy of a Night<\/em> (translated by Bradley Schmidt) draws us in and confines us to a small, five-hour sliver of life in Amar\u00e2q Greenland: an impoverished Inuit village that is plagued by a wave of suicides. Over the course of these pages\u2014through deep personal ties and chilling alienation\u2014the topics of poverty, isolation, and suicide swirl around the inhabitants of the town. Is it the poverty and isolation that drives these folks to take their own lives? Is the strained history between Greenland and Denmark a factor? Or is there something more, something deeper and ingrained in Amar\u00e2q?<\/p>\n

Anatomy of a Night<\/em> is broken up into one-hour sections, with each section broken down into smaller vignettes. It is in these snippets that we learn about the villagers and their relationships. We are thrown into this insular society without much of an introduction and only over the course of the novel do we see the relationships between people develop and dissolve, and see the emergence of Amar\u00e2q as the real binding element. All of these characters are inherently tied to the village in one way or another through generations or a personal calling. Because of the evolving web of stories across the whole of the novel, identifying a key example of this intricate technique is very difficult1<\/a><\/sup>; however, one of the most interesting relationships is between Ole and Magnus, two adolescent boys who resolve to commit tandem suicide:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey wrap the scarves around the bedposts, tie knots. They sit down on the carpet, close to the post, wrapping one end around each of their throats, and knotting them under their chins. They work synchronously, their movements are coordinated, practiced.\u201d<\/p>\n

And farther down the page:<\/p>\n

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\u201cMagnus sits back down on the floor, scoots over to the bed, takes the scarf, wraps it around the end of the bedpost, and knots it under his chin; light from the street falls on the wall, on the pictures Magnus had cut out of magazines and schoolbooks. He considered them outrageously beautiful photos, until about a year ago, when he stopped collecting them because he could no longer remember why he had started. It\u2019s always the same motif: a sandy beach, the ocean in the background so blue it appeared to merge with the sky, but there was no horizon\u2014the horizon was missing in all of the pictures.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Even during one of the most intimate moments one person can have with another, there still lingers a sense of loneliness and alienation. Though a little more than halfway through the novel, these passages are like a skeleton key, unlocking a well-guarded secret\u2014or maybe they just deepen the mystery.<\/p>\n

At times, especially at the very beginning, the prose is a little difficult to grasp hold of, but what really catches and draws you in is Bradley Schmidt\u2019s masterful rendering of Anna Kim\u2019s text. Schmidt\u2019s deft touch allows the prose to sing with full force; a pleasure to read from the first word to the last. Anna Kim\u2019s gorgeous ebook (YES<\/span>! Ebooks can be gorgeous), published by the new Berlin based Frisch & Co., is a haunting, thoughtful, beautiful work that sticks with you long after it\u2019s done.<\/p>\n

1<\/sup> Here is a map of characters from Frisch & Co.<\/a>, illustrating this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“At night Amar\u00e2q is coated with a darkness as viscous as unmixed colors, neither the fjord nor the mountains, valleys, lakes, or the river exist, there is only a black mass, a void that spreads across the landscape sporadically, pressing what\u2019s left but leaving holes that it fills with abstract elements, moving pictures, waves of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[51796,48656,51786,5706,38656],"class_list":["post-294276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-anatomy-of-a-night","tag-anna-kim","tag-bradley-schmidt","tag-german-literature","tag-jennifer-marquart"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339666,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294276\/revisions\/339666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}