Along with plots that astonish, Aidt keeps readers off balance by using gender-neutral pronouns to deliberately obscure characters\u2019 relationships to each other and defy our expectations as to how they will interact — most often in ways that are a great deal nastier than we can imagine. <\/p>\n
But it is with her descriptions of the inconsequential that the most lasting impressions are created: a baby\u2019s green, lollipop-stained mouth; an uncooked chicken, the habitual manner in which a woman moves her hand, the fat, falling flakes inside a child\u2019s snow globe. The mundane becomes extraordinary when it succumbs to the scrutiny of Aidt\u2019s perceptive eye:<\/p>\n
I like watching people. And this woman is remarkable. She\u2019s nearly bald. Her head must\u2019ve been shaved fairly recently because there\u2019s just a fine dark shadow of hair. She drinks carefully out of a small glass, something strong, maybe cognac, or whiskey, I can\u2019t tell from here. There\u2019s something about her that reminds me of a young animal, perhaps a deer, the same watchful nervousness. She\u2019s wearing a suit that\u2019s both elegant and a little too large. It\u2019s grayish-green, brownish, like mud and dried grass. I have a sudden urge to touch her neck. A flood of images runs through my head: I think about the canvas sacks, about my childhood, about the soldiers\u2019 uniforms, and my mother, who, much later, is standing in front of our house outside of Leipzig. It\u2019s plastered with thick mortar and has that color so common for East German houses: grayish-green, brownish. My mother is smiling. She\u2019s wearing a red dress.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nA poignant portraiture like this displays Aidt\u2019s talent even more than the astounding scenarios that she creates for her stories. <\/p>\n
To read Baboon<\/i> is to bear witness to the unraveling of otherwise complacent lives; an unsettling experience made all the more so in the short story format, which withholds the context necessary for the reader to anticipate what will happen next. And this is a large part of the fun. But Aidt also asks us to consider whether, like us, her characters are justified in being caught off-guard or if, as one character puts it, \u2026she\u2019s spent far too many years down in the dark, where all that\u2019s revealed is a fraction of what there is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lori Feathers is a freelance critic and Vice President of the Board of Deep Vellum Publishing. Baboon – Naja Marie Aidt, translated from the Danish by Denise Newman, Denmark Two Lines Press Baboon should win this year\u2019s Best Translated Book Award because page-for-page it offers more surprises and excitement than any other book in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[60346,58526,60686,25636,60676,56906,10686,41496,50846],"class_list":["post-301226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba2015-fiction-longlist","tag-baboon","tag-danish","tag-denise-newman","tag-denmark","tag-lori-feathers","tag-naja-marie-aidt","tag-short-stories","tag-two-lines-press"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301226","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\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":333596,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301226\/revisions\/333596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}