{"id":395456,"date":"2018-04-16T19:42:09","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T19:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2018\/04\/16\/the-invented-part-by-rodrigo-fresan-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-14T10:22:49","modified_gmt":"2018-05-14T14:22:49","slug":"the-invented-part-by-rodrigo-fresan-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2018\/04\/16\/the-invented-part-by-rodrigo-fresan-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Invented Part” by Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between now and the announcement of the BTBA<\/span> finalists on May 15th, we\u2019ll be highlighting all 37 longlisted books in a series we call \u201cWhy This Book Should Win.<\/a>\u201d The first post is from BTBA<\/span> judge and Ebenezer Books bookseller P.T. Smith.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Invented Part<\/em><\/a> by Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden (Argentina, Open Letter Books)<\/b><\/p>\n

In an earlier post,<\/a> about Remains of Life<\/em>, I asked \u201cWhy continue?\u201d I tried to understand why I keep on reading even when I\u2019m not sure what to make of a book, if I\u2019m not sure I think it is good enough to keep reading. My final answer, shown by its presence on the longlist, is that sometimes that book sticks with you for a long time, and you admire it more and more in retrospect. I\u2019m not here to write about Remains of Life<\/em> though. I have another question, one that leads me to another book.<\/p>\n

Why read? The earliest answer in my life was \u201cI enjoy it.\u201d As a kid, Jim Kjelgaard was my favorite author. I had no friends to talk to him about, I didn\u2019t think about what I learned reading them, didn\u2019t think about their affect on me or my brain. His books tell the story of a boy, his dog, and adventure. Those three things brought me joy. As an up-his-own-ass high school and college kid, I came up with reason after reason other than \u201cI enjoy it\u201d to read. All were some version of trying to be better, smarter, more worthy. Thankfully, some professors taught a course called Textual Pleasure, and I\u2019ve never again forgotten to read for pleasure. A more intricate pleasure, deeper one than boy, dog, adventure, but pleasure all the same. Seeking to understand what exactly brings the feeling can itself be a pleasure.<\/p>\n

I have no memory of the last time I had a reading experience as pleasurable as reading Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n\u2019s The Invented Part<\/em> in Will Vanderhyden\u2019s translation. That pleasure has remained, infecting my life and how I think (I\u2019m writing this while listening to The Kinks, a band I have no connection to, but they\u2019re scattered in The Invented Part<\/em>, so why not, and I\u2019m having a blast). A few friends have said that The Invented Part<\/em> broke reading for them, as in nothing else compares, so the gap in pleasure leaves them cold while they make their way through another book. It\u2019s the opposite for me.<\/p>\n

For the first time in my life, reading had become a nearly entirely anhedonic experience for me. For a year, longer, I had been falling deeper towards this. First I found pleasure in a book, but longed for how it would have made me feel some time ago. Then I couldn\u2019t sit and read for as long a time as I used to. I began to not look forward to picking up a new book. Eventually, I could hardly read at all. I\u2019d put the words in my eyeballs for however long I could manage. I would read sentences that I recognized I should appreciate, should send some of those tingles down my spine or spark something in my neurons. But nothing came. It was a loss of sense of self.<\/p>\n

Then I came The Invented Part<\/em>. I felt pleasure, joy, excitement, and I laughed. My brain was on fire and my spine tingling. I read almost two hundred pages in a sitting, the first time I\u2019d done that in memory. I was reading something new. The novel is full of excitement and love, for its characters, for music, for other books, for reading, for the experience of art and life, for culture high, low, and middle. Fres\u00e1n seeks all of that out, and pulls it together brilliantly. He does things I didn\u2019t know the novel could do, but without it being a purposeful gesture, a thing that calls attention to itself. It\u2019s naturally new, this novel couldn\u2019t exist any other way, but before it did, I couldn\u2019t imagine it.<\/p>\n

It is everything. It\u2019s heady and complex. Its sentences are beautiful. It\u2019s weird as all hell and realism doesn\u2019t matter. Its characters are full and real and you care deeply for them. It can make you laugh and it can break your heart (I tried to construct a better version of \u201cyou\u2019ll laugh, you\u2019ll cry\u201d because fuck you it\u2019s true). I\u2019m not going to pitch a plot because it\u2019s complicated and fragmented and sort of plotless but you\u2019ll also be hooked by whatever story it\u2019s telling at the moment. It\u2019s clever and snarky and mocks. It is utterly sincere. It is generous. It is welcoming. Will Vanderhyden understands all of this about the book and captures all of it. Thank the gods he\u2019s going to be bringing us the next two in this trilogy. There\u2019s little I want more from this life.<\/p>\n

When I finished, I could read again. Nothing has compared, but that\u2019s okay. They don\u2019t have to. Books are my love. So reading is sex? Not every time you have sex with your love will be the best sex you ever have. That\u2019s okay. It\u2019s still going to be pleasure, and there\u2019ll be little specifics, shades of it you appreciate. You just treasure those times that were amongst the best. That\u2019s what other books are for. The Invented Part<\/em> was the most pleasure I\u2019ve had reading in five years, longer maybe. It\u2019s the best book I\u2019ve read in that time. I don\u2019t say these things lightly. I hate the hyperbole of language around books. I don\u2019t know any other way to talk about this one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between now and the announcement of the BTBA finalists on May 15th, we\u2019ll be highlighting all 37 longlisted books in a series we call \u201cWhy This Book Should Win.\u201d The first post is from BTBA judge and Ebenezer Books bookseller P.T. Smith. The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fres\u00e1n, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":397772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[35996,66446,48766,37876],"class_list":["post-395456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-btba-2018","tag-btba-fiction","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395456","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\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397782,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395456\/revisions\/397782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/397772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}