{"id":411712,"date":"2019-01-09T13:00:23","date_gmt":"2019-01-09T18:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=411712"},"modified":"2019-01-09T12:15:23","modified_gmt":"2019-01-09T17:15:23","slug":"landmarks-btba-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/01\/09\/landmarks-btba-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Landmarks [BTBA 2019]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tara Cheesman of Reader at Large<\/a>\u00a0and BookRiot<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This is my second year as a BTBA fiction judge and (please don\u2019t @ me) the pages are all starting to run together. I\u2019ve discovered that when reading books in rapid succession it helps to identify landmarks on the literary roadmap to keep me on course. Fortunately, a lot of the books contending for the 2019 award have plots which run parallel to chunks of information which are (somehow) simultaneously integral to and independent of the overall story. Like last year\u2019s Compass<\/em>, by Mathias \u00c8nard, translated by Charlotte Mandell, a book that is a moving love story and a four-part lecture on classical music.<\/p>\n

\"\"Eventide<\/em><\/a>, by Therese Bonham and translated by Marlaine Delargy, is a tense novel in which a middle-aged academic falls into a steamy affair with a charismatic graduate student half her age. What do I remember? Bookplates. That\u2019s right. Square, paper marks of ownership which are in no way crucial to the plot. True, they represent a small act of friendship and generosity, a role that just as easily might have been filled by a potted plant or book of poetry. But the writer chose bookplates, a thing which no one uses anymore, and she must have known what she was doing because that\u2019s the detail that resonated with me.<\/p>\n

I finished Maria Gabriela Llansol\u2019s The Geography of Rebels Trilogy<\/em><\/a> because it introduced me to \u201cbeguinages,\u201d a medieval cloister\/hostel for laywomen who wanted to retreat from the world without the commitment of taking vows. This information appears in Benjamin Moser\u2019s afterword and nowhere else in the text. But the idea and all it implies\u2014monastic cells, vows of silence and poverty, Catholic mysticism\u2014provided context, an entry point, into a very complicated book.<\/p>\n

\"\"Another example: The Language of Birds<\/em><\/a> by Norbert Scheuer and translated by Stephen Brown is illustrated with beautiful ink washes. The main character, an army paramedic named Paul, fills time between missions describing and drawing the different birds he observes in Afghanistan. He also writes about his distant relative, an ornithologist who traveled through the same region in the nineteenth century. Told from multiple perspectives, Paul\u2019s and the people close to him, The Language of Birds<\/em> is about a troubled young man wracked with feelings of grief, guilt, and loss. And it has pretty pictures of birds.<\/p>\n

The narrative of Empty Set<\/em><\/a> by Veronica Gerber Bicecci, translated by Christina MacSweeney, is structured around the idea of set theory. The pages are filled with diagrams of overlapping circles which the heroine uses to describe the network of complicated relationships in her life. Visual storytelling through the medium of mathematics. It\u2019s a clever concept used to tell a compelling story about a young woman recovering from a break-up that invites comparisons to the infamous PowerPoint chapter of Jennifer Egan\u2019s A Visit from the Goon Squad<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"Eric Plamondon\u2019s Mayonaisse<\/a>,<\/em> translated by Dimitri Nasrallah, is about the life of the 1960\u2019s writer Richard Brautigan in much the same way Nathalie Lieger\u2019s Suite for Barbara Loden<\/em> is about the life of filmmaker Barbara Loden. Both books are essentially long essays which use their once famous subjects to explore specific cultural moments. Lieger dissects Wanda, the film Loden wrote, directed and starred in, scene by scene. In the same way, Plamondon takes readers through Brautigan\u2019s history, including the covers of his books. Each bears a photograph of the author with a different woman who he may or may not have been sleeping with. The reasons for this minute examination are eventually explained\u2014but the truth is that Mayonnaise<\/em> is a novel in which the journey is much more important and, ultimately, enjoyable than the final revelations.<\/p>\n

\"\"After the Winter<\/em><\/a> by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey, is another novel about love and loss. The heroine spends most of her days wandering through a number of Parisian cemeteries. Nettel\u2019s descriptions are evocative and gorgeous. By the end, I (and I think at least one or two of the other judges) added a view of a historic cemetery, along with high ceilings and hardwood floors, to our lists of necessities for the perfect apartment.<\/p>\n

Every one of these books is a great read . . . though which of these titles makes it onto the longlist still remains to be seen. In the meantime, if you\u2019re interested in bookplates, beguinages, birds, set theory, 1960\u2019s counter-culture heroes or taphophilia, there\u2019s definitely a book here for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Tara Cheesman of Reader at Large\u00a0and BookRiot.\u00a0 This is my second year as a BTBA fiction judge and (please don\u2019t @ me) the pages are all starting to run together. I\u2019ve discovered that when reading books in rapid succession it helps to identify landmarks on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":404292,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[68042],"class_list":["post-411712","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba-2019"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411712","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=411712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":411772,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411712\/revisions\/411772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}