{"id":428602,"date":"2020-01-14T12:09:59","date_gmt":"2020-01-14T17:09:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=428602"},"modified":"2020-01-14T12:09:59","modified_gmt":"2020-01-14T17:09:59","slug":"homestead-horror-and-genealogical-angst-btba-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/01\/14\/homestead-horror-and-genealogical-angst-btba-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Homestead Horror and Genealogical Angst [BTBA 2020]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Justin Walls,<\/strong> a bookseller with Powell\u2019s Books in Portland, Oregon who can be found on Twitter @jaawlfins<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"Psychological horror\/thriller\/chiller\/etc.\u2014you know the sort, taut with spring-loaded tension and positively oozing dread\u2014is tricky to pull off in a work of literature, let alone to sustain over the course of an entire novel. Anything containing too much gory mayhem runs the risk of being slapped with the genre label (Quelle horreur, indeed!), while taking too cerebral a tack could attract the charge that nothing \u201chappens.\u201d An effective workaround in the current milieu of literary scares is to aim for the unsettling, \u00e0 la expert spine-tingler Samanta Schweblin, whose forthcoming\u00a0Little Eyes<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(trans. Megan McDowell, Riverhead Books) will arrive with just such claims already embedded in its jacket copy. (See also: Guadalupe Nettel’s\u00a0Bezoar: And Other Unsettling Stories<\/em><\/a>, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine, due out from Seven Stories Press later this year.) Think of the infamous diner scene from David Lynch’s\u00a0Mulholland Dr.<\/em>\u00a0(2001), a startling encounter with the inexplicable that upends all previous notions of what might happen from one moment to the next. It’s no wonder that, like \u201cunsettling,\u201d the term \u201cLynch-ian\u201d has pretty much had the tread worn off its tires as far as bookish buzzwords are concerned. This method, essentially, takes reality and makes it unreal.<\/p>\n

However, recent entries into the canon of cinematic terror, like Ari Aster\u2019s\u00a0Hereditary<\/em>\u00a0(2018) or Jordan Peele\u2019s\u00a0Us<\/em>\u00a0(2019), suggest a shift in what we as a culture deem hair-raising. A hyper-reality borne of not just fright but ambient stress and buried trauma, centered around the family, has acquitted itself as a convincing boogeyman for contemporary America. Even in Robert Eggers\u2019 deliciously demonic\u00a0The Witch<\/em>\u00a0(2015), the devil himself opts to sow seeds of suspicion in the hearth of an ousted Puritanical clan, pitting mother against daughter and infant against goat (or something like that). Sure, there\u2019s no shortage of bloodletting in these films, but the true innards-twisting aspect of each lies not with any amount of over-the-top slasher theatrics. Instead, it\u2019s the permeating sensation that something\u2014specifically something close to home\u2014isn\u2019t right.<\/p>\n

\"\"For fiction that addresses a similar strain of homestead horror and genealogical angst, we must turn to two 2019 Nordic novels in translation: Linda Bostr\u00f6m Knausg\u00e5rd’s\u00a0Welcome to America<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(World Editions), translated by Martin Aitken, and Vigdis Hjorth’s\u00a0Will and Testament<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Verso Fiction), translated by Charlotte Barslund. Both are attuned to the complex contaminants that can burble to the surface among relatives and loves ones, especially where grief is involved. From Nicolas Roeg\u2019s\u00a0Don’t Look Now<\/em>\u00a0(1974)\u2014which Lynch ripped off for the aforementioned\u00a0Mulholland Dr.<\/em>\u00a0scene, if we’re being honest\u2014to Lars von Trier\u2019s\u00a0Antichrist<\/em>\u00a0(2009) to Aster\u2019s\u00a0Midsommar<\/em>\u00a0(2019), a death in the family remains fertile ground for exploring our inherent fears.<\/p>\n

\"\"In\u00a0Bostr\u00f6m Knausg\u00e5rd’s\u00a0Welcome to America<\/em>, we\u2019re introduced to Ellen, a newly non-verbal tween convinced that she\u2019s colluded with God in a plot to murder her mentally unstable and frequently menacing father. Rather than address these worrisome notions via whatever passes for conventional methods, Ellen\u2019s actress mother becomes ebullient and distant, her brother adopts a posture of physical intimidation, and our eleven-year-old patricide collaborator recedes into a chrysalis of torment. There is an atmospheric disquietude reminiscent of Roman Polanski\u2019s\u00a0Repulsion<\/em>\u00a0(1965) or Ingmar Bergman\u2019s\u00a0Persona<\/em>\u00a0(1966) to the novel, a hallucinatory netherworld crafted from isolation. Echoing Catherine Deneuve\u2019s confinement in the former and Liv Ullmann\u2019s silence in the latter,\u00a0Welcome to America<\/em>\u2019s troubled narrator possesses all the makings of a budding woman on the brink. A spiritual successor to the vanishing girls of Peter Weir\u2019s\u00a0Picnic at Hanging Rock<\/em>\u00a0(1975), Ellen slips through a geological recess of the mind, simultaneously trekking further out while burrowing deeper in. The bog of doubt, delusion, and scattered dreams she discovers there is as haunting as anything in modern fiction.<\/p>\n

\"\"Meanwhile, Hjorth\u2019s comparatively cogent\u00a0Will and Testament<\/em>\u00a0resembles Henri-Georges Clouzot\u2019s\u00a0The Wages of Fear<\/em>\u00a0(1953) with the nitroglycerin swapped out for the phrase \u201ccabin valuations.\u201d This diabolical bit of legalese dredges forth all manner of curdled resentment after being invoked one too many times \u2014 yes, like how Beetlejuice functions in\u00a0Beetlejuice<\/em>\u00a0(1988) or Candyman in\u00a0Candyman<\/em>\u00a0(1992), exactly \u2014 and thrusts black sheep Bergljot back into the familial fray. There\u2019s another felled patriarch, another trail of abuse, but whereas adolescent Ellen is left to merely cope following her father\u2019s passing, grown-ass Bergljot confronts her trauma with the advantage of resolute indignation and abundant hindsight. When the matter of the inheritance goes sour, the surviving family members split into competing factions: those who believe that the trespass occurred and those who, for various reasons, feel compelled to deny, deny, deny. What follows is a free-for-all rhetorical chess match marked by passive aggression, suppression, grievance, subterfuge, and bad faith diplomacy. Like Audrey Hepburn\u2019s sightless protagonist in Terence Young\u2019s\u00a0Wait Until Dark<\/em>\u00a0(1967), Bergljot must fend off attempts to undermine what she knows to be the truth. (A certain Mia Farrow character can also totally relate.) The slow burn of steadily accumulated anxiety, increasing with every perceived slight and cutting remark, is enough to leave you tied up in sympathetic knots. That is, if you can bear to watch.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is from Justin Walls, a bookseller with Powell\u2019s Books in Portland, Oregon who can be found on Twitter @jaawlfins. Psychological horror\/thriller\/chiller\/etc.\u2014you know the sort, taut with spring-loaded tension and positively oozing dread\u2014is tricky to pull off in a work of literature, let alone to sustain over the course […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":428652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[69572,68542],"class_list":["post-428602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba-2020","tag-justin-walls"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428602","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=428602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":428672,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428602\/revisions\/428672"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}