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55
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| 0822371103
| 9780822371106
| 0822371103
| 3.78
| 3,009
| 1924
| Apr 13, 2018
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Jun 23, 2024
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54
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| 1913867927
| 9781913867928
| 1913867927
| 4.12
| 3,685
| Nov 25, 2020
| Oct 15, 2024
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liked it
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All I want now is to watch the horizon, the plains, to stare into the distance, let the countryside inundate me, let the sky fill me up, not to think,
All I want now is to watch the horizon, the plains, to stare into the distance, let the countryside inundate me, let the sky fill me up, not to think, so that what is happening inside me stops existing all the time. Yo ahora solo quiero mirar el horizonte, la llanura, fijar los ojos en la distancia, que me inunde el campo, que me llene el cielo, para no pensar, para que lo que sucede en mí deje de existir todo el tiempo. The Plains (2024) is Jennifer Croft's translation of Federico Falco's Los llanos (2020), the second of his works to appear in English after the story collection A Perfect Cemetery. The narrator of the story, Fede, a 42 year old writer (or as he says, 'I used to be a writer') has recently broken up with Ciro, his male partner of 7 years, and not of his own volition, his partner's clearly well-decision to end their relationship clearly well thought through and irrevocable but a complete surprise to the narrator. While living now in the city of Buenos Aires, Fede's family live in the plains and he particularly retains memories of his weekends spent with his rural grandparents (as from interviews, does the author), and rather than throw himself into his writing and teaching, as Ciro advises, he instead rents a run-down house in the countryside for a year, where he attempts to build a vegetable garden. [image] (photo from the author, from this interview on the novel) And if a vegetable garden, like a story, can not be entirely controlled, at least it doesn't require one to understand another person's feelings: You can't control a vegetable garden, and that exasperates me sometimes. A garden cannot grow out of my desire, but rather on its own power, the power of its seeds, and all its growth occurs in the midst of accidents. Writing is similar: I used to write, at times, under the illusion that I was in control of the text, when in reality everything kept happening in a manner that almost excluded me: whatever could sprout did so in the midst of my own accidents, my neurosis, my tiredness, my lethargy, my fear of what people might say, and would they be bored, and what will they think of me, my fear that nobody would like it, that they'd put down the book halfway through without picking it back up. Such slips are not so different from drought, or wind, or hail. They attack the seed. Stories grow in their midst, modelled and marred by me. Sometimes they don't survive. Other times I give them nothing. Some stories I can't help along, I don't know how to write them. Being with another person is hard. Being with another person is work, effort. Understanding, or not understanding, or trying to understand. What you think you are. What the other person thinks you are. Your wants and needs. What the other person wants. What the other person needs. The other person's work and your work. Teamwork: work, the relationship, the friendship, the proximity. Wear, misunderstandings, doubts. What isn't seen, what isn't heard, what you don't want to see, what is so excruciatingly painful you would rather not know. The narration is in the form of notes in Fede's journal, beginning in the heat of summer in January through to September as the area emerges from winter. He records in detail the successes and failures of his various crops, but also the town where he grew up, memories of his grandparents, reflects on what went wrong with his relationship. One fascinating contrast in background is between Ciro, who was openly out in his home village, and his own upbringing where he repressed his sexuality, feeling stifled by the way people become labelled by a few key moments in their biography (this last I found very resonant): In a small town, each of us is a biography, a row of photos, a continuous thread, our identity affixed to a story, to a history. Three, four, five moments in a person's life that, in some way, make up enough of a sketch to identify us. Misfortunes, accidents, encounters, jobs, loves, births, achievements, funny anecdotes, poignant ones. Milestones on a timeline. Points in a life joined together by lines that run across the plains, in wind, in sun, in storms. Then an ending, an obituary. "Who died?' people ask at the café-bar or the store when the funeral lights come on, or when they play the recorded bells on LVA, the town's radio station. It was a Pascualini, one of the ones that lives behind the fire station. The one they always called Filón. No, that one's brother. The one who married one of those Pautaso girls from El Molle. The Pautasos were those four sisters where every single one of them was good-looking? Right. This guy was married to Delia, one of the middle sisters. The Pascualini whose boy had that accident. No, that was the one where the boy got all those oil burns and had to spend a long time in the hospital in Córdoba. This guy would be that boy's uncle. This is the Pascualini that one time when he went on a trip with the folks from the co-op, the escalator ate his sleeve. And this different experience is perhaps at the heart of the break-up, his partner feeling trapped by the narrator's intensity. Fede also quotes various writers from his library, who in a sense form his companions in his relative isolation from the cultural circles in which he has previously moved: 'Remember Monica Vitti saying, I can't watch the sea for a long time or what's happening on land doesn't interest me anymore?' Anne Carson asks. I set what I'm reading face down on the Bermuda grass and think. […] All I want now is to watch the horizon, the plains, to stare into the distance, let the countryside inundate me, let the sky fill me up, not to think, so that what is happening inside me stops existing all the time. Falco has said in an interview with Croft in Southwest Review published at the time of a Perfect Cemetery that he is more suited to the short-story form and that The Plains was almost an accidental novel formed from fragmentary writing, "notes on a garden I was cultivating at the time, reflections on language, on relationships, on landscape", which is reflected in the nature of the journal entries: This is a very well-constructed work, but I must admit it didn't totally work for me - there was a bit too much on the chard harvest and the yield of the tomato plants, and I'd have liked more on the narrator's relationship. 3 stars. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 29, 2024
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Sep 29, 2024
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Dec 02, 2023
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53
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| 1913867862
| 9781913867867
| 1913867862
| 3.79
| 2,519
| Aug 06, 2024
| Aug 06, 2024
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liked it
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Luckily I am not the same person I was before, that would mean I hadn't learned anything. And I did learn, I think I learned a lot. I have reinvented
Luckily I am not the same person I was before, that would mean I hadn't learned anything. And I did learn, I think I learned a lot. I have reinvented and renamed myself. Inés Experey is not a bad name, it reminds me of who I was and at the same time it banishes my old self (get out, Eresto Pereyra!) And her as well (get out, Charo). Though Yours. Yours is another story. 'Time of the Flies' (2024), Francis Riddle's translation of Claudia Piñeiro's 'El tiempo de las moscas' (2022) is a direct sequel to Tuya (2005), literally 'Yours' although translated by Miranda France as 'All Yours' (2012). That isn't made clear in the novel's English language blurb, perhaps because the earlier book is from a different publisher, Bitter Lemon Press, who had published Piñeiro's work in English until Charco Press took over from Elena Knows - Bitter Lemon Press promoting the works more as crime fiction, whereas Charco "intends to relaunch Piñeiro in English as a writer of ethical weight and commitment". And unfortunately reading this novel stand alone is a rather unsatisfactory experience. While Time of the Flies is a new and different story, there are a lot of references back to the previous novel, including things the reader knows but the characters don't. Time of the Flies opens with Inés being discharged from prison after a 15 year sentence for the crimes she committed in 'All Yours'. The story then picks up a year later - Inés together with Marta, a close friend from her time inside, have set up a business together, FFF, standing for Fumigations Females Fly. Actually it is more two businesses under one brand - as Inés has retrained as a pest-controller, while Marta works as a private investigator, both specialising in female clients. Although the one animal Inés refuses to eliminate are flies, which are instead her passion, one which started when she discovered a floater in her eye, which she mistook for a trapped fly, leading her to read books on flies from the prison library. The novel's plot revolves around a wealthly client, Mrs Bonar, who hires Inés to fumigate her house, but then after a number of visits reveals her true intention. She wants Inés, who is licensed to obtain various products, to obtain for her a pesticide fatal to humans, so that Mrs Bonar can murder her husband's lover, just as Inés (whose backstory she reveals she knows) did 16 years earlier. And Inés needs the generous money Bonar offers to pay for an operation Marta urgently needs. Marta decides she will use her PI skills to investigate (particularly as there is no obvious Mr Bonar) and a complication arises when she sees Inés estranged daughter Laura, who cut off all contact after her mother was jailed, visiting Mrs Bonar's house. And what the reader of All Yours knows, but not Inés and, unfortunately, not the reader of this book who hasn't read the earlier one, is that the 16 year old Lali was pregnant at the time 16 years ago when Inés committed her crime. This generally is the type of crime fiction where the reader - at least the reader of both books - knows more than some of the characters, and Mrs Bonar's true intention is clearer to even those new to the novels than it is to Inés and Marta, so the story can drag a little as we wait for them to catch up. What does redeem the novel in a literary sense are the sections on flies, particularly when it links to two authors in particular, Marguerite Duras and Augusto Monterroso: And there it is, Glantz's article entitled 'The Fly and the Dinosaur' dedicated to the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso. And also a photocopy of 'The Flies' from Monterroso's Perpetual Movement, along with his short story The Fly that Dreamed it Was an Eagle. Laura looks at the sentences she underlined in Glantz's text: 'Yes, I agree with Tito: there are only three possible themes: love, death, and flies.' (...) 'I'm convinced that literature could not exist if flies did not exist' (...) 'Yes, the fly is the most perfect archaeological vestige, the "last transmitter of our clumsy western culture".' She still likes what she underlined when she read it, in her last year of university, if she's not mistaken, and this surprises her because usually when she comes across notes she made in books she wonders why she did so. A person has the right to change as a reader, to change what they'd underline, she thinks. She continues reading, and even though she sometimes finds new phrases that she likes, she'd mark the same ones again. And she takes comfort in the fact that, at least when it comes to Margo Glantz, Monterroso, and flies, she hasn't changed; it's somehow reassuring on a night like this one. She puts the photocopies back into the book, closes it, and takes it to bed with her. And the chapters which interrupt the story with a Greek chorus of commentary, one which directly quotes various feminist writers, such as Duras, Rebecca Solnit, Toni Morrison, Lina Meruane, Vivian Gornick, Natalia Ginsburg, Chimanadna Ngozi Adichie, Angela Davies and Paul B. Preciado. That Preciado is transgender but a feminist writer is important in relation to the novel's plot, with the Greek chorus debating but ultimately rejecting TERF views. I suspect had I known to have read All Yours previously this would have been a 4 star read - and I'd strongly recommend readers start there (as do the top Spanish-language reviews on this site). But on my experience a mid 3 star. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jun 15, 2024
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Dec 02, 2023
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52
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| 1913867846
| 9781913867843
| 1913867846
| 3.74
| 358
| Nov 06, 2019
| Jun 25, 2024
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it was ok
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That’s where I live now, that’s what this whole town is: limbo. That’s what heroin is too. You’re halfway between the world of the living and the worl
That’s where I live now, that’s what this whole town is: limbo. That’s what heroin is too. You’re halfway between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and neither wants to deal with you. Last Date in El Zapotal (2024) is Robin Myers translation of Una cita con la Lady (2019) by Mateo García Elizondo. It begins (translation and original): I came to El Zapotal to die once and for all. I emptied my pockets as soon as I set foot in the town, tossing the keys to the house I left behind in the city, my credit card, anything with my name or photograph. All I've got left are three thousand pesos, twenty grams of opium, and a quarter-ounce of heroin, which had better be enough to kill me. «Vine a Zapotal para morirme de una buena vez. En cuanto puse un pie en el pueblo me deshice de lo que traía en los bolsillos, de las llaves de la casa que dejé abandonada en la ciudad, y de todo el plástico, todo lo que tenía mi nombre o la fotografía de mi rostro. No me quedan más que tres mil pesos, doscientos gramos de goma de opio y un cuarto de onza de heroína, y con esto me tiene que alcanzar para matarme.» The opening lines a very deliberate echo of Rulfo's Pedro Páramo's “Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivía mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo.” ("I came to Comala because I was told my father lived here, a man called Pedro Páramo" in the translation by Douglas J. Weatherford). Our narrator has come to El Zapotal for a last date with his "skinny bride", heroin, one he expects, hopes even, to be fatal, having lost many of his friends to the same drug, his dog through neglect and his love, Valerie, to an OD. El Zapotal, founded as an encampment for the lumber trade, really is at the end of civilisation, with the forest fighting back by reclaiming the village: From what I've heard, the village was founded as an encampment for the lumber trade, because that's all this place has to offer, the only thing of interest.To encourage the expansion of the settlement, the government brought in prostitutes from all over the state, and the outpost started by lumberjacks and whores became El Zapotal. Besides the mostly humble houses, there's a scattering of farms, a couple of sawmills, a chapel, two abandoned haciendas, a convenience store, and a cantina. The dirt road into town exists only for the lumber lorries, laden with amputated trunks, plus the occasional bus, like the one that brought me here. These are the only means of transport into this wasteland, supplying enough beer, cigarettes and Coca-Cola to give the village an illusory air of civilisation. The town, rather like Comala, exists, particularly in the narrator's mind in a liminal state, with him unclear if the interactions he has are imaginary, if those he interacts with are real or ghosts, and indeed which state he is in: When your mind is no longer preoccupied with sensation, with seeking pleasure and dodging pain and disgust, there's a void that opens up, and it starts to fill with shadows, fantastical forms sculpted from the residues of sanity that wash up on the shores of consciousness. Your memory falters, and you fall into a spiral of oblivion that corrodes everything your life once was. But some still-active part of the brain recycles everything that's been buried and anaesthetised, turns it all into a kind of perpetual daydream, totally indistinguishable from everyday life. Reality takes on the bizarre texture of hallucination, and your memories of your life and your dreams become more or less indistinguishable: vague, fragmentary, garbled, and absurd. Myers translation captures this liminal sense perfectly, and in an afterword she explains how she captured the two types of dream in the prose: "oneiric curiosity and nightmarish dread". While a nod to Rulfo's work, the novel's key inspiration lies in the tradition of beat literature, and that on the experience of drugs in particular, such as William S. Burroughs (see e.g. this Spanish-language interview). More accurately, the author explains his interest in the process of altered consciousness, where near-death experiences and those of certain drugs, allow him to explore the topic. But that's ultimately the big issue I had with this book - that's probably my least favourite sub-genre of literary fiction, so a reluctant 2 stars for personal taste as not a novel I appreciated at all, while one I would commend in terms of its literary quality amongst its type. ...more |
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1
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Jun 23, 2024
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Jun 23, 2024
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Dec 02, 2023
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51
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| 191386782X
| 9781913867829
| 191386782X
| 3.68
| 6,878
| Apr 02, 2024
| Jun 04, 2024
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liked it
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Alma shared what she remembered of her dreams as well as what she was vaguely planning. She needed a place to bury her unfinished work, a space honori
Alma shared what she remembered of her dreams as well as what she was vaguely planning. She needed a place to bury her unfinished work, a space honoring all those characters who had never had the chance to tell their stories. She wanted to bring them home to their mother tongue and land. Charco Press have become known for their translations into English of contemporary English literature, starting with their very first book Die My Love, shortlist for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize (a prize they've since won), and longlisted for the International Booker (for which they've subsequently been shortlisted 3 times). But they have more recently launched an "Untranslated" series to run alongside it, as explained at the time in Publishers Weekly: The Untranslated series will embrace texts by English-speaking authors linked by sharing their experience of Latin American culture, as well as opening the door to Latin American authors writing in English. The Edinburgh-based press previously focused solely on literary works by contemporary Latin America authors translated into English. The first two books were by translators who had worked with Charco - Jennifer Croft's novel Homesick (the UK version differing from the US, including in it being presented as a novel) and Daniel Hahn's Catching Fire, a cotemporaneously written diary of his translation of Diamela Eltit's Never Did the Fire. The Cemetery of Untold Stories is of the second type - from a Dominican-American author writing in English (although with a sprinkling of untranslated Spanish). This is Julia Alvarez's seventh novel (alongside poetry, non-fiction and YA/children's literature) and her 1994 novel In the Time of the Butterflies sold a million copies. In the US, this novel has been published, as with the previous 6, by Algonquin Books, an independent press originally but now part of Hachette, but this is the first of her novels to be published in the UK. The novel is narrated by Alma Cruz, a successful novelist, writing under the pen name Scheherazade, and literary professor, living in the US but originally from the Dominican Republic. She retires from her writing and academic career, leaving a number of unfinished works. Rather than trying to complete them, she decides to bury them, building a cemetery on a piece of land she inherited in the Dominican Republic. She wishes to free herself from two unfinished novels in particular - that of her father, and one based on Bienvenida Inocencia Ricardo, the largely forgotten second wife of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Alma had even tried to write a novel combining their stories. BIBENVENIDA + PAPI, that box was labeled. These two most recent failures especially haunted Alma. Bienvenida had been erased from history; Papi had sealed himself off in Alfa Calenda - these were precisely the characters Alma felt drawn to. The silenced ones, their tongues cut off; wives and daughters taking dictation from their husbands or fathers, improving and revising, in fact cowriting the epics, the sonnets, the ballads, with never a credit to their names. Generations of Anons. To close a story, the old people back home would utter a chant. Colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado. This tale is done. Release the duende to the wind. But how to exorcise a story that had never been told? But those two prove to be hard to silence. Whereas she burns post of her papers, and stories, those two she buries 'alive', and when a local woman, Filomena, becomes the caretaker for the Cemetery of Untold Stories, the stories speak to her from their graves, and she learns how they are connected, while also telling them her own story. One key theme of the novel is who has the right to tell their story, and the implicit violation in a author doing so: I am a shapeshifter, Alma concedes. It's a professional handicap. Ever heard of negative capability? As she often told her students, writers are `always betraying someone', to quote Joan Didion. To get at a higher truth, Alma would add, so as not to sound like the schmuck who would throw Abuelita under the bus. As her own abilities waned and the stock market of her popularity plummeted, Alma began to lose faith in this chameleonlike quality, part of her disenchantment with the craft. But it had become a habit, being several people at once. A very well crafted novel, if a little too contrived and sentimental for my taste (although the stories told are anything but - affairs, exile, murders both personal and political). That this is advertised as for 'readers of Isabel Allende’s Violeta' I think identifies the target market well. 3.5 stars. ...more |
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1
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May 26, 2024
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May 28, 2024
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Dec 02, 2023
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50
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| 1913867765
| 9781913867768
| 1913867765
| 3.56
| 80
| unknown
| May 14, 2024
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liked it
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Tidal Waters (2024) is Annie McDermott's translation of Aguas de estuario (2020) by Velia Vidal (the main Spanish edition of the novel is included und
Tidal Waters (2024) is Annie McDermott's translation of Aguas de estuario (2020) by Velia Vidal (the main Spanish edition of the novel is included under the longer name Velia Vidal Romero so doesn't link to this). Vidal was chosen as one of the BBC 100 Women 2022, a list of 100 inspiring and influential women from around the world, and the citation serves to set up this novel. [image] [image] The English edition comes with an introduction from Brazilian philosopher and journalist Djamila Ribeiro, who brought the book into Portuguese translation and Brazil as the start of a project to promote literature written by black women from across South America, what the campaigner Lélia Gonzalez referred to as the 'Amerfican' community. The novel (I think it can be called that) is an epistolary one, consisting of a series of letters (mostly via email) written by the narrator/author over the period May 2015 (when Vidal would have been in her early 30s) to September 2018 to a friend in Medellin (his responses, which the text indicates are brief, are not included). They describe how she and her husband moved from Medellin, after several years living there, back to the Chocó Department in Colombia, which borders Panama and has both Pacific and Caribbean coasts, and, per Wikipedia is "known for hosting the largest Afro-Colombian population in the nation, and a large population of Amerindian and mixed African-Amerindian Colombians." Chocó, this great jungle between two seas. One of the most biodiverse corners of the world, which finished off its beauty with a huge historic mistake: slavery, a mistake we find painful and condemn, but which, in the long run, has allowed us to complete the circle of biodiversity and given this place, already so rich in nature, the good fortune to be inhabited not solely by indigenous people, but also by mixed-race mestizos and direct descendants of Africa. All three, on coming together here, in this land of water and rain, seas and humidity, were fertilised and gave rise to a particular culture: the culture of Chocó. It's often said that we Chocoans 'are the Pacific', that we're 'Africa in Colombia', and there's some truth to both these expressions. However, they also reduce us, because that's not all we are. Originally the couple move to her hometown of Bahia Solano on the Pacific Coast, but when Vidal establishes her Motete Foundation, which promotes reading amongst the deprived communities in the area, she spends much of her time in and around the city of Quibdó. And so this story is coming together. This basket, this Motete, is filling up. The slogan for my project is `Contenidos que tejen' — contents that weave — and every day I like it more. Every day I realise that these contents are weaving fulfilment and happiness within me. Do you know what a motete is yet? I think I sent you a photo. It's basically a basket used by indigenous people for carrying food, with a strap that goes over the head. `Motete' is what we call those baskets on the North Pacific coast (Bahia Solano, Jurad6, Nuqui) and in Panama. The thing is, motetes have always been used to carry food for the body: plantains, bushmeat, fish. Our idea is to fill them with food for the soul: art, culture, books. And just as motetes are woven by hand, I thought these new contents would also form a fabric: the fabric of society, of community, the fabric of souls. At some point — sooner than you think — I'll need you, so we can keep on weaving a big motete and keep on filling it up. I haven't seen the sea since December and I miss it, of course. This is a long, sustained absence of sea, but also one that I've chosen. I'm feeling it deeply. However, I'm surer by the day that the sea is inside me; it's part of what moves me to do this work. The story she tells via the letters is a very personal one, indeed at one point she likens the self-discovery in what she is doing to reading a new book of her life: Travelling along a stretch of the Quito river one day with forty teachers and forty-five books, meeting three women a couple of days later to discuss reading promotion in Chocó, then getting a phone call from a mother to check that the women's and children's clubs start on Saturday. This is how I'm reading another Chocó, discovering another story. I'm rereading Velia and discovering personality traits that feel new. Characters appear who really are writing a new story between the water and the jungle. The idea of development is dealt with in a paragraph that seems almost incidental, and the characters who take centre stage in most things we read aren't even mentioned in these new texts. Some months ago I was saying with total certainty that Chocó is where I belong in the world, the place I need to be, my base, from which I can go anywhere and still always return, and where I feel complete even though it lacks so many things, and I wasn't wrong. Now I know, too, that being Seño Velia is my mission on this earth; it's like it's what I was born to do. The personal side includes confessions about her own love-life - her marriage with her husband is one most would describe as an open relationship, although she comments:We're not exactly an open couple; we're a strange invention that's very particular to us, in which these kinds of things happen. I'd say this invention is the result of many conversations, misunderstandings and infidelities that we've been able to address and which have made us accept how implausible it is to love just one person for all eternity. We decided to stay together on the basis that it's possible to build a life together while also admitting that sometimes other people appear who we want to have sex with, and that there's no reason for that to disrupt our shared life. But at its heart, the novel covers the work that Vidal does in bringing communities together and promoting the local culture via her reading project, and the joys that literature can bring, both to those she reaches but also herself, when the Foundation is struggling with bureaucracy, funding and the adverse effects of the guerrilas and the narco-economy: Then I'll be back here again with my long letters and my stories: on Saturday, when I read a José Manuel Arango poem with the children and talked about Porfirio Barba jacob, I remembered the importance of poetry in my life. It's like bathing in beauty or drinking the awareness of life in a single gulp; it's what it means to exist and, in the midst of it all, to submerge yourself in a tiny space that can reveal everything. It brings with it nostalgia, pain, happiness, many possible emotions. When I read a poem, it's like taking a deep breath and the air bringing with it the feeling described by the poem. I remembered, too, that my life is full of poetry thanks to the sea, the Chocó sunsets, the water that falls from the sky and flows over the land, and this beautiful habit of writing to you and waiting for a reply. And no one can live without poetry. A surprisingly effective novel - the simple format proving powerful. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 14, 2024
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Apr 15, 2024
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Dec 02, 2023
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49
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| 1913867803
| 9781913867805
| 1913867803
| 4.24
| 4,350
| Apr 2018
| Apr 09, 2024
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really liked it
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Every time I think that it's over, that once and for all I've finally said everything I have to say, it somehow comes back to haunt me. It comes back
Every time I think that it's over, that once and for all I've finally said everything I have to say, it somehow comes back to haunt me. It comes back in every voice that sounds like his, in every photograph from my childhood, the memories with my family, the town where I took my first steps. It comes back every time I get on a bicycle or the swings at a park, when summer comes and I miss the window displays at my aunt's shop. But it also comes back in nightmares, in scratches on my body, even in the pain of other women's stories that I hear and who share the same emptiness. It comes back every time I see a gun on TV, when I catch some guy looking at my ass, or when people ask me if I'm feeling better. And every time I relive it I feel the same way: this will never end. And I fight with myself to destroy every image, to try and curb that pain that surfaces every morning and rips my guts out. I blame him for being a real son of a bitch. I blame my aunt for turning a blind eye. I blame my parents for their absence, my paediatrician for not noticing my battered vagina, and also my lawyer for being a soulless jerk. But it's never enough. Why Did You Come Back Every Summer (2024) is Maureen Shaughnessy's translation of Por qué volvías cada verano (2018) by Belén López Peiró. The novel is based on the true-story of the sexual abuse the author was subjected to between the ages of 13-17, by her uncle, the husband of her mother's youngest sister and a police commissioner. She filed a criminal complaint in 2014, when she was 22 (and her uncle 47) and novel tells of the obstacles she encountered, both from officialdom and her own family (particularly her aunt and cousin), in pursuing this. The original book was published in 2018, with the case still ongoing, and inspired other women to tell their stories. Notably at the end of that year, the actress Thelma Fardin filed charges against actor Juan Darthés for sexual assault and rape 10 years earlier, when he was 45 and she was 16, and Fardin cited, and recommended to others, 'Por qué volvías cada verano' as the book that gave her the courage to speak up. The novel opens: Y entonces, ¿por qué volvías cada verano? ¿Te gusta sufrir? ¿Por qué no te quedabas en tu casa? Allá en Capital, cagándote de calor. Ah, no. Cierto que no podías, que no tenías a nadie para que te cuide. Con más razón. Encima de que te ayudamos, de que te dimos una familia, nos hi-ciste esto. No te queríamos, solo te recibíamos porque tu mamá nos daba regalos. Nos conseguía vestidos, viajes, perfumes. Todo a cambio de te-nerte a vos acá. De llevarte con nosotros a cenar, de sacarte a pasear como a un perro. Te enseñamos a limpiar, dejaste de ser la porteña bo-luda que no sabía ni tender su cama. Tampoco lavar los platos, siempre los dejabas sucios. Acá te dimos un escobillón y empezaste a barrer. Te dimos unos trapos y un poco de Blem y empezaste a lustrar. Primero las habitaciones, después el living y por último la cocina. Siempre en ese or-den, ¿te acordás? Una vez incluso te enojaste porque dejamos tu bolso en el patio para que no ensucie. O porque tiramos tus alpargatas hediondas y tus bombachas vencidas por tus hormonas. Entendeme, en esta casa soportamos todo menos la mugre. Y sí, acumulaste bronca... pero ¿salir con esto? No, no me lo esperaba. Siempre tuviste celos de Florencia. Por-que ella tenía muchos amigos, porque podía salir a bailar y tenía mucha ropa. Ah, no, pará. Ya sé por qué lo hacés. Porque ella tiene una familia que la quiere. Y vos no. So then, why did you come back every summer? Do you like to suffer? Why didn't you just stay home? There, in Buenos Aires, dying of heat. Ah. No. That's right — it's because you couldn't. You didn't have anyone to take care of you Now it makes sense. We were the ones to help you, we gave you a family — and this is how you repay us? We didn't love you, we only invited you here because your mum showered us with gifts. She gave us dresses, paid for trips and perfumes. All in exchange for having you here.Taking you out to dinner with us, taking you out for a walk, like a dog. We taught you how to clean.You stopped being the helpless little city girl who didn't even know how to make her own bed. Or wash the dishes, you always left them dirty in the sink. Here we handed you the broom and you started to sweep. We gave you some rags and a can of furniture polish and you learned to shine. First the bedrooms, then the living room and the kitchen last. Always in that order. Do you remember? You even got mad once when we left your bag out on the patio so it wouldn't clutter up the house. Or when we threw out your tattered espadrilles and your hormone-stained underwear. Listen here, in this house we put up with everything except filth. So, naturally, your anger built up... but now you've taken it too far. To be honest, I wasn't expecting this. You've always been jealous of Florencia because she had lots of friends, because she could go out dancing and had many clothes. Oh but, wait. I know why you did it. Because she has a family who loves her. And you don't. The speaker is - as with the rest of the novel - never named. But by context this is her aunt speaking, accusing her of making up the accusations and a lack of gratitude for how she and her husband, the abuser, gave the author/narrator a home to stay in every summer, away from the heat of the city and her own difficult family situation. There then follows a reproduction (in the English version, a translation) of an official police document - the actual complaint made by the author in 2014: [image] (from the original novel) The last part, in translation, conveying the stark but horrifying truth: my uncle sexually abused me repeatedly between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. The form of the book continues in this way - brief vignettes from 20 different voices, unnamed but usually clear by context - various members of her family (some supportive, others less so) and different lawyers and prosecutors - interspersed with key legal documents, such as interviews with witnesses and medical and psychological reports. The former are novelised, but the latter are reproductions of the actual texts. It makes for a short and intense read - indeed the book contains blank pages between each of the sections, which the translator notes she and the English publisher agreed to give the reader pauses for breath, although I read the book cover to cover breathelessly. Subsequent to the original novel, 9 years after her accusation, but prior to publication of this translation, the case finally concluded in January 2013, with López Peiró’s abuser receiving a ten year jail sentence. She wrote about this in El Pais at the time: Se acabó. Ya está. Terminó. C’est fini. Me liberé. ¿Qué más? Después de nueve años y una denuncia. Declaraciones, pericias psicológicas, viajes de ida y vuelta a comisarías, fiscalías, tribunales de la nación. Un expediente: 500 páginas. Dos abogados. Una procuradora. Una comisión de justicia. Terapia por 15 años. ¡La mitad de mi vida! Mi familia entera partida en dos. Un pueblo encubriendo al abusador. Siete años de talleres de escritura. Dos libros publicados. (the original) It's over. That's it. It's finished. C'est fini. I'm free.What more? After nine years and a criminal complaint. Affidavits, expert witness reports, trips back and forth to police stations, district attorneys, national courts. A five-hundred page case record. Two lawyers. One prosecutor. A justice commission. Fifteen years of therapy. Half my life! My entire family split in two. A whole town covering up the abuser. Seven years of writing workshops. Two books published. (Shaughnessy's translation in her afterword - NB the second book the non-fictional Donde no hago pie, published in 2021, describing the legal process) And she was finally able to name her abuser - Claudio Marcelino Sarlo. Powerful and, if not entered too late (April published books can miss out from not being ready for submission), a strong International Booker contender. ...more |
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| 1913867730
| 4.55
| 9,101
| 2020
| Feb 20, 2024
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It doesn't take long for your colour to seep through your body and determine the way you exist in the world. And though your life will be seen through
It doesn't take long for your colour to seep through your body and determine the way you exist in the world. And though your life will be seen through your colour, though your attitudes and lifestyle will be seen through this too, you somehow have to preserve some part of you that doesn't fit into that. The Dark Side of Skin is Bruna Dantas Lobato's translation of O Avesso da Pele by Jeferson Tenório, which in the original won the prestigious Premio Jabuti in the Romance Literário (Literary Fiction) category. The framing principle of the novel is Pedro clearing out the things from his father Henrique's flat after the latter's death and using the possessions he finds as prompt to narrate to himself (but in the form of a second person address to his father) Henrique's life. Henrique, in his 50s at the time of his death was a teacher of literature within the underfunded state school system and a believer in the reedeming power of literature despite the evidence throughout his own life that he, and his pupils, would be judged in Brazilian society primarily on the colour of their skin: Você sempre dizia que os negros tinham de lutar, pois o mundo branco havia nos tirado quase tudo e que pensar era o que nos restava. É necessário preservar o avesso, você me disse. Preservar aquilo que ninguém vê. Porque não demora muito e a cor da pele atravessa nosso corpo e determina nosso modo de estar no mundo. E por mais que sua vida seja medida pela cor, por mais que suas atitudes e modos de viver estejam sob esse domínio, você, de alguma forma, tem de preservar algo que não se encaixa nisso, entende? Pois entre músculos, órgãos e veias existe um lugar só seu, isolado e único. E é nesse lugar que estão os afetos. E são esses afetos que nos mantêm vivos. You always said that black people had to fight, because the white world had taken almost everything from us and thinking was all we had left. You need to protect the inside, you told me. Preserve the part of you no one can see. Because it doesn't take long for your colour to seep through your body and determine the way you exist in the world. And though your life will be seen through your colour, though your attitudes and lifestyle will be seen through this too, you somehow have to preserve some part of you that doesn't fit into that, you know? Because somewhere in your muscles and organs and veins there's a place all your own, remote and unique. And that's where your love is. And this love is what keeps us alive. That theme, which runs through the book, it is strongest point. One of the most powerful sections of the novel is an enumeration of the times Henrique has been stopped-and-searched, typically because the police are searching for a criminal and simply stop, with their weapons drawn, anyone with dark skin vaguely fitting the description (in some cases even when the description specifies light skin). (view spoiler)[And we later learn Henrique was shot dead by policemen when, after being stopped, he instinctively reached into his bag to show them his copy of Crime and Punishment. (hide spoiler)] On the less positive side, the more general story of Pedro's parents, and his own life, was a rather conventional tale, and the organising principle doesn't seem followed through with no real reference to the objects / possessions and Pedro knowing rather more than any child would of his parents' lives, excused by a brief coda where Pedro calls the story an 'invented truth' based on the pieces of their story they did tell him. Read 25-26 December, 3.5 stars ...more |
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| 1913867455
| 3.94
| 4,224
| 2020
| Jan 2024
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really liked it
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Shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize - deservedly so and Winner of the Shadow Jury Prize from a group of bloggers and online reviewers
Shortlisted for the 2024 International Booker Prize - deservedly so and Winner of the Shadow Jury Prize from a group of bloggers and online reviewers of which I am part It’s not a river, it’s this river. [image] Not a River (2024) is Annie McDermott's translation of Selva Almada's No es un río (2020). It forms the last part of a loose trilogy of novels centred on male characters in remote or hostile environments as the author explained at the time of publication with: 1) The Wind that Lays Waste (2019) translated by Chris Andrews from her debut El viento que arrasa (2012) - my review 2) Brickmakers (2021) translated by Annie McDermott from Ladrilleros (2013) - my review "Cuando empecé El viento que arrasa no sabía que iban a seguir estas dos novelas, de hecho cuando escribí Ladrilleros tampoco lo sabía. Pero cuando aparecieron las primeras imágenes de esta novela pensé que entre las tres podían formar una especie de trilogía porque están concentradas en personajes masculinos y en el universo de los varones." Almada also writes short-stories, poetry and journalistic non-fictional (chronicles) of which in English we've had Dead Girls (2020) translated by Annie McDermott from Chicas muertas (2014) - my review. All of the above in English are published by Charco Press, this their 47th book overall - I've read and reviewed them all at my dedicated shelf. 'Not a River' was inspired by a conversation at a barbecue with a friend who told how he had caught a giant stingray in the Paraná river by shooting it with a gun, which gives rise to the scene that opens the novel. Two men in their 50s, Enero and El Negro, are fishing on an island in the Paraná with Tilo, the son of their late friend Eusebio who drowned in the same waters. They catch a giant stingray by shooting it, and hang it from a tree, where it attracts the attention of the locals. But when Enero and friends throw the fish's body back in the river, it raises the ire of the islanders, led by Aguirre. He stays where he is. Just over the road the woods begin. He knows them like the palm ofhis hand. Better than he's ever known another person. Better than he knows Cesar, who's his friend. Better than he knows his sister, who's a mystery still. Better than he knew his nieces, poor things, they never had the time. He knows the woods better than he knows himself. Some wind gets in between the trees and it's so quiet at this hour that the rustle of leaves could be the breath of a giant beast. He listens as it breathes. As it huffs and puffs. The branches move like ribs, inflating and deflating with the air that's sucked deep inside. They're not just trees. Not just bushes. They're not just birds. Not just bugs. The quitilipi isn't a wildcat, though perched on a branch it might look like one. They're not just any guinea pigs. It this guinea pig. This yarará. This bromeliad, unique, its centre red like a woman's blood. If he looks farther on, to where the road slopes down, he can just about see the river. A glint that makes his eyes water. And again: it's not a river, it's this river. He's spent more time with it than with anyone. So. What gave them the right! It wasn't a ray. It was that ray. A beautiful creature stretched out in the mud at the bottom, she'd have shone white like a bride in the lightless depths. Flat on the riverbed or gliding in her tulle, magnolia from the water, searching for food, chasing transparent larvae, skeletal roots.The hooks buried in her sides, the tug-of-war all afternoon till she can't tight any more. The gunshots. Pulled from the river to be thrown back in later. Dead. The format of the text and lack of chapter breaks is deliberate, to give the effect of prose that flows like a river (gráficamente también se parece a la corriente de un río). The novel focuses on both the history of the three friends Enero, El Negro and Eusibio, but also of Aguirre, his sister Siomara and her two daughters, Mariela and Lucy, who invite Tilo to a dance, although a local shopkeeper warns them off "Get a grip pal, can't you see they're long gone" (view spoiler)[It becomes clear as the novel progresses that the girls died in a car accident returning from another dance some years ago, and Tilo has encountered their ghosts (hide spoiler)] With Aguirre and his friends intent on punishing the fishermen, and Tilo heading for the dance to meet Mariela and Lucy, the sense of impending violence ratchets as this powerful and compact novel heads to a conclusion. Another impressive work from Almada and McDermott, whose afterword explains some of the context of the novel and some of the translation choices she made. Read 22nd December, 4 stars ...more |
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| 3.47
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| Aug 2015
| Nov 14, 2023
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liked it
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Writing only shows itself fully when it's read. That is the moment when it says something more than, or different from, that which it signals. It's th
Writing only shows itself fully when it's read. That is the moment when it says something more than, or different from, that which it signals. It's the paradox that everyone who writes knows well: when we express our thought, it changes. I'm not referring to language in general, but rather, as I've tried to describe, the specific conditions that obtain for all writing, whether material or immaterial. I know that this may seem like a vague conclusion. But I'm not sure that one should always be conclusive, especially when we turn our attention to those strange emanations that survive the moment of writing and point to something that is beyond the analogy of the word. So concludes Forgotten Manuscripts (2023) in Jeffrey Lawrence's translation from the original Últimas noticias de la escritura (2015) by the late Sergio Chejfec (1956-2022), prepared largely with the author's input but published after his death. Or in keeping with the spirit of the novel, the quote is better rendered by a digital photo of me reading the analogue printed copy (better still if I had annotated the text in pen; although annotating a printed book is one area where my and the author's sensibilities depart). [image] Forgotten Manuscript is an essay on the art of writing which considers both its physical form and its performative aspect, and in particular the new possibilities opened up by the digital, which in a sense bring us back to those of the written manuscript, after the more limited possibilities of the printed typewritten form. Sometimes this analogical foundation col0nizes even the most realist of forms, for example, in texts whose construction and organization are dominated by a particular kind of verisimilitude that derives from the communicative structures of digital media. These narratives adopt the protocols of messaging apps, Twitter, and email, and incorporate subject lines, timestamps, and message fields — all for the purpose of 'representing' contemporary human interaction by way of a revitalized communicative sensibility. Such texts seem to point in two directions at the same time: to the epistolary form that has had such a decisive effect on literary history and to the visual iconography of the contemporary computer screen. Or to put it slightly differently, they appropriate digital tools in order to elaborate upon conventional literary modes. In these kinds of visual reproductions, which draw from different fields and often correspond to an individual operation of the keyboard or new configuration of an image, the literary device perfectly replicates its digital equivalent. These are heavily mimetic strategies and perhaps a bit limited from a compositional perspective, in that they demonstrate a certain acritical passivity in relation to technological advances, from which they derive what we might call their graphic eloquence. In this sense, they are undoubtldly naturalistic. But in spite of all this, they still serve as crucial signal of the pressure exerted by these new format, which might very well indicate the development of new kinds of of verisimilitude. While in the Anglosphere it feels these avenues have ben relatively underexplored, particulatly in conventional literary circles, in Argentinian literature Chejfec is able to draw on a long-line of innovative literary works which question the very form they use, centred of course around the great Borges, but including his mentor Macedonia Fernandez, Bioy Caseres, Silvina and Victoria Ocampo, Ricardo Piglia, Manuel Puig, Sylvia Molloy and through to Juan José Saer and Chejfec himself. Chejfec also draws on various visual artists who in their exhibitions and performance art have often taken the form furthest. This is a intellectually rich novel, which doesn't always make for an easy read - at times it felt closer to an academic paper - particularly when the anglo-reader has less familiarity with some of the works cited, and from a personal perspective the focus on the hand-written also did not resonate (for me any written notes are an ephemeral aid to be re-typed in minutes). So 3.5 stars based on my personal experience, but recommended. (Read 14-15 December 2023, 3.5 stars rounded to 3) ...more |
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| 1913867552
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| 4.28
| 6,711
| May 2015
| Jul 11, 2023
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really liked it
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Motherhood is full of little failures that pass unnoticed. If the circumstances had been different, no one, not even me, would've ever known who I cou
Motherhood is full of little failures that pass unnoticed. If the circumstances had been different, no one, not even me, would've ever known who I could become. Some mothers have all the luck; life never puts them to any kind of test. I only have a little luck. A Little Luck ia Francis Riddle's translation of Claudia Piñeiro's 2015 novel Una suerte pequeña and published by Charco Press, following the same author/translator/publisher's shortlisting for the 2022 International Booker Prize for Elena Knows. The novel opens after an epigraph from Alice Munro (see below) with a short but ominous paragraph telling of a woman sitting in a queue of cars taking it in turn to cross the railway tracks around the barriers on an already lowered level crossing. It then takes us to the main narrative section, part of a 'Handbook' written by the first person narrator, a woman who now goes under the name of Mary Logan. She is returning from Boston, where she has lived for 20 years, to her native Argentina, on a business trip (she works in an educational institute) but one that will take both to her old neighbourhood and to a school that has particular, painful, memories, a place I loved and hated with similar intensity. She is now known by a different name, looks very different (her hair shorter and a different colour, her weight significantly less, her eye colour even changed by contact lenses) and sounds different (her accent more americanised and her voice deepened by dysphonia induced by the stress of what caused her to move suddenly to Boston), and the school don't know who she is, indeed think she is American, so while she expects to recognise some people, she doesn't expect them to recognise her and I know the only person I care about seeing won't be there. The book is slow to give up its mysteries, so no spoilers here, but the telling of the story (what we're reading, we learn, is designed to be read by that very person) is key to the novel itself. But the novel is also strong on the inadequacy of narrative to describe how memory and instinct functions: It all happens in a flash: Mr Galvin asks what animal, the doorman says murciélago, I think bat in English, the memory of the bats from my childhood in Caballito, and I automatically move my hands to my hair — not remembering that I now wear it cut like a man's, short red hair that the bat from my mother's story could never get tangled in. The whole sequence occurs in an instant. It takes so many words to recount events that occur in a matter of minutes, seconds, fractions of time that are barely perceptible. Things happen so quickly that the words needed to describe them are never able to keep up. Just as it can take years for fleeting events to be forgotten. Sometimes, those memories will never fade. An instant can stay with us our entire lives, relived in words a thousand times over like a punishment. Time is compressed and the narration of that time has to expand it to make it comprehensible. Various literary references are embedded in the literature, explicitly so in the case of books the man she comes to live with in Boston gave her to read, hoping to tease out exactly what she fled Argentina from. One of those is Alice Munro's story "The Children Stay" from which the aforementioned epigraph is taken, words that do unlock her story: This is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get. Although in Mary Lohan / Marilé Lauría / María Elena Pujol's case the pain was incurred to avoid pain for others, not to get anything for herself. But she comes to find a form of happiness towards the novel's end: Talvez a felicidade seja isso, um instante onde estar, um momento qualquer em que as palavras sobram, porque seriam precisas muitas para o contar. Atrever-se a tomá-lo na sua condensação, sem permitir que elas, na sua ânsia de o narrar, lhe façam perder a sua intensidade. Um tempo comprimido e o fracasso da narrativa que o expande. A felicidade como uma imagem para contemplar em silêncio. Maybe that's all happiness is, an instant inhabited, a random moment in which words are unnecessary because it would take too many of them to describe it. To accept the instant in its pure, condensed form, without allowing language and its obsession with narration to dilute the intensity. Time compressed and narration's failed attempts to expand it. Happiness like an image to be contemplated in silence. This is an impressive work, perhaps more conventional though that the sort of novel I'd read in English and rather less political than Elena Knows. A (spoiler-heavy) interview with the author here: https://southwestreview.com/each-abys... ...more |
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Nov 26, 2022
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| 1913867692
| 3.69
| 1,982
| Jun 07, 2022
| Oct 24, 2023
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liked it
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I regret so many things that their mere enumeration solidifies behind my forehead and keeps me from thinking. I regret accepting the job on the cow,
I regret so many things that their mere enumeration solidifies behind my forehead and keeps me from thinking. I regret accepting the job on the cow, I regret committing to apply for the grant, I regret allowing myself to be saddled with a necrophiliac cat. I regret meeting Axel, I regret falling in love with Axel. I regret not being unequivocal with Susan: you two won't fit in my life, or in my house, or even on my sofa. What I most regret is not putting a stop to my sister's litany of packages: if I go back over all the boxes she has sent me, it's easy to see that she was preparing me for this last one, the coup de grace. The Delivery (2023) is Megan McDowell's translation of Margarita García Robayo's La encomienda (2022) and the third book by the author/translator I've read after the novella+story collection Fish Soup and the novel Holiday Heart. All three were published by Charco Press, this their 45th book overall - I've read and reviewed them all at my dedicated shelf. The Delivery opens: My sister likes to send me packages. It's ridiculous, because we live far apart and most of the things she sends get ruined on the way. Far is too short a word once it is translated into geography: five thousand three hundred kilometres is the distance separating me from my family. My family is her. And my mother, but I don't have any contact with my mother. I don't think my sister does, either. She hasn't mentioned her in years, though I assume she still takes care of all her affairs. Sometimes I wonder about what happened to the house we lived in as children, but I don't ask, because the answer could come with information I'd rather not have. The narrator of The Delivery lives, rootlessly, in Buenos Aires; her original home while not stated is, from clues, Cartagena in Colombia. Living here is an accident, I could just as well be anywhere else. My geographical location determines the mailing address for my sister’s packages and not much more. Everything else - bills, correspondence, work - comes to my email. My only superpower I once told Axel, is that I can do what I do in any studio apartment with good Wi-Fi on the planet. I’d moved many times without any great disruption. The secret was to live with the bare minimum, and avoid getting settled. She works on an assignments basis as a copywriter for an advertising agency (her current project has elements of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, promoting happy beef cows), although has aspirations as a novelist, and is applying for a residency in the Netherlands. Her only contact with home is via her older sister, via fortnightly chats and the packages (encomiedas) she sends, full of drawings from her nieces, old family snapshots and food which was inevitably spoiled by the time it is delivered. The author has commented in interviews that the “encomienda” is a Latin American custom that she had to explain when promoting the novel in Spain. (As an aside the term also refers, indeed seems more commonly associated with, a 16th century 'Spanish labour system that rewarded conquerors with the labour of conquered non-Christian peoples' - per Wikipedia - which implies an interesting new dimension to the novel's title although not one I've seen the author reference). The narrator as well as being rather rootless in her residency, doesn't seem terribly keen on ties and commitments at all - whether it be the temporary nature of her job; her commitment to her partner; her friendships (she prefers friends who are cruel as that creates no obligation); or attempts from neighbours to get her to babysit or take responsibility for the neighbour cat. Indeed a rather key line occurs early in the novel: Kinship is an invisible thread, and you have to picture it constantly in order to remember it’s there. El parentesco es un hilo invisible, toca imaginarlo todo el tiempo para recordar que está ahí. And as the novel progresses we learn more of her childhood, where her and her sister spent weekends with their mother, who was rather loose in her parenthood, but weeks with their aunt: I have more X-rays that photographs from my childhood … [My aunt] was like a formal boyfriend you have to return to after a passionate weekend with a beautiful, adventurous heroin addict. All of which nicely sets up the novel's key concept - as the story has rather hinted and the English blurb gives away, the latest delivery (encomieda) from her sister contains a surprise - her mother. The author has said the only book she re-read while writing this was Kafka's Die Verwandlung, and the surreal arrival of her mother serves in a similar way to Gregor Samsa's metamorphosis. The Delivery leaves it cleverly ambiguous as to whether this actually happened or is in the narrator's imagination leaving the reader nicely caught in the Todorovian middle ground, althugh my reading favoured the latter. There is also a further Kafka link towards the novel's end where the narrator find herself on 'trial' in front of her residents' association for reasons that are unclear to her. An interesting novel, although at times it can feel a little too much of an intellectual exercise. 3.5 stars. ...more |
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| 191386765X
| 9781913867652
| 191386765X
| 3.97
| 1,240
| Jul 15, 2020
| Sep 05, 2023
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really liked it
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Ezequiel Martínez Estrada wrote that the pampa, crushed by the metropolis, denied by the city, was now emerging from the deep and conquering (reconque
Ezequiel Martínez Estrada wrote that the pampa, crushed by the metropolis, denied by the city, was now emerging from the deep and conquering (reconquering) Buenos Aires. Normal life unfolds on the surface, mentally abolishing that sub-city of dark and latent galleries. No one thinks of that underground. No one pays it any attention. But just see what happens up above when what’s submerged re-emerges, when the clandestine city undermines the visible one, when the suppressed flow returns towards what suppresses. Confession is Daniel Hahn's translation (apparently his 100th book!) of Martín Kohan's 2020 novel Confesión, and the latest from the wonderful Charco Press, tne 44th of their novels, all of which I've read and reviewed here. This is a fascinating novel, a triptych of three pieces in different styles (one divided into two streams) which adds up to a fascinating portrait of the pressures of live in Argentina under military rule, centred around one woman, the narrator's grandmother. The first section 'Mercedes' opens in the small city, in Buenos Aires province, of that name in 1941 (or rather looking back on 1941 from nearer the present day as the stories have been relayed to the narrator): Father, I have sinned. I've sinned, or I think I have, said, and says, Mirta Lopez, my grandmother. Who wasn't my grandmother yet, of course: she was only twelve. Kneeling in the confessional at the church of San Patricio, over in Mercedes, aware of Father Stine, who was leaning forward, just like her, towards the porous wooden grille, in the comingled smell of incense and the damp of the floor and walls, in the thick gloom from the stained-glass windows that are too high up and probably dirty, as she awaited the double promise of understanding and punishment, of acceptance and rebuke, of indulgence and sanction, presenting tolerance with something maybe intolerable, approaching forgiveness with something perhaps unforgivable, Mirta Lopez, my grandmother, the girl who would much later be my grandmother, white blouse and blue skirt and an elastic headband, also blue, holding and ordering her hair, said this: I have sinned, and then: or I think I have.The verbs conjugated in that way, the present perfect, an appropriate form for confession and for all solemn pronouncements (for promises, the future: I won't do it again; for sins, the present perfect: I have lied). She said and says, in those exact words, and although when speaking today she raises her head, for a better evocation, at the time she lowered it, ashamed: chin touching her chest, her eyes lost on her own hands, a contained sob. Mirta possible sin is her first feelings of sexual attraction to a boy, the elder son (or elder living son, his twin brothers have died at a young age) of the distiguished Videlas family, himself 4-5 years older. As this strand of the story continues over the year's Mirta's innocent feelings become more overtly sexual, and at the same time her initially naive confessions to her Priest more disingenuous. The section ends with Mirta's feeling unacknowledged, let alone consumated, and them each marrying different people in 1947-8. A second stream (I use the term deliberately) in this first section is a series of shorter pieces on the Río de la Plata, on whose shores Buenos Aires stands, drawing on the work of various Argentian writers including Rodolfo Walsh, Borges, Juan José Saer, João Guimarães Rosa (of course Brazilian), Eduardo Mallea, Adolfo Prieto and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. The latter is behind the comment that opens my review, and as this strand progresses the focus moves from the river itself, sometimes seen as an island sea, to the smaller underground streams in Buenos Aires itself. The second section, 'Airport', set in 1977, is told in a reportage style of brief statements and rather neatly shows how these two sections link. It tells of what seemed initially to this reader a rather unrealistic plan to assassinate the military dictator and his entourage by leftist guerrilas, using the underground sewers and streams of Buenos Aires to transport and plant a large bomb under an airport runway, timed to explode as a military plane takes off. That leader is Jorge Rafael Videla, who the reader could have recognised as the elder son in the 'Mercedes' section from the family name and history. And the incident is actually a real, although unsuccessful one - see for example here for the details. The map of the Maldonado Stream storm sewer used by the real-life bombers: [image] The third section, 'Truco' is set in the present day, with the narrator's grandmother, Mirta, now in a nursing home, her short-term memory unreliable, but her long-term memories still clear, and her present-day wits enough to give her grandson, the narrator, a strong match in a game of Truco (whose rules an appendix attempts to explain for the reader, not entirely successfully - interestingly Hahn says he translated the novel without understanding the rules). Again there are two streams, although this time interwoven in real-time, each with a link back to the confession theme, as the narrator and his grandmother play cards, the game involving a considerable amount of bluffing, deduction and stake-raising, but also as he confesses to him more about what happened the day his father, her son, was "disappeared" by the Junta's military police. If there was a more direct connection of the characters in this part to those in 'Airport' I missed it, although the link to guerrila activity, and forced abduction of those suspected of being involved, is clear, and the narrator's grandmother provides a link, via her wished-for relationship with the regime's leader. Overall, this is very well done, and, as always, Hahn's translation brings the English version to life. It is a novel where the English reader has to work harder to unlock references that would, I suspect, have been much more obvious to readers of the original, although that challenge, and the consequent knowledge gained, is part of the the beauty of translated literature. ...more |
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The worst month to start a childhood from scratch on the prairies, beneath the soft sob of the snowflakes. El peor mes para recomenzar una infancia en The worst month to start a childhood from scratch on the prairies, beneath the soft sob of the snowflakes. El peor mes para recomenzar una infancia en las estepas, bajo el llanto suave de los copos. Over to you ChatGPT, or Ava as you suggested I call you: "Fresh Dirt From the Grave, the latest release from Charco Press, is a collection of six short stories by award-winning Ecuadorian author Giovanna Rivero. Rivero has published several books of poetry and fiction, exploring themes related to gender, race, and violence. She has received numerous literary awards and was named as one of the "100 Most Influential Women in Ecuador" by the country's government in 2018. Her writing style has been described as part of the "New Latin American Gothic" movement, and she is happy for her work to be considered in dialogue with authors such as Mariana Enríquez and Mónica Ojeda, although she is reluctant to be limited by genre labels. Translated by Isabel Adey from the original 2021 novel Tierra fresca de su tumba, Fresh Dirt From the Grave marks the 42nd novel published by Charco Press, all of which I have read and reviewed. The stories in Fresh Dirt From the Grave explore themes of violence, trauma, and the macabre, with the first story, "Blessed Are The Meek," drawing inspiration from the horrific ghost rapes that occurred in the Bolivian Mennonite community in the mid-2000s. The novelist Miriam Toews also portrayed these crimes in her 2018 novel Women Talking. Rivero's latest work has been praised for its powerful storytelling and evocative prose, taking readers on a journey through the dark and often disturbing aspects of human experience. Through her writing, she offers insights into the complexities of trauma, memory, and resilience, giving voice to the struggles and triumphs of marginalized communities in Latin America." Thanks and back to my views: This is an eclectic collection varied in style and content: As Ada notes, the first story (19pp) is based on the gas facilitated rapes in the Bolivian Mennonite community, and is a revenge story told from the perspective of one of the victims who decides to literally bury the past sins committed against her. The second, Fish. Turtle, Vulture (21pp) is also based on a real story, that of Salvador Alvarenga who survived over 400 days lost at sea, part of it with a younger less experienced crewmate who did not survive. The two men made a pact that if either was the sole survivor, they would visit the other parents, a pledge Alvarenga fulfilled. In this story, with the names and some of the details changed, Rivero imagines the visit, with the bereaved mother ominously determined to discover the truth of what happened. The third, It Looks Human When It Rains (26pp) begins with the epigraph of a haiku, and starts with a very different, poetic, flavour, told from the perspective of Keiko, an older woman from the wave of Japanese agricultural workers who moved to the country in the 1950s, and who teaches origami to the local prisoners. But gradually her memories of her daughter, and another child she and her husband, who she always refers to distantly as Mr Sugiyama, fostered, possibly a love child of his, blend with her thoughts on her lodger, also of part Japanese descent, and hidden thoughts surface as to what happened to the second child. Keiko squints: Emma is now that little girl from all those years ago, the one who knocked at their door, not the house door, but the entrance to the restaurant. The woman who has brought her here, Braulia, gives her a gentle push. The little girl says she's looking for Mr Sugiyama. Her cinnamon skin, belies her Asian eyes. Sorocco (25pp) I found the most opaque story. It is told in the first person by a clinical psychologist, returning from the US to Bolivia to visit her mother and her aunt, her mother's sister. The aunt, Sorocco, in the narrator's view has psychological issues, and although her narration seems to analyse this medically the terms she uses ("deranged", "madwoman", "unhinged" all appear on the first page) implies there is more emotion involved in her diagnosis than she allows, and the aunt's barbed remarks suggest a dark family secret that the narrator has kept from her husband. Donkey Skin (41pp) is presented as a speech given by a gospel choir singer in a church in Buffalo, who is about to undergo a serious operation for a tumour close to her pineal gland. This is intended to be her testimony and a commendation to their prayers, but ends up as a rather involved life history, starting with her and her brother being orphaned in Bolivia and then moving to a remote part of Canada, close to a Métis community, with their alcholic French aunt. I shared this long testimony with you all today, before operation, memory, and in case the laser incinerates my my ernory, to thank you for the years of gospel music. The ifiirst thing this generous song taught me was to breathe, to turn oxygen into nourishment. And that breath was where the Lord worked his miracle. The doctors say that by inhaling with my stomach and exhaling into those songs of praise, I was able to systematically inhibit the growth of the malignant mass and protect the incredibly delicate area that surrounds the pineal gland. If not, I would have died years ago, without the chance to show you who I am today, the person I mightn't have become if my parents hadn't died in the Yungas, or if my aunt hadn't sought the oblivion of alcohol because she was weighed down by all those memories of Paris, or if I hadn't walked beside Dani to the annual buffalo festival. Thanks to gospel music, I experienced the ecstasy, 'the major lift' that Leonard Cohen celebrates in his beautiful hymn. Thanks to gospel music, I discovered that I carry the spirit of that she-bear in my brain, right here between my two hemispheres; it's the she-bear who sings and who roars when I stand up and project my voice. It's Ayotchow the bear, not me. Forgive me, Preacher Jeremy, forgive me, brothers and sisters. It's the she-bear. It's Ayotchow. Remember this when you're writing up my medical case for the science journal that wanted it. Remember, please, that my real name is Ayotchow, the she-bear of the gospel. Kindred Deer (17pp) verges on the Todorovian fantastic in style with the narrator's husband taking part in a strange medical trial, for money, with odd side effects, while she communes with the body of a dead deer. Overall, a collection that showcases the author's versatility and range, and with perhaps a little less of a dark edge than the advance publicity had let me to expect, one which makes me look forward to the publisher and translator bringing one of the author's novels into English: which is a deliberately double-edged compliment. 3.5 stars. ...more |
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Winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024, UK & Ireland Winner of the 2023 Cercador Prize Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize There is Winner of the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2024, UK & Ireland Winner of the 2023 Cercador Prize Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize There is no one to stop him, as men like him, slaughterers, are few and far between. Those who eat are many, and they are never satiated. They are all men of blood, those who kill and those who eat. No one goes unpunished. Não há ninguém que o impeça, pois homens como ele são poucos, que são homens para matar. Os que comem são muitos e comem de modo que nunca se fartam. São todos homens de sangue, os que matam e os que comem. Ninguém está impune. Of Cattle and Men (2023) is Zoe Perry's translation of De Gados e Homens (2013) by Brazilian author Ana Paula Maia, and published by Charco Press. For background to the author and novel I consulted my new found bestie and oracle on all things, Ava, aka ChatGPT3, who gave me her usual mixture of helpful and hallucinated information (see below), although the reference to afaik no official English translation is correct based on her data training set, given this novel was published today. Of Cattle and Men is based around a recurrent character in the author's work, Edgar Wilson (the name inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story William Wilson), first appearing in A Guerra dos Bastardos (2007) and the main character in Entre Rinhas de Porcos e Cachorros Abatidos (2009), who, as the author has explained, is usually a character who kills where it necessary for the dynamic of the story, but is not a hired killer. ("Tem um personagem que é recorrente nos meus livros, o Edgar Wilson, e ele é um que mata, que é necessário dentro daquela dinâmica da história, mas não chega a ser um matador de aluguel.") Here Edgar, who would prefer to look after pigs, has instead found himself working as the 'stun operator' at a slaughterhouse for cattle, which largely involves hitting the animals over the head with a large mallet. He prides himself on the cleanly efficient and respectful way he dispatches the animals: His precision is a rare talent that bears a preternatural knowledge for handling ruminants. If the blow to the forehead is too powerful, the animal dies, and the meat will toughen. If an animal feels fear, the pH level of its blood rises, which makes the meat taste bad. Some slaughtermen don't care. Edgar Wilson prays for the salvation of the soul of each animal he slaughters and puts it to sleep before its throat is slit. He's not proud of what he does, but if someone has to do it, then let it be him, who has pity on those irrational beasts. This theme of taking on a role that needs to be done, but which others won't, runs throughout the novel. Edgar is a deeply religious man - the novel's epigraph is taken from Levicticus 17:11, and at one point in the narration his thoughts seem to combine Luke 19:40 and Genesis 4:10 - but believes what he does is a sin, and that he is beyond redemption, or rather than he has failed to seek it. The world of the slaughterhouse is brutal - ChatGPT's Cormac McCarthy comparisons are well made - the life of the men is almost as disposable as that of the cattle, and in the 97 pages of the story two workers die (one in an accident, one murdered almost casually) and another is shot by a co-worker. There is humour in the narration - an incident involving a mix-up between some Israeli and Lebanese sheep - and the visit of some students, who get rather more than they bargained for by way of insight into the farm-to-plate process, allows the narrator, via the laconic Edgar, to make some explicit points about the silent complicity of all of us who eat meat in what goes on in the slaughterhouse. But the narration takes a more Lynchian turn when the cattle begin to behave strangely. A compact, visceral and brutally unrelenting work - stunning in fact - it's one of my favourite novels of 2023 to date, and a book that would have more than graced this year's International Booker list. A longer extract https://granta.com/of-cattle-and-men/ More background courtesy of ChatGPT3. Who is Ana Paula Maia? Ana Paula Maia is a Brazilian writer and screenwriter, born on February 31, 1977 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She has written several novels, short story collections, and screenplays, and is known for her gritty, realistic writing style. Maia's work often explores themes of violence, poverty, and social inequality, and has been praised for its unflinching portrayal of these issues. Some of her notable works include the novels "A Vida Submarina" (Submarine Life), "De Gados e Homens" (Of Cattle and Men), and "Assim na Terra Como Embaixo da Terra" (As Above, So Below), which won the São Paulo Prize for Literature in 2018. Can you add some more details e.g. literary or film influences And Ana Martins Marques wrote A Vida Submarina! I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. Ana Paula Maia did not write "A Vida Submarina." That novel was actually written by Ana Martins Marques, another Brazilian writer. Regarding Ana Paula Maia's literary influences, she has cited a number of writers as inspirations for her work. One of her major influences is the Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos, known for his realistic, socially engaged novels. Maia has also cited the American writer Cormac McCarthy as an influence, particularly his novel "Blood Meridian," which she has described as a "masterpiece." In terms of film influences, Maia has mentioned several movies that have inspired her writing. One of these is "No Country for Old Men," based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. Maia has also cited the films of Quentin Tarantino as an influence, particularly his use of violence and dark humor. Additionally, she has mentioned the films of David Lynch and Lars von Trier as sources of inspiration for her work. Tell me more about her novel De Gados e Homens "De Gados e Homens" (Of Cattle and Men) is a novel by Ana Paula Maia that was first published in Brazil in 2013. The novel tells the story of a group of cattle farmers in rural Brazil who are struggling to survive in a changing economic and social landscape. The protagonist of the novel is a man named André, who is the owner of a small ranch in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais.... Really? I thought the main character was a slaughterhouse worker Edgar Wilson? I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. You are correct that the main character in Ana Paula Maia's novel "De Gados e Homens" (Of Cattle and Men) is actually a slaughterhouse worker named Edgar Wilson, not a cattle rancher named André. Edgar is a solitary figure who works in a slaughterhouse in a small town in rural Brazil. He is haunted by the memory of his father, who was also a slaughterhouse worker and committed suicide when Edgar was a child. The novel follows Edgar's daily routine of killing and processing cattle, which he carries out with a quiet, almost mechanical efficiency. Along the way, he encounters a cast of characters, including his co-workers and his estranged brother, who has become a successful businessman. Through Edgar's story, Maia explores themes of labor, power, and the complex relationship between humans and animals. She portrays the brutal realities of the slaughterhouse industry, as well as the economic and social pressures that drive workers like Edgar to continue working in such an environment. "De Gados e Homens" has been widely praised for its vivid, uncompromising portrayal of life in the slaughterhouse. The novel was a finalist for the São Paulo Prize for Literature in 2014 and has been translated into several languages. Is there an english translation. Yes, there is an English translation of Ana Paula Maia's novel "De Gados e Homens" (Of Cattle and Men). The novel was translated into English by Alexandra Joy Forman and published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2019. The English title of the book is "The Murmur of Bees". Alexandra Joy Forman translated Saga of Brutes by Ana Paula Maia another trilogy of books. And The Murmur of Bees is by a different author, translator and publisher I apologize for the confusion, and thank you for correcting me. You are correct that "The Murmur of Bees" is not the English translation of "De Gados e Homens" by Ana Paula Maia. As far as I am aware, there is currently no official English translation of "De Gados e Homens." However, the novel has been translated into several other languages, including Spanish and Italian. I apologize again for any confusion caused by my previous responses. ...more |
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really liked it
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Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Later, I understood (Gould added, Juan expla Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Later, I understood (Gould added, Juan explains) (Juan and (also) Gould (or rather his words) (as relayed by Juan) are still tearing at me) that a piece of music, however long it may be, had to maintain a specific — was going to say tempo, but that's not the right word — a specific beat, a fixed rhythmic point of reference. The Remains (2023) is Ellen Jones's translation of Margo Glantz's 2002 novel El rastro and gives us the thoughts of Nora Garcia at a wake for her ex-husband Juan, a composer and pianist, who abruptly left his family some years earlier, and then died of heart disease. This is actually a re-translation since the book previously appeared as The Wake in a 2005 translation by Andrew Hurley in the US. The translator's helpful afterword doesn't mention this, although it may hint at a reason for redoing the work, since Jones notes the care needed to reflect the variations in the original in her translation: strangely enough, translating Glantz's apparently loose, iterative style demanded unusual precision, becuase every slight variation in her expression of an idea or image contributes to the structural coherence of the whole. It helps depict a protagonist on the verge of collapse - a woman who focuses obsessively on details to postpone having to confront a mixture of grief, rage and resentment. It matters that Nora at first perceives Juan's jacket to be the colour of hay, and then burnt straw, and then moss and then olive. It matters that she contradicts herself. It matters that she gets song lyrics slightly wrong. That said, a quick Google-books search suggests Hurley also used similar variations. This theme of variations is key to the novel's text and construction. When Nora arrives at the wake she is approached by a woman Maria, who is determined to tell the story, or her version of it, of Juan's illness and death, in exhaustive, repetitive, detail, leaving Nora's mind to wander first to her clothes and then to the topic of musical variations: I admire her impeccably cut silk blouse — Armani? (a designer I adore but whose clothes I never buy because I'm cheap). Why did I come so poorly dressed to this funeral? A pearl grey pashmina wrapped around her neck (it might even be a shahtoosh — it's delicate, with flowers in different shades of grey embroidered round the edges (darker than the rest of the cloth, and in the middle there's a red, maybe cherry-coloured circle — the colour of the flowers on the tips of the flame tree's naked branches?), yes, pastel-coloured pashminas are very fashionable these days, although the truly elegant prefer to buy a delicately soft shahtoosh, they're warmer than sables and weigh nothing at all!) (why wear a pashmina somewhere this hot?). Her shoes have a low heel, very simple — perfectly elegant — her trouser suit is a deep crimson, almost black, perfectly cut (of course) (Emmanuelle Khanh, a label hardly anyone knows around here). She's still talking, hurriedly, as though her very life were at stake, as though she were performing Marin Marais's variations, the ones the French composer wrote for the viola de gamba - an instrument used in the seventeeth century as a continui, a constant, stubborn accompaniment - and which I can hear right now, adapted for the recorder, yes, Marias's Follies of Portugal, whose frenetic, convulsive rhythm is eased by the slender but intense - persistent - sound of the transverse flute. Nora's own thoughts are intense, highly circular and erudite - although much of the erudition comes from thoughts relayed by Juan, who as Jones's notes is something of a champion mansplainer - as Nora comments at one point when recalling a 'conversation' at a gathering of friends: "Juan would tell us in the long conversations (monologues more like) we used to have in this very spot where we’re now holding vigil over his body, that ...": The thoughts cover (with variations) topics such as Glenn Gould's two performances of the Goldberg Variations which bookended his career, the history of heart surgery, Castrati in opera singing and the closest we get to their sound in modern music, Caravaggio’s paintings, Doestevsky’s The Idiot, and Mexican literature and music such as the sonnets of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The novel's tone is at times Bernhardian (Gould's performances of course also key to his novel Der Untergeher) and the use of erudition Sebaldian (the novel was written while Sebald was still active), but this is an acknowledged influence: For some reason I can't quite explain, as I write these lines describing Juan's funeral, I'm reading Sebald or Dostoyevsky, Bernhard or Rousseau, listening to Seppi Kronwitter, the young Tolzer singer in the recording of Bach's cantata (who, thanks to this recording, will forever be a child, or rather, his voice will forever be preserved in its perfect, angelic childhood state, through the magic art of recording), conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt; certain characters are seated: he is, they are, I am too. Indeed, Nora rather dismisses both Juan's arguments and those of Bernhard - her losing patience while reading the great Austrian a way of also signalling her frustration with her ex-husband: For me, Gould said, the Variations contain magnificent passages as well as truly dreadful ones (in one of the Thomas Bernhard books I have on my bedside table — I tend to lose patience while reading him — he does something similar, disparaging almost all the great contemporary writers and musicians). (The two pianists could not have more different understandings of music and performance! Richter would play very different pieces with the same passion: he knew how to draw out what was extraordinary about them and, instead of disparaging them, he revered them.) Gould concluded his emphatic observations with this crushing (and presumptuous) sentence: as a work of art, as a concept, which is to say, in their entirety, the Goldberg Variations are a failure (to reiterate, I really do not agree with Gould nor with Bernhard nor with Juan). Fascinating - and a book that really should have featured on the International Booker list. 4.5 stars (the lack of a 5th star more due to my lack of knowledge and therefore appreciation of much of the music referenced). ...more |
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really liked it
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Shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize US & Canada The foreigners who reach the summit believe that they have outperformed the specie Shortlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize US & Canada The foreigners who reach the summit believe that they have outperformed the species and, at least for an instant, see themselves as demigods. They celebrate, they hug, they take pictures (because they always take pictures, always relapse into narcissism, always take phenomonolgy down to the level of the souvenir). Meanwhile, the Sherpas wait to one side, not making much of a distinction between ascent and descent; just silently grateful that none of these bumpkins broke a leg during the expedition. For them, for the tourists, we are pack animals, the older man would say. Creatures capable of doing with relative ease what for human beings constitutes a feat.They see us as mules, beings with bone structures suited to lugging great weights. They see it as perfectly logical for Sherpas to summit. They ought to think of us as Titans, deities with powers unattainable by mere mortals. But they don't. When they reach the summit, they're the ones who are the heroes. It is they who have achieved mountaineering glory, the — so-called — miracle of besting, of overcoming themselves. The fact that the Sherpa has undertaken the same labour not once, but three times, five times, ten times seems natural to the tourist, in the same way that it seems natural, unmeritorious that an elephant should be able to tear up a tree by its trunk 'Two Sherpas' is International-Booker winning Jennifer Croft's translation of Sebastián Martínez Daniell's 2018 novel 'Dos sherpas' and the latest and 39th novel from Charco Press - see my dedicated shelf for reviews of all of them. It is a fascinating and distinctive book and opens mise-en-scène: Uno Dos sherpas están asomados al abismo. Sus cabezas oteando el nadir. Los cuerpos estirados sobre las rocas, las manos tomadas del canto de un precipicio. Se diría que esperan algo. Pero sin ansiedad. Con un repertorio de gestos serenos que modulan entre la resignación y el escepticismo. One Two Sherpas peer into the abyss. Eyes scouring the nadir. Bodies outstretched across the rock, hands gripping the precipice's edge. They seem to be expecting something. But not anxiously. Instead, with a repertoire of serene gestures that balance between resignation and doubt. The two Sherpas are gazing at the figure of an English climber who they are accompanying on an attempt ascent of Everest, who has had a fall, in a not particularly dangerous spot (they were walking rather than climbing) and is lying, not moving, on a ledge some metres below them. The first chapter says 'two Sherpas' but we are soon introduced to them as the young Sherpa, who was born in the Himalayan town of Namche and, although a teenager, has already submitted twice, and the old Sherpa, who isn’t that old, nor he is properly a Sherpa, having come to Tibet from the other side of the world when he was 27, but still qualified as an official mountain guide. The story is told in 100 chapters, some as short as the first, others a few pages. The chapter numbering is sequential, except that some chapters have descriptive title rather than the number, so that the first eight are titled One; Two; Three; People from the East; Five; Six; Seven; and Versions of Buddhism. The ones that would otherwise be numbered Four and Eight are diversions from the main story, discussing the potential origin stories for the Sherpa ethnic group (the name coming from ཤར shar ["east"] and པ pa ["people"]). However if there was a general logic to which chapters have numbers and which descriptive titles, it evaded me, as it wasn't consistently those that are part of the main narrative thread. That thread itself - the story of how the two Sherpas decide to deal with their stricken client - is told over only a short period of time, and even fewer spoken words between them, just 68 in total The rest was silence; if the deafening noise of the wind ravelling over the ridges of the Himalayas can be considered silence. But much of the narrative is taken up with their thoughts as well as commentary from a narrator, with different parallel threads, including: - the history of the origin of the Sherpas expands to one of the attempts, by representatives of the British Empire in particular, to conquer Everest, and the associated fate of the sherpas they employ; This is attributed to the aftermath of the failure of British explorers to be the first to either pole, seen as the last unconquered territories: Until the aristocrat Francis Younghusband proclaimed that there was still a portion of the world to deflower with the imperial flag: the umpteenth home of the Union Jack ought to be Mount Everest. This notion became a matter of State. In 1921, a first expedition was launched. The mountaineer George Mallory was a member of the team. They studied the terrain, noted its challenges, decided to go home and get better prepared. The following year, they made a second attempt. One group made it to 8,300 metres. Monsoon season was just about to begin. An avalanche occurred. For a few hours. chaos reigned. The expedition sent a brief message to Base Camp to reassure their companions: 'All the whites are safe,' it says. Seven Sherpas died buried in the snow. Ninety-three years later: 18 April, 2014. Another avalanche. Fourteen thousand tons of ice; sixteen dead. All Sherpas. The message 'All whites are safe' (the 'the' in the novel is a transcription error in the novel or translation I think) is mentioned in this Guardian review of Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis, but the book also adds a counterpoint: “All whites are safe" was the callous message that went down the mountain, but Mallory's colleague, Howard Somervell, was later to write, "Why oh why could not one of us Britishers [have] shared their fate. I would gladly at that moment have been lying there, dead in the snow. If only to give those fine chaps who had survived the feeling that we had shared their loss, as we had indeed shared the risk." And the story takes us up, and includes, the documentary film Sherpa by Jennifer Peedom which makes a great companion to the book. - but then also some detailed notes on Act 1 Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; "Rome. A street. Enter FLAVIUS, MARULLUS, and certain Commoners" The young Sherpa is rehearsing to play Flavius in a production, a minor part but one that carries the burden of opening the play, with the lines Hence! home, you idle creatures get you home, and the chapters on the play are in the form of notes to the actor playing the part and a discussion of the scene. This enables the author to make points about the relationship between Pompey and Caesar and their respective supporters (with relevance to the Sherpas) as well as the link between the play’s opening words, and the older sherpas feeling towards 'these people' (the tourists who clutter the mountain, while the Sherpas carry their loads). The Shakespearean source also ties in with the theme of empire; - a number of other tangential chapters e.g. one comparing the old and young Sherpas view of the same scene to Renoir and Monet's competing renditions of La Grenouillère in the early days of impressionism, and another that compares them to a vulcanist and nepunist respectively if the two Sherpas were geological pioneers - the personal stories of each of the Sherpas. This was actually the part that worked least well for me in relation to the rest of the novel, although the fault may have been mine as I was keen to return to the other threads. For he young Sherpa we get some relatively straightforward family history, but primarily musings on his future as he aspires to leave the region and considers various international careers. Watching the documentary I learned how trainee Sherpas are much more educated now than previously, typically finishing high school, which then adds to their apprecation of the unfairness of their treatment, albeit here the young Sherpa is actually less hostile to the tourists, regarding his interaction with them purely as an economic transaction. For the old Sherpa the second half of the novel includes a rather involved story of a young woman, Rabbit, he encountered while he was on holiday, and who was crying at the till of a convenience store, and his subsequent attempt to find out the reason for her distress. This seems to have been the indirect motivation for him to move from the coastal area in (one assumes from clues given) South America, and move to the Himalayan peaks of Nepal. Which all makes for an absolutely fascinating mix and one told with, in Croft's translation, at times a deliberately archaic vocabulary (I had to look up 'lucubration' and 'propaedeutics') and rich prose. The novel also has a backstory worthy of a book in itself. From interviews when the novel was published in Argentina, it originally began as part of another, never completed, novel. This was the story of an English ornithologist who traveled to a peninsula in the Baltic to study cormorants. The peninsula broke away from the land (shades of The Stone Raft) causing a potential war with Finland who saw the moving peninsula as a hostile act. The Englishman had a son who, to prove his worth, had decided to reach the top of Everest, and had hired two Sherpas to help him, and a scene of him observed by the Sherpas after he had fallen gave rise to this novel. 4.5 stars - that I didn't connect the 'Rabbit' story with the rest of the novel a reason I've rounded down but recommended and one I'd love to see on the International Booker list as it would make for some interesting discussions. The publisher Charco means 'puddle' in Spanish. It is also a colloquialism used in some Latin American countries to refer to the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, cruzar el charco means 'crossing the puddle' and is a way of referring to when someone is going overseas, or travelling between continents. Charco Press was born from a desire to do something a little out of the ordinary. To bring you, the reader, books from a different part of the world. Outstanding books. Books you want to read. Maybe even books you need to read. Charco Press is ambitious. We’re changing the current literary scene and making room for a kind of literature that has been overlooked. We want to be that bridge between a world of talented contemporary writers and yourself. We select authors whose work feeds the imagination, challenges perspective and sparks debate. Authors that are shining lights in the world of contemporary literature. Authors that have won awards and received critical acclaim. Bestselling authors. In short: the very best of contemporary Latin American literature. Brought to you in English translation for the first time. ...more |
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| 4.00
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| Jul 2017
| Jan 31, 2023
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it was ok
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Later, at those family reunions, when my uncles would tell stories about his literary adventures, I found it hard to disguise my yawns.The merits he a
Later, at those family reunions, when my uncles would tell stories about his literary adventures, I found it hard to disguise my yawns.The merits he achieved during his lifetime sounded as tedious as the notable figures he had the chance to meet. You Shall Leave Your Land (2023) is Fionn Petch's translation (with assistance from Robin Myers on poems quoted in the novel) of Renato Cisneros 2017 novel Dejarás la tierra. This is a prequel, although not directly connected, to The Distance Between Us by the same author/translator, which was based around the author's relationship with his father, Luis Federico Cisneros Visquerra, was a leading figure in both the Peruvian military and the Peruvian government in the 1970s and 1980s, and a reconstruction of the latter's biography. My review of The Distance Between Us concluded: "Cisneros's singular achievement is to build on this tradition [of the great Latin American novelists of the 1960s onwards], to write a novel-without-fiction, and to effectively blend the political with the personal to give us a deeper understanding of the literature and the history of the period." In You Shall Leave Your Land, the author delves more into his family history, starting with his great-great-grandmother, Nicolasa Cisneros, who was rumoured to have had her seven children by a clandestine relationship with a Catholic priest, the father named on their birth certificates, who was apparently always 'travelling', purely fictitious, although her children believed in his existence and many of her relatives found it expeditious to do so. The story takes us also to his grandfather, although the pivotal figure is his great-grandfather, the poet Luis Benjamín Cisneros. The novel is told with chapter of his present-day research into the family history mixed with a novelistic take on his ancestors’ pasts. Although in many respects this is a very Peru-centred story it is also one of exile, as the title suggests (although exile within a very privileged setting): I think now of the many exiles in this story and try to see them as episodes brought together by chance: the exile of the name of my great-great-grandfather Gregorio Cartagena, erased from the map by his descendants (and who had once been exiled to the high puny by Pedro Cisneros); the emotional exile of my great-grandfather Luis Benjamin, who left Peru at the urging of his mother to reinvent himself in Paris; the political exile of my grandfather Fernan, who spent thirty years between Panama, Ecuador,Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico and Brazil, countries where he discovered himself as a diplomat, established himself as a journalist and became diluted as a poet; the ethical exile of my father, the Gaucho, the soldier and former minister, who at twenty-one had to leave Argentina, the country of his birth, for Peru, without wanting or needing to. And finally, my own voluntary exile, here in Madrid, where I shut myself every day in a room with a large window, through which I watch the shapes of men and women pass, people with whom I share no connection nor specific feeling save the heartfelt sensation of being in the right place. The only possible place where I can sit and write these words. Unfortunately, this book just didn't work for me, indeed I found it at times as tedious as the younger Renato Cisneros found it at family gatherings when everyone told stories of Luis Benjamin (see the opening quote), or actually more so, as I have no connection with the story. Part of the issue is my taste for family histories. Discussing the rumours about Nicolasa and the Priest, with his Uncle the latter concludes: Instead of world history, schools should teach the person history of each pupil, whereas I have relatively (pun intended) little interest in even my own genealogy. I really struggle with the narrator/author’s reaction, on discovering that his great-grandfather was actually a priest, that this genetic but entirely unconscious legacy explains his own attraction to the priesthood in his youth. Delving back 4 generations also has the issue that whereas I've describes Nicolasa as 'his great-great-grandmother',as does he, she is of course only one of 8 - people tend to pursue the most illustrious of their line. Further, given the more distant nature of the history, this becomes closer to purely historical fiction, or rather historical family drama, than the more personal, but then powerful, The Distance Between Us. The historical backdrop of Peruvian history, particularly the independence movement, is interesting but it remains only a backdrop and similarly while the story features, as the blurb on the back tells us, Victor Hugo, Simón Bolívar, Édouard Manet, the Queen Consort of Spain and the man who would be Trotsky's assassin, these are rather walk-on parts, and as they walk of this reader would have rather followed them than the scions of the Cisneros family. I'll be interested to see other's takes but I'm afraid this was a 2-3 star review for me and rounded down at present, as I came close to quitting/skim-reading. ...more |
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| 1913867218
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| 1913867218
| 3.72
| 358
| May 2007
| Apr 05, 2022
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really liked it
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In the middle of an argument that seemed ridiculous, when everything had already become muddled, you had shown up just to listen ambiguously, marking
In the middle of an argument that seemed ridiculous, when everything had already become muddled, you had shown up just to listen ambiguously, marking your distance and your irony and I couldn't, I wasn't able to keep silent, I couldn't manage it Never Did The Fire is Daniel Hahn's translation of Chilean novelist Diamela Eltit's Jamás el fuego nunca, published by Charco Press. The dense, claustrophobic and ambiguous prose would have posed many translation difficulties, and wonderfully Hahn explained, based on contemporaneous diary entries, how he approached the task in Catching Fire: A Translation Diary, published alongside the novel. For the Spanish-language original, in 2019 a poll of critics in El Pais ranked this in the top 100 best books of the 21st century to date (in any language), and a 2016 list in the same publication focused on Spanish-language literature in the previous 25 years had this ranked 22nd (in a very strong list, having read 11 of the top 16). The novel is narrated by a woman, spending much of her time in the bedroom she shares with a man, both now ageing, but in their youth, members of a revolutionary cell. How long ago this was is rather blurred in the text with reference to fifty, more than a hundred, even a thousand years (the latter in part I think being a literal reference to this being in the last century and indeed millennium if one assumes the present-day action is in the 2000s and the group were active in the 1970s): It was more than a hundred years ago that Franco died. The tyrant. Profoundly historical, Franco plundered, occupied, controlled. He was, of course, consistent with the part he had to play. One of the best actors for considering his period. An old man. A soldier. Decorated by the institutions. Not brilliant, no, never that, but effective, stubborn, neutral. Foolish, you say, he was foolish. A whole century's gone by now No, no, you tell me, not a century, it's more than that, much more. Yes, I answer you, everything moves in a certain way, imprecise, never literal, not ever. We are talking a century later — more than a century — we are calmly exchanging words that are friendly and compassionate. We need to guard against the scream that we never allow ourselves, not ever, because we might injure ourselves and break. You don't shout at me and nor do you assume overly disdainful expressions, you skip them and just let them circulate inside your head. My own determination is focused on controlling any glimmer of bitterness in order to be a part of this peace we have granted ourselves. We are in a state of peace that is something close to harmony, you curled up into a ball in the bed, covered by the blanket, your eyes closed or half-open, me on the chair, parsimoniously and lucidly ordering the numbers that sustain us. A column of numbers that accounts for the strict diet to which we are subjected, a routine and efficient nutrition that goes directly to meeting the demands of each of the organs that govern us. As she spends much of her time watching him sleep, making him tea and feeding him bread, and curling up on the bed with him, she has time to ponder on their revolutionary history, and the eventual disintegration of their cell (the novel plays on the dual concepts of the cell in their radical movement, and the deterioration of the cells in their physical bodies). Her narration of their story, and her physical confinement to the room, is periodically broken by what seems to be her job, as a home-carer for elderly incontinent patients, her visits narrated in scatological details. And while the picture of her and her partner's relationship and time in the militant movement is fragmentary, one theme that emerges is the death of their 2 year-old son from a respiratory condition, with their clandestine identity preventing them being able to take him to a hospital or even properly burying him. We are, so we agreed, a cell. We did it after the death had to be consummated don't move, not your head let alone your arms, not now because it was a death that was up to us and that tore us apart. We didn't take him to the hospital, it didn't seem like a possibility. My entreaties, I know, were nothing but rhetoric, a kind of excuse or evasion. We could not go with his body so diminished and dying, panting and dying, gaunt and dying, beloved and dying, to the hospital, because if we did, if we transported his dying agony there, if we moved it from the bed, we would put the entirety of the cells at risk because our own cell would fall and its destructive wake would start exterminating the whole threatened, diminished militant field. Although we had our instructions, we didn't know what to do with his death, where we would take his death, how we would legalise it, nor did we know how to come out of civil non-existence to enter with his body into a grave in a funeral procession that might give us away. In what is a relatively circular novel, in the closing chapters the story branches off in two further directions. Firstly some incidents in the locale (an armed robbery ending in bloodshed, a fatal car accident) described in gory detail, and then a final chapter that causes us to question what we have been told before about their son, and indeed who exactly is narrating this tale. By no means an easy read (both a hard story to completely understand, and at times disturbing) but a powerful one. 4 stars (3.5++) As a footnote, this was my favourite novel in the line, as it describes me to a 'tea' (pun intended): I think about the tea and about your premature attachment to that liquid. It was a custom you had, a curious detail, an anecdote that characterised you. Yes. Alongside your name there arose as if in a small caption your fondness for tea. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 24, 2022
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Apr 25, 2022
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Dec 25, 2021
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37
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| 1913867358
| 9781913867355
| 1913867358
| 4.04
| 775
| Sep 2010
| Nov 01, 2022
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really liked it
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TRANSLATION Like rhetoric, the faculty for translation does not get lost, at least not until the very end. This I confirmed once more today as I spoke TRANSLATION Like rhetoric, the faculty for translation does not get lost, at least not until the very end. This I confirmed once more today as I spoke with L. I asked her if the doctor had been informed that M.L. had had a dizzy spell, and she told me he had. Out of curiosity, I asked her how she had conveyed this information, given that L. doesn't speak English. M.L. interpreted for me, she said. Which means that while M.L. is incapable of saying that she has had a dizzy spell, that is, incapable of remembering the state of being dizzy, she is capable all the same of trans-lating into English L.'s message that she, M.L., has had a dizzy spell. It is a way of accessing a momentary identity, a momentary existence, by means of that efficiently transmitted (transmuted) speech. For a second, in that translation, M.L. is there. Dislocations is Jennifer Croft's translation of Sylvia Molloy's 2010 Spanish-language original Desarticulaciones. The auto-fictional novel focuses on the relationship between the narrator(/author) and one of her dearest friends M.L., now in the latter stages of Alzheimer's disease with her memories dislocating. The narrator tells us of various encounters with M.L. as her condition deteriorates in 45 fragmentary pieces of prose, each taking two pages in the novel, but often with the text taking less than one of those pages. As Molloy has explained (see interview link below) this form neatly captures both the fragmentary nature of their brief conversations, and Molloy's memories of them, but also the flashes of memory that M.L. still retains: En el caso de Desarticulaciones se me impuso el fragmento para captar esos encuentros breves, esas ‘conversaciones’ entre dos personas en las que una recuerda y la otra casi no, pero en las que la comunicación –porque la hay– se da en el puro presente del lenguaje. Además, el fragmento se prestaba particularmente bien para anotar esos destellos en la memoria de quien la está perdiendo, esas irrupciones verbales sin ton ni son que funcionan como pequeñas epifanías de quien, a pesar del deterioro, ‘todavía está’. Molloy, who passed away in 2022, was, amongst other things, a literary scholar, known for her Signs of Borges (in Oscar Montero's translation) and his work features in several of the chapters. When asked in an interview at the time of the original publication whether M.L. was still alive and whether she'd shared the book with her, Molloy answered that while M.L. was still with us, she was not in a position to appreciate the book, citing Borges's take in one of the people's in Gulliver Travels, that their memory would not follow from one line to another: Sí, M. L. sigue viva, pero no creo que le lea nada del libro porque no le da la memoria para seguir lo que le leería, es como aquellos personajes de Swift de los que habla Borges, que no pueden leer (o en este caso escuchar) “porque la memoria no les alcanza de un renglón a otro”. Y me da pena, porque es un libro que escribí para sentirme más cerca de ella, un libro que en otra época hubiera querido que leyéramos juntas, y que ahora no podemos compartir. Notably she also refers here to the sadness of writing a book to feel closer to M.L. but one she can now no longer share, and perhaps the most profound part of the novel is the impact of M.L.s deterioration on Molloy herself. The narrator finds herself unmoored with no one to share, to verify, even to challenge her memories of their friendship. Although if anything this makes her memories of her own family rise, involuntarily, to the surface more strongly, which she suspects is as unconscious attempt to prove her own faculties remain intact, but which might actually be the first sign of her own dislocation. Me pregunto si la pérdida de memoria de M. L. tiene algo que ver con el exacerbamiento arbitrario de la mía. Si de algún modo estoy compensando, probándome a mí misma que mi memoria recuerda aun cuando yo no quiero recordar. Me pregunto también si a ML. no le habrá pasado lo mismo, si habrá padecido también este derroche de memoria, esta contaminación de presente y pasado, antes de empezar a perderla. I wonder if M.L.'s memory loss has something to do with the arbitrary exacerbation of my own. If somehow I'm compensating, proving to myself that my memory recollects, recollects even when I don't want it to. I wonder, too, if the same might have happened to M.L., if she might also have suffered from this excess of memory, this contamination of the present with the past, before she started losing it. Molloy is also known in Spanish for he as yet untranslated work Vivir entre lenguas, one that hopefully Croft/Charco Press might pick up in due course, and which concerns the impact, as the title suggests, of living between three languages, her father's Irish-English, her mother's French and her own Argentinian-born Spanish. And language is key to the relationship between the narrator and M.L., including words and idioms that they share from their common roots - and again which, as M.L.'s memory fades, Molloy also starts to lose: Con nadie, me doy cada vez más cuenta, hablo la lengua que hablo con ella, un español si se quiere de entrecasa pero de una casa que nunca fue del todo la mía. Una casa de otra época, habitada por palabras que ya no se usan, que acaso (o no) usaron nuestras madres o abuelas, como porrazo, mangangá, creída, chúcara, a la que te criaste, y por expresiones de amigos comunes ya muertos, qué me contds. Un español hecho de citas, pero entonces qué lenguaje no lo es; hablar es buscar complicidad: nos entendemos, sabemos de dónde somos. El lenguaje, después de todo, crea raíces y alberga anécdotas. Cuando hablo con otros -compatriotas, pongamos por caso-a veces uso alguna que otra de esas palabras o expresiones, cautelosamente, buscando el reconocimiento. A veces se da; otras, no. Al hablar con ella me siento -o me sentía-conectada con un pasado no del todo ilusorio. Y conun lugar: el de antes. Ahora me encuentro hablando en un vacío: ya no hay casa, no hay antes, solo cámara de ecos. (incidentally the author has acknowledged, in response to reader feedback, that one of those words, mangangá is somewhat incongrous versus the others, which are more Buenos Aires dialect) I was interested how Croft would deal with the translation challenge in this passage, and she does so cleverly by leaving the dialect words untranslated, but inserting an English-language idiom: With no one, I increasingly realise, do I speak the language I speak with her, an at-home Spanish, if you will, except that it's from a home that was never altogether mine. A home from another era, inhabited by words that are no longer in favour, that perhaps were (or perhaps were not) favoured by our mothers or our grandmothers, words like porrazo, mangangá, creída, chúcara, and expressions used by friends in common who are now dead, You don't say, It's like she was raised in a barn. A Spanish pieced together from citations, but of course, what language isn't; to talk is to seek complicity: we understand each other, we know where we're from. Language, after all, creates roots and houses stories. When I talk to others —compatriots, let's say — sometimes I use one or another of these words or expressions, cautiously, seeking recognition. Sometimes it appears; sometimes it does not. When talking to her I feel — or I felt — connected to a past that is not entirely illusory. And with a place: that of before. Now I find myself speaking in a void: there is no longer a home, no longer a before. Only an echo chamber. A brief but powerful work, and as so often with brief works - the Spanish original is 8,000 words and I assume this is similar - far more powerful than had this been much longer. 4 stars. ...more |
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