Category Archives: South America

#WITMonth Book of the month: Angélica Gorodischer

August 29, 2024 By in Book of the month, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
kalpa imperial

This #WITMonth, it was the translator who attracted me to my featured title. I often find this is the case: now that I’m relatively well versed in how books come into English, there are certain translators’ names that predispose me to try stories. Because I admire other projects they’ve done or know them to be particularly committed to championing interesting voices, I regard their involvement with a book as a sign that something is worth investigating.

In the case of Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, originally published in Spanish in 1983, it wasn’t the translator’s other translations but her novels that piqued my interest. Despite not being particularly keen on sci-fi (although I’m warming up to it in my fifth decade), I’m a big fan of the work of the late Ursula K. Le Guin. If you haven’t read her, you’re in for a treat.

Along with her novels, poetry, short fiction, criticism and books for children, Le Guin’s website lists four translations in her bibliography. Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire that Never Was is one of these.

As its subtitle suggests, the book charts the history of an imaginary empire. It does so through multiple voices, bringing alive the idiosyncrasies, cruelties, obsessions and triumphs of a host of the personages who have shaped and been shaped by this history.

Many of these figures are marvellous creations. Take the dealer in curiosities who buys a boy who can dance in an era when dancing has been forgotten. Or the urchin who shrugs off her abusers and rises to be empress. And there are numerous sadists in the mix too – many of them military men who delight in pursuing their proclivities in the professional arena.

The prose is similarly inventive and startling. Lyricism jostles with surprise on every page. There is also plenty of humour.

Lists in novels are frequently a bugbear of mine: I find them wearing and am often tempted to skip them. But Gorodischer and Le Guin’s lists engrossed me – masterclasses in rhythm and the subversion of expectations.

There is subversion at the structural level too. Sometimes events are narrated several times by different voices – fishermen, passersby, servants and a dedicated storyteller. Indeed, along with the empire itself, the figure of the storyteller is the only consistent presence in the book. Most discussion of the novel I’ve seen declares that there are multiple storytellers involved in it. This wasn’t clear to me – I read the storyteller as being a single voice. But if you know different, please tell me!

Certainly, the tone of the storyteller is varied. At times fawning and affectionate, the narrator can also be downright rude to the reader – ‘if you could imagine anything you wouldn’t have come here to listen to stories and whine like silly old women if the storyteller leaves out one single detail.’

What remains consistent, however, is the book’s excavation of the mechanics and purpose of storytelling. ‘I’m the one who can tell you what really happened, because it’s the storyteller’s job to speak the truth even when the truth lacks the brilliance of invention and has only that other beauty which stupid people call mean and base,’ the narrator declares at one point. And at another: ‘a storyteller is something more than a man who recounts things for the pleasure and instruction of the crowd[…] a storyteller obeys certain rules and accepts certain ways of living that aren’t laid out in any treatise but are as important or more important than the words he uses to make his sentences[…] no storyteller ever bows down to power’.

There is a clarity to the prose and to the insights the book presents into its characters’ motivations that reminded my of Le Guin’s other writing.

This got me thinking anew about the influence of readers and translators on stories. It’s something that’s been on my mind lately as I’ve been receiving feedback from beta readers on the manuscript of my forthcoming book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (preorder your signed collectors’-edition copy now!). The brilliant insights and responses I’ve had from these first readers have been invaluable in helping me finetune the book, and they have developed my understanding of it too. Relearning to Read now carries their influence and is the stronger for it.

Translators, of course, aren’t simply readers providing feedback that a writer may respond to or ignore. They rewrite a book in their own words. But this rewriting is in response to reading. It can’t help but meld their own talents and perspectives with the strengths and weaknesses of the primary work. There is an inevitable hybridity to the end result.

Of course, part of what attracted Le Guin to the project of translating Kalpa Imperial may have been the sense of a synergy between her work and Gorodischer’s. Unlike many translators, Le Guin had the luxury of picking and choosing the books she worked on. Translation wasn’t her primary career.

Still, reading her rendering of this Argentinian sci-fi/fantasy classic, I can’t help but wonder if translation itself doesn’t have something of the fantastical or speculative about it: a processes that fuses the capabilities of two minds. It sounds like something Le Guin herself might have envisioned in one of her novels: a revolutionary technology that enables the magnification of creativity, multiplying the powers of those involved. In that sense, when a book is the product of two writers working at the top of their game, as the English version of Kalpa Imperial seems to be, might translations offer a supercharged reading experience, a kind of literature squared?

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was by Angélica Gorodischer, translated from the Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer Press, 2013)

Picture: ‘kalpa imperial’ by Dr Umm on flickr.com

Book of the month: Machado de Assis

July 31, 2024 By in Book of the month, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

This month, the seventh in my year of reading nothing new, I delved back further than usual. My edition of July’s featured title was published in 2020, but the original came out some considerable time before that, in 1881.

The English translation of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is a collaboration between two translators to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Back in 2012, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson were among the nine volunteers who translated A casa do pastor by Olinda Beja so that I would have a book to read from São Tomé and Príncipe.

As its title suggests, the novel by the legendary Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis presents an account written from beyond the grave by its title character, an aristocrat with a string of failed love affairs and thwarted political ambitions to his name. It wastes no time in declaring its singularity. Right from its dedication (to the first worm to gnaw its author’s flesh), it demonstrates a determination to explode conventions and taboos.

The narrative also rides roughshod over literary customs. Digressions abound, chronology scatters and we are repeatedly informed that the author is minded to cut a section we have just read, as well as told about notes for chapters that will not be written, and, once, presented with a passage in which all dialogue is blank. ‘This is, after all, the work of a dead man’, Brás Cubas or whatever remains of him declares, as if with a shrug.

Indeed, being dead seems to absolve the protagonist-narrator of all obligations to please, giving him carte blanche to lay into whomever he chooses. The reader is no exception, and neither is Brás Cubas himself:

The main problem with this book is you, the reader. You’re in a hurry to get old, and the book progresses slowly; you love direct, sustained narrative, a regular, fluid style, whereas this book and my style are like a pair of drunkards: they stagger left and right, start and stop, mumble, yell, roar with laughter, shake their fists at the heavens, then stumble and fall…

Of course, regardless of its narrator’s declarations about having no need to please, such devil-may-care posturing is extremely entertaining and pleasing. A great deal of humour comes from a choice of register that deflates the pretensions of the characters. There is also a wonderful inventiveness to the writing. Although he often abandons analogies in mid-flow, the imagery Brás Cubas does use is often startlingly fresh and witty. ‘One morning, while I was strolling in the garden, an idea appeared on the trapeze I have inside my head,’ he declares at the start of chapter two. Among the many things to admire about the translation is surely the fact that Jull Costa and Patterson have managed to achieve a voice that is simultaneously erratic and distinctive, that, while roving among the registers, feels true to its singular speaker. (Although the inclusion of footnotes creates a strange tension in this anarchic, irreverent text: I found myself constantly questioning whether what seemed to be straight, factual glosses were in fact up to something I hadn’t fathomed – maybe they were.)

Another of the book’s startling qualities is the way it seems to reach both forward and backwards in literary history. Its irreverence and textual high-jinks recall the works of eighteenth century writers such as Sterne; there is more than a touch of the picaresque about it; yet its inventiveness also hints at psychedelia and the experimentation of the greats of modernism. In this sense, Machado has achieved a powerful impression of, if not the eternity that entraps its narrator, then timelessness.

The same goes for its satire. At once of its moment and resonant beyond its setting, Machado’s exposure of the hypocrisy of this society built on the backs of slaves, in which the desire for fame eclipses genuine advancement and learning, speaks to worlds he can never have known.

At one point Brás Cubas even seems to reach from the pages to grip our hands. He imagines a ‘bibliomaniac’ seventy years or so on from the time of writing considering the novel. The description is not flattering – he conjures a sallow, white-haired creature whose main interest in the volume is because it is rare rather than of any literary value.

I like to think I’m some distance from the figure Machado imagined. Yet, knowing the author to have been something of a ‘bibliomaniac’ himself – he reportedly set himself the goal of reading all the world’s classics in their original languages – I suspect he may have more sympathy for such creatures then this depiction implies. At any rate, another seventy years on from the time of the bibliomaniac Brás Cubas pictures, this bibliomaniac salutes his author, even as she corrects him: the value of his novel has nothing to do with its scarcity. It is thankfully widely available. And a jolly good thing too.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (Liveright, 2020)

Book of the month: Sheyla Smanioto

August 31, 2023 By in Book of the month, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

This WITMonth, it’s my pleasure to feature a multi-award-winning feminist tornado of a novel recently arrived in English.

Out of Earth by Brazilian novelist Sheyla Smanioto came onto my radar when Sophie Lewis, who translated the book with Laura Garmeson, contacted me about it. I rarely accept review copies these days – I would be inundated if I did and I like to buy most of the books I feature on this blog in order to support fellow writers. (I also rarely feature books when they are newly published as I think the very small window of time titles get to succeed is one of the many problems with the publishing industry today so I try to do what I can to keep good books visible for longer by reviewing older titles.)

In this case, however, I decided to make an exception. Having admired Lewis’s work for many years and knowing how passionate she is about championing bold and daring translations (she was one of the original driving forces behind groundbreaking indie publisher And Other Stories), I was pretty sure this book would be something special. And I wasn’t wrong.

At this point in a review I would normally give a brief overview of the plot. In the case of Out of Earth, that’s tricky because this is not a book that plays by the rules. The linear and-then-and-then-and-then of storytelling has no place here. Rather, the narrative expounds the realities of inherited trauma and domestic violence, using the experience of four generations of women in the arid Brazilian sertão as a lens through which to reveal painful truths.

Language itself is at war with accepted modes of expression in this novel. Evasive, skewed and sometimes choric, the narrative voice courts ambiguity, teetering repeatedly on the verge of nonsense and shrugging off the rules of grammar to invite and dismiss multiple interpretations of even simple claims. Take the second paragraph:

He whistles, Tonho does. Calls the dog over right up close. The dog hesitates, tail lowered. The dog hesitates, then comes. It wants to know why the calling. Then he strikes the animal on the flank, yelping softly. The dog, not Tonho. The dog lies dying, slowly slowly. Not Tonho, he likes listening to the faltering barks of the dog on the ground guts blood bone breath. Tonho’s, not the dog’s. But right before the dog dies, in that very moment, you wouldn’t be able to tell which was the dog and which was Antônio.

Comprehension and interpretation, the text signals, are partial and contingent, forever shifting. We can never be confident we have fully got the measure of what is happening or who it is happening to, as the following clause or sentence may rewrite what has gone before or require us to revise our impressions.

This linguistic signposting provides a key to much of what follows. Over the ensuing pages victims morph into witnesses and the traumatised reenact their traumas even as they try to protect their younger relatives. ‘Have you noticed how babies newly born are just a heap of people thrown together?’ asks the narrative. In this book grown people are heaps of other people thrown together too, such that we can rarely be sure where one ends and another begins. With this interbleeding of selfhood and experience comes a strange strain of dramatic irony, granting use eerie foreknowledge of how certain moments will play out because we have read something like them before.

Yet, for all its ambiguity – for all that the lens through which we look is smeared and flyblown – the narrative has moments of searing clarity. At points, the language focuses daylight on dark areas so intensely that it almost scorches us. Here’s how Smanioto et al present Tonho as he visits the full force of his fury on Fátima:

He’s beating again: for suffering in others. He’s beating everything under the sun he’s beating. He beats he sees no body, he beats, beats, beats he sees no body, he beats beats beats not a single dog he beats. He doesn’t see any body at all he doesn’t see anything until he stumbles across Fátima he doesn’t see any Fátima in the midst of so much Tonho until he comes across Fátima at death’s door.

Uncomfortably, in this work centring female experience, it is the psychology of the male abusers that gives rise to some of the most powerful and memorable writing. Smanioto provides several brilliant instances of the mechanisms of self-justification as men perpetrate horrors on female bodies. These moments of ruthless, undeniable action feel shocking and sharp; but in the context of the swirling ambiguity of much of the rest of the text, they are oddly welcome too.

For this is perhaps the most profound and troubling thing this book shows us: storytelling as we are used to experiencing it is in itself a problematic and potentially exploitative thing. In their requirement for doer and done to, for causality and conclusions, for the casting of characters into recognisable, defined roles, traditional narratives force through choices and demand the supremacy of certain readings, leaving little space for multiple, conflicting or blurred perspectives.

‘Reading: devouring the hunger of others,’ reads a section heading towards the end. With her exploded poem of a book Smanioto obliges us to confront the role our appetites play in the perpetuation of such hunger.

Out of Earth by Shela Smanioto, translated from the Portuguese by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis (Boiler House Press, 2023)

Picture: ‘sertao casa flamboyant’ by Maria Hsu on flickr.com

Book of the month: Alicia Yáñez Cossío

September 30, 2021 By in Book of the month, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

This was a recommendation from Fran, an Ecuadorian who stopped by this blog a few weeks ago to add some suggestions to the list.

First published in 1985 and brought into English by translator Amalia Gladhart some twenty years later, The Potbellied Virgin follows the political wrangles surrounding a small wooden icon in an unnamed town in the Andes. This strangely shaped representation of the Mother of the Christian God is the repository of local pride and virtue (as well as a secret that comes to light in the course of the novel) and is controlled by a group of local matriarchs from the landowning Benavides clan. Led by the formidable Doña Carmen, president of the Sisterhood of the Bead on the Gown of the Potbellied Virgin, these women watch over the virgins nominated to dress and prepare the icon for each of the many festivals and rituals built around it. But when communism begins to sweep neighbouring regions, stirring up dissent among the less fortunate residents of the town, the women will need more than prayer to maintain their dominance.

This is a book about female power warped and poisoned by a patriarchal, classist and racist system. The narrative refers at one point to the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba and the parallels between the play’s eponymous heroine and Doña Carmen are clear. The same dessication of youth and cramping of development that plagues Bernarda Alba’s captive daughters shows in the frustrated virgins who fall under her sway. Similarly, the deployment of proverbs, which  run through the narrative like a kind of psychic chorus, creates a memorable impression of the internalised, punitive voices that limit and direct women’s actions.

Unlike Bernarda Alba, however, Yáñez Cossío’s matriarch does not focus on shutting the world out but on subverting and controlling it. The author shows this in astonishing detail, swooping in on the key moments in which characters manipulate and better one another to show minds shifting and changing beat by beat. Time and again, we see the downtrodden tempted to act against their best interests in the name of short-term security, exhaustion and disillusionment.

What’s more, we feel it too. Yáñez Cossío and Gladhart’s writing is so precise and vivid that, within a handful of sentences, we are taken into the deepest concerns and emotions of figures who often appear only fleetingly in the narrative. The death of the new magistrate at the hands of his former friends is a particularly striking piece of writing. This account of some of his final thoughts is a powerful sample:

‘… he sees with his own bulging eyes the bad movie of his life, its grotesque presence in full color. And he wants to cry because it is a ridiculously sad movie, it’s an interminable melodrama, and the protagonist is a small-town man who would have liked to have had so many things, and would have liked to live in a different fashion and to have died in his own bed with that unknown something that he never had and which is now set aside and he needs it. And he is filled with shame and nostalgia at never having had it, not because he didn’t want it, but because he was never allowed, because if he had had that which is called dignity, he wouldn’t be stretched out on the strangely fresh grass now, although he thinks at the same time that with dignity he and his children would have starved to death.’

Although it centres on life in a small, nameless town, the narrative has an epic quality. It sweeps across the decades in a single piece, unbroken by chapters, like the train of a richly embroidered gown, snagging now and then just long enough for particular details to catch the eye before jerking forward again. This grand quality has the effect of augmenting the bathos of some of the novel’s more ignominious and ridiculous episodes, but it also lends the work a timeless, majestic air.

For readers from other traditions, some of the rhetoric  (in particular, the habit of rehearsing the same mechanism of undercutting expectations over a series of consecutive paragraphs) may feel overblown. It is also intriguing to note which terms the publisher chose to italicise and explain in the glossary, and which they left undefined (often a keen tell on who the production team envisages the reader to be). I found myself having to freewheel over passages with extensive lists of local foodstuffs, materials and practices, although this may not be such an issue for readers in Texas, who may well have more knowledge of Latin American traditions than I do.

Luckily though, this book is more than equal to accommodating sporadic, superficial slippages in comprehension. The narrative glides along like the current of a mighty river, carrying readers with it, however they flail. Irresistible and powerful.

The Potbellied Virgin (La cofradía del mullo del vestido de la Virgen Pipona) by Alicia Yáñez Cossío, translated from the Spanish by Amalia Gladhart (University of Texas Press, 2006)

Book of the month: Patrícia Melo

August 31, 2021 By in Book of the month, Post-world, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 7 Comments

This #WITMonth, my reading has had a particular flavour. In October, I’ll be the inaugural Literary Explorer in Residence at the Cheltenham Literature Festival (theme: ‘Read the World’). One of the events I’ll be involved in is chairing a discussion about ‘Crime Fiction Around the World’ between celebrated writers Ragnar Jónasson, Mark Sanderson and Manjiri Prabhu.

As a result, I’ve been using the summer holiday to catch up on some of the world’s most intriguing who/how/whydunnits, with the help of recommendations gleaned from social media and more knowledgeable bloggers in this field, among them Marina Sofia, a contributor to Crime Fiction Lover and one of the driving forces behind Corylus Books. Female-authored highlights from recent weeks include: The Aosawa Murders by Ritu Onda, translated by Alison Watts, and Divorce Turkish Style by Esmahan Aykol, translated by Ruth Whitehouse.

For me, one of the fascinating things about crime stories that travel is the contrasting ways that regional norms around criminality, detection and punishment shape page-turners based on concepts of right and wrong. A murder mystery set in a country with the death penalty may land awkwardly for readers unused to the idea of criminals being executed; an investigation proceeding in a city where limitations on resources or infrastructure mean that the sort of forensic techniques commonly available in the global North are off-limits presents an author with contrasting choices to those confronting, say, Jo Nesbø. Meanwhile, varied conventions around interrogation practices and the handling of evidence may mean that the unravelling of a particular crime has the potential to play out rather differently depending on where it takes place and who is telling the story.

Bestselling Brazilian author Patrícia Melo embraces this issue in The Body Snatcher, translated by Clifford Landers. Presenting a narrator-protagonist who considers himself morally ‘neutral, to tell the truth’ and is well aware that ‘we’re not in Sweden, the police here are corrupt’, she unravels the mystery not of how a crime is solved but how it is committed and the ways a human mind must contort itself in order to do and try to get away with despicable things.

The premise is outlandish: out fishing one day in rural Corumbá, near the Bolivian border, the cash-strapped narrator witnesses a fatal light-aircraft crash. Discovering that the pilot is the son of one of the region’s wealthiest families and that his backpack contains a large packet of cocaine, he hits on the idea of selling the drugs and ultimately extorting money from the dead man’s parents as they grow desperate to recover their son’s body. What follows is a deft, fast-moving story full of twists and surprises.

Melo and Landers’ writing carries the day. While some of the set up and events, particularly in the early part of the story, would probably feel a little heavy-handed or convenient in another author’s hands (the protagonist wangling a job as the wealthy family’s chauffeur, for example, or his girlfriend having recently started working at the mortuary), this novel sweeps us over bumps in the road with an engaging, witty and beguiling narrative voice that can’t help but fascinate. Reading it is like watching a high-wire act – part of the enjoyment comes from the knowledge that the performer could tumble and seeing the flare and skill with which Melo dodges one pitfall after another.

Spare rather than bald, the writing bristles with beautifully succinct descriptions and observations. Consider this depiction of the pilot’s mother ‘being eaten alive by the worms of [her] son’s death’:

‘Every day there was a new health problem, a neck pain, another in the temples, in the neck and temples at the same time, her arms numb, tingling in the legs, tachycardia, vomiting, always some new symptom. And new doctors. If Junior were to appear, even dead, I knew the illness would go away. The same thing happened with my mother. At first the sickness is just a fiction, a kind of blackmail the body uses against the mind, and then, over time, it becomes a true cancer.’

These insights into human psychology are one of the keys to the novel’s success. With an uncanny sense of how the mind moves, Melo is careful to sweep us along in the currents of her narrator’s obsession. Starting with the revelation of a few shabby but relatable traits in her narrator – drawing comfort from disaster headlines because of the satisfaction of being outside the events, for example – she brings us along on his journey towards the unforgiveable, taking us through the loops of rationalisation and justification by which almost any act can be made acceptable to the doer.

Except that in the world Melo presents, the acts are not quite as unforgiveable as they might appear in some other places. With corruption revealed at every turn – indeed, with double-dealing repeatedly offered as the only way to afford a decent standard of living – the moral compass swings increasingly wildly as we journey through the book. By the end, the question is not so much whether the protagonist will be found out but whether we would want him to be. What makes this novel great is that rather than leave us on the outside, looking at the conundrum through the prism of our own society’s conventions about law enforcement and justice, it draws us into its centre, filling us with the same doubts and contradictions that besiege its characters.

A novel about a plane crash leading to an extortion attempt set in the British countryside might take very different twists and turns. And that’s precisely the point. This is a story that is the product both of its characters and of the world in which it takes place. In great writing, the two are inextricable.

The Body Snatcher (Ladrão de cadáveres) by Patrícia Melo, translated from the Portuguese by Clifford E. Landers (Bitter Lemon Press, 2015)

Picture: ‘Pantanal, Corumbá/MS’ by Coordenação-Geral de Observação da Terra/INPE on flickr.com

Book of the month: Leonardo Padura

June 30, 2018 By in Book of the month, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , 4 Comments

This book was a recommendation from two visitors to this blog. Suroor said it was ‘about the events leading up to Trotsky’s assasination’ and ‘about “corrupted utopias”: the Soviet Union, Cuba and Spain during the civil war,’ while CarolS told me that her book group had enjoyed Padura’s work, finding him a ‘superb conveyer of atmosphere’.

When I looked up Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs, translated by  Anna Kushner, I found that it had garnered a sheaf of enthusiastic reviews and that the word ‘masterpiece’ had been liberally applied to it. This set alarm bells ringing for me. Could this novel really live up to such hype?

The fruit of many years of research, thinking, discussion and writing, The Man Who Loved Dogs makes no secret of its ambition. Centring around the assassination of  the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940, it sets out to explore how ideologies are built and betrayed, how wars are won and lost, and how history is manipulated to suit the interests of those in power. To do so, it moves between multiple perspectives – weaving together an account of Trotsky’s years in exile, the reflections of late-twentieth century Cuban writer Iván Cárdenas Maturell and the strange story of a frail man he meets walking two Russian wolfhounds on the beach.

The novel is as weighty as its subject matter. At 576 pages, it is on its way to rivalling the classics of Russian literature for girth. The similarities don’t end there: the book’s expansive scope recalls the sweeping arcs of the works of Tolstoy, and like Tolstoy, Leonardo Padura capitalises on the richness that such long-form storytelling affords, taking time to establish motivations, personality shifts and moments of crisis that are all the more devastating for their extended build-up.

The drawn-out description of the radicalisation and indoctrination of Ramón Mercader, for example, and the painstaking delineation of the days leading up to his assassination of Trotsky are exceptionally powerful. The same goes for the detailed depictions of Trotsky’s sufferings and the struggles of many secondary characters, chief among them Mercader’s flinty mother, Caridad, and Maturell’s brother, who pays a heavy price for openly acknowledging his homosexual relationship at a time when this is still illegal in Cuba.

Through these haunting, engrossing episodes, which immerse us in the feelings and thoughts of those living them, we see how ‘the decisions of history can come in through the window of some lives and destroy them from the inside’.

The history in question, however, is somewhat different to that with which many English speakers will probably be familiar. As I discovered repeatedly during my quest to read the world, one of the mind-expanding things about literature from elsewhere is its tendency to portray familiar stories from unfamiliar angles, revealing aspects of well-known events that we may not previously have appreciated.

Here, we see the coming and unfolding of the second world war not from the familiar vantage points of London or Washington, but from the Soviet Union and Spain. The devastating implications of the pact between Stalin and Hitler – which, among other things, led to the suicide of numerous Communists imprisoned under Franco – leap from the page far more vigorously than they do from many anglophone history books.

In addition, Padura lays bare a mindset that many readers in Western capitalist countries may never have penetrated before. Through the discussions between Mercader and his mentor, he reveals what drives those who sacrifice their lives and identities for an idea:

‘I’m just one person , so very small, in the fight for a dream. A person and a name are nothing […] : a man can be relegated, substituted. The individual is not an unrepeatable unit but rather a concept that is added to and makes up a mass that is real. But man as an individual isn’t sacred and, as such, is expendable. […] The dream is what matters, not the man, and even less the name.’

This is a truly fascinating novel. To get through it takes commitment: even speedy readers will have it in their lives for the best part of a week. Yet, when I finished it I found myself wishing it had been longer – I wanted more of the hardships of life in late-twentieth century Cuba, as glimpsed through the eyes of Maturell, and I wished Padura had turned his talents to conjuring the thoughts of Trotsky’s nemesis, Stalin, who is a sinister, shadowy absence at the heart of this excellent book.

The term masterpiece is often used and seldom merited. It is justified in this case.

The Man Who Loved Dogs (El hombre que amaba a los perros) by Leonardo Padura, translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner (Bitter Lemon Press, 2013)

Picture: ‘Trotsky’s Gravesite’ by verifex on flickr.com

Book of the month: Liliana Colanzi

October 31, 2017 By in Book of the month, Post-world, South America Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

With a few notable exceptions, South American countries are generally poorly served when it comes to having their literature translated into the world’s most published language. If you want to venture beyond Colombian, Argentinian or Brazilian literature, you quickly find that quite a few nations only have a handful of their authors’ works available in English.

Bolivia is a case in point. When I cast about for something to read from there in 2012, there seemed to be very little choice. In the end, on the recommendation of the country’s most celebrated contemporary writer, Edmundo Paz Soldán, who graciously responded to my request for thoughts on lesser-known Bolivian writers I might discover, I plumped for the striking and savage short-story collection Sangre dulce/Sweet Blood by Giovanna Rivero Santa Cruz.

Five years later when a translation of another short-story collection by a female Bolivian writer came onto my radar through #WITMonth, I thought it might make an interesting comparison.

A brief summary of the content of some of the stories in Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World, translated by Jessica Sequeira, immediately shows up common ground between the authors. Stories of mental breakdown, maternal cruelty, child death, indigenous slavery and suicide make up the meat of this collection; like Rivero, Colanzi has an eye for the darker side of life.

The similarities don’t end there, for Colanzi’s writing possesses a similar muscularity and violence to Rivero’s. She has no hesitation in plunging us into disturbing scenes – such as the brutal killing of a pig, which opens the story ‘Alfredito’. These she fleshes out in precise and alarming detail, revealing that cruelty lives not in the summary of the things we do but in the moment-by-moment choices to deny, impose, withhold or force.

As with Rivero’s work – and indeed a number of the other Latin American works I’ve read – mental illness and the uncanny loom large. The world is never quite stable or trustworthy. The wave that travels through a university campus, triggering a spate of student suicides, is never explained. Neither are the spooky animals glimpsed by a homesick space traveller on Mars.

What gives Colanzi’s writing its own unique flavour, however, is her love of unusual perspectives. From ‘Family Portrait’, in which the surfacing of longstanding grudges between generations is told largely through the eyes of the photographer’s assistant helping to set up a group photograph, to ‘Story with Bird’, in which the narrator steps back briefly from events to envisage a time when humankind is extinct and other unimaginable beings inhabit the earth, the writer delights in showing us her characters from surprising angles.

The most delicious example is the way she crashes together space time and quotidian human existence at the start of ‘Meteorite’:

‘The meteroid traced the same orbit in the solar system for fifteen million years until the movement of a comet pushed it toward Earth. Even so, it took another twenty thousand more years before it collided with the planet, during which time the world passed through an ice age, mountains shifted and the waves gave land masses a new shape. Innumerable life forms died out forever, while others battled ferociously, adapted and repopulated the Earth. When the object at last entered the atmosphere[…] the igneous ball, a meter and a half in diameter, fell on the outskirts of San Borja. Its spectacular descent from the heavens was witnessed by a couple at home, arguing at five-thirty in the morning.’

Sometimes this playfulness topples into the outright weird. There are digressions and odd turns of events that feel too loosely threaded through the narratives. And, as is almost always the case with collections of this kind, certain of the stories are more successful than others.

On the whole, though, this is an arresting book. Its pieces work together to remind us that, although we are small, short-lived organisms in a vast and ancient universe, we nevertheless have the capacity to do startling things.

Our Dead World (Nuestro mundo muerto) by Liliana Colanzi, translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017)

Picture: ‘Abandoned steam engine in Uyuni train cemetery’ by Jimmy Harris on flickr.com

Book of the month: Samanta Schweblin

April 29, 2017 By in Book of the month, Post-world, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

When I was at university, I saw the following question on an exam paper: ‘Literary prizes often go to the right author but rarely the right book. Discuss.’ It was one of my earliest exposures to the doubts that often surface as the book world’s award ceremonies come round each year.

It’s easy to see why some people are cynical about prizes. With so many publications competing for attention (according to the Guardian recent years have seen more than 20 titles released every hour in the UK alone, with a total of 184,000 new and revised works coming out in 2013), it seems inevitable that awards are at least partly luck of the draw.

Indeed, history is littered with the names of literary greats passed over for accolades that subsequent generations of readers would have rushed to heap upon them. Neither Virginia Woolf nor James Joyce received the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example, while several of those lauded over the decades have slipped into obscurity.

Nevertheless, during my quest to read a book from every country, I found book prizes could act as useful signposts when it came to selecting reads from literary traditions and markets that were largely unfamiliar to me. The fact that Sunethra Rajakarunanayake’s Metta had won the Best Sinhala Novel State Literary Award, for instance, emboldened me to choose it for Sri Lanka with positive results.

So, although I appreciate that book prizes are an inexact science, I nevertheless look out for the announcement of the major longlists and shortlists each year. And for those of us interested in reading books that originate beyond the English-speaking world, they don’t come much more major than the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded for the first time last year to Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith for The Vegetarian, a book of the month pick of mine some months before.

April’s book of the month, Argentinian novelist Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, translated by Megan McDowell, comes from the shortlist for the 2017 award. I read it some weeks ago after seeing lots of excitement about it on social media and it stayed with me. Earlier this month, I was delighted to discover that it was among the six novels in contention for the award.

Framed as a vision arising from a woman’s delirium as she lies dying, the narrative centres on a holiday gone sour. Terror glints in the sunshine as Amanda haltingly recalls meeting flamboyant Carla and the macabre story she shared about her desperate attempt to save her poisoned son, David, by submitting him to a process of partial  transmigration conducted by a local medicine woman. Yet, as the book unfolds, it becomes apparent that the malevolent forces in question are not confined to Carla’s memory, and that Amanda and her daughter Nina could be at risk from them too.

Concision is central to the narrative’s power. In this slender, 194-page novel, Schweblin and McDowell know the weight of each word and deploy them to achieve maximum pressure.

Mystery abounds as the familiar becomes strange. This is a world where the most mundane of things – a child waking in the night, a lesser-known brand of peas – acquire a horrid weirdness. And as Amanda swerves in and out of the story, urged on by the very David whose eerie unmaking lies at the heart of the book, the ground of the narrative shifts unnervingly beneath our feet.

‘You know. But you don’t understand,’ David tells Amanda. Is he addressing us too?

Loathe though I am to make too much of comparisons between writers from markedly different times and traditions, I couldn’t help but find echoes of the work of one of my favourite authors, Shirley Jackson, here. Schweblin’s management of unease and foreboding is every bit as deft as the building of giddy queasiness found in such classics as The Haunting of Hill House. (Incidentally, Ruth Franklin’s outstanding biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, is a must-read for all those who have enjoyed Jackson’s work.)

The result is memorable, haunting and brave. Like all books that test the limits of what words can do, Fever Dream takes risks and there are odd occasions where the narrative knots or sags, such that some readers might flail to regain the thread. These are few, however.

Not having read Schweblin’s other works, I can’t say how this compares and whether or not it is the title from her oeuvre most deserving of global recognition. But if the Man Booker International Prize judges see fit to honour Fever Dream this year, I would count it a worthy second winner.

Fever Dream (Distancia de rescate) by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Oneworld, 2017)

Image from manbookerprize.com

WITmonth pick #5: Lina Meruane

September 15, 2016 By in Book of the month, Post-world, South America Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

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When I tweeted that I was reading Seeing Red by Chilean writer Lina Meruane last month, @infinitetexts responded: ‘hold on tight. It’s a brilliant ride!’ It turned out to be good advice because this slender work, my fifth and last pick of the 17 books I read during Women in Translation month, is a roller coaster of a story.

The autobiographical novel follows the fortunes of Lina, a doctoral student in New York who loses her sight after a stroke. Forced to depend more and more on her boyfriend, Ignacio, and relatives back in Chile, the fiercely intelligent, ambitious and self-reliant protagonist has to renegotiate her relationships with those around her and the world. As she does so, she is obliged to look at life, humanity, the body and science afresh.

Meruane’s ability to take readers into the experience of sight loss is extraordinary. Her descriptions are fresh, immediate and memorable, inviting comparisons with passages from Nobel Prize winner José Saramago’s great novel Blindness. Although the catastrophe that Meruane evokes is private and individual, as opposed to the public and universal breakdown of society that Saramago depicts, it is every bit as engrossing and devastating. In this narrative we discover that to lose your sight is to risk losing your self – an eventuality which could cost you the world as utterly as any mass outbreak of sightlessness might.

At root, this is a book about what happens when the familiar suddenly becomes strange, rendering the methods by which we have known and judged the things around us useless. It reveals what happens when the known is made mysterious – when simple acts such as moving around your apartment or recognising an acquaintance turn into minefields, when the street ceases to be a place and becomes instead ‘a crowd of sounds all elbowing and shoving’. In showing us life through a scuffed lens, the novel helps us to look at everyday occurrences differently.

The idea that blindness opens up alternative channels of vision and insight is hardly new – storytellers have been playing with it since the creation of the first Ancient Greek myths involving the blind prophet Tiresias and probably long before that. Yet, in Meruane’s hands, the familiar trope takes on a fresh urgency, helped by startling language use and imagery that makes the text leap from the page. Indeed, praise is due to translator Megan McDowell, who has not only managed to deliver an English version full of surprising and challenging repurposements of words, but also had to contend with a scene in which Lina and Ignacio try to do a crossword – surely no easy thing to bring successfully from one language to another.

The consequence of the odd brilliance of the prose, which is sometimes bewildering in its breathlessness, is that it makes reading itself strange. Much like the protagonist, who has to remake her interaction with texts by way of audiobooks, we also have to relearn to read in order to inhabit this novel. And just as Lina stumbles over the once mundane objects of her life, we may find ourselves blundering between sentences, having to stop now and then to reorientate ourselves and ensure that our interpretation is on track.

The result is powerful and memorable. Although I wish Meruane had opted for a different final sentence (the existing one being a little on-the-nose for my liking), there is no doubt that this book is a valuable addition to the literature of blindness, as well as an excellent read. It is exhilarating – a brilliant ride as @infinitetexts said. I came away with my vision sharpened and my head spinning.

Seeing Red (Sangre en el ojo) by Lina Meruane, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Deep Vellum, 2016)

Picture: ‘Blurred vision’ by Judy on flickr.com

Book of the month: Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares

November 24, 2015 By in Book of the month, Post-world, South America Tags: , , , , , , , , , 10 Comments

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Brazil is certainly not short of stories. When I was collecting recommendations for my year of reading the world back in 2012, many people suggested tempting-sounding titles from South America’s most populous country. Since then, booklovers have continued to get in touch with ideas, leaving comments on the post I wrote about João Ubaldo Ribeiro’s House of the Fortunate Buddhas (the novel I chose for my project), and whizzing over emails and tweets.

Indeed, only this morning, Carlos left a comment to tell me about ‘The Devil to Pay in the Backlands’ (Grande Sertão: Veredas in the original), which he regards as ‘the greatest Brazilian novel’. He went on to say, however, that he believes it’s untranslatable because author João Guimarães Rosa invented many of the words in it, creating ‘a unique reading experience’, which Carlos fears would be lost if the book were converted into another language. (It would be interesting to hear what others think about this.)

Beyond the personal recommendations I’ve been lucky to get from readers, a number of anthologies of Brazilian writing have opened up the work of some of the nation’s newer authors to English-language readers in recent years. Thanks to publications such as Granta’s Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, writers such as JP Cuenca, Vanessa Barbara and Tatiana Salem Levy are on the anglophone radar. Their work (or some of it at least) is accessible to the huge number of people who read in English, the most published language in the world.

As a result, there are thankfully a relatively large number of translated Brazilian works that I could have chosen as November’s Book of the month – both recent novels and fantastic blasts from the past. Over the past year, for example, I’ve found myself enthralled by the writings of Clarice Lispector and could happily have written an enthusiastic post about her wonderfully strange novel Hour of the Star. 

However, in the discussions I’ve had about Brazil recently, one title in particular caught my attention. It was a novella translated by my friend Daniel Hahn for Berlin-based ebook company Frisch & Co: Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares’s Family Heirlooms.

I was intrigued by Frisch & Co and by Hahn’s comment that Tavares was not likely to be known to many English-language readers, despite her being much-lauded at home in Brazil. This month, there was another incentive too. Having spent the last few weeks reading Tolstoy’s magnificent War and Peace, the idea of a book I could finish in a handful of hours was very appealing! So I decided to give the book, which was first published in Portuguese in 1990, a go.

Set in Itaim Bibi, a district in São Paulo, the novella follows Maria Bráulia Munhoz, an elderly, yet formidable, widow who is putting her affairs in order with the reluctant help of her nephew. When one of the pieces in her jewellery collection, a handsome pigeon’s-blood ruby ring, is found to be a fake, the discovery triggers an avalanche of recollections and revelations that uncovers the foundations of the central character and the bourgeois world that is fading with her.

The discrepancy between our private selves and the faces we present to the world is everywhere apparent in the book. From the formal ceremony of the rose-petal-strewn fingerbowl that Maria Bráulia Munhoz insists must follow every meal, to the ritual of her make-up routine and the awkward posturing of her nephew, Tavares captures the thousand ways we shore ourselves up with pretence.

Often, this is very funny. In the description of the nephew’s sensitivity about his thinning hair and the way that he is ‘more afraid of his aunt’s migraines than the movement of shares on the Stock Exchange’, we see the glimmer of Tavares’s sense of the ridiculous. The author (or perhaps more accurately Hahn in his translation) makes rich use of lacunae too, frequently deflating characters’ pretensions by the inclusion of pithy, bracketed dollops of interior monologue.

The writing is inventive. At several points, for example, life itself crops up, personified and spoiling for a fight, ready to beat characters down. And for my money, you have to go some distance to find a simile better than the description of a stroke that afflicts one of the lesser characters towards the end of the book:

‘His words seemed to be coming from very far away, like the roar of the sea – they were transatlantic words – only to die there in the corner of his mouth, forming, in front of his embarrassed friends, a slight layer of froth that took a while to disappear […] All that muted volume, that threat coming from so far away, a thought coming from such a depth, and soon just a little bit of froth, nothing at all, just a little froth, a mere trifle.’

It’s fair to say that not all the devices work as well as this. Labyrinthine sentences leave the reader foundering occasionally. Similarly, some of the imagery cancels itself out by changing tack from one phrase to the next.

All in all, though, this is an enjoyable and illuminating read. It walks the tightrope between humour and insight with aplomb, finishing with a flourish. I found it a joy – and a delightful counterpoint to the Napoleonic wars.

Now, back to Tolstoy’s Moscow, where the enemy has entered the gates…

Family Heirlooms (Jóias de Família) by Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn (Frisch & Co., 2014)

Picture: São Paulo by Júlio Boaro on Flickr