Lists
by Powell's Staff, February 27, 2023 9:43 AM
There were some incredible books in translation released this past month, compiled here with enthusiastic recommendations from Powell’s booksellers. On this list, you’ll find a “strange, dystopian, and undeniably human” Bosnian short story collection; a “naughty, vertiginous stew of fairytale-like episodes” from a Russian author; a new addition to jail literature from the former press secretary to a Russian opposition leader; a long-lost epistolary novel from the “Russian Proust;” a Norwegian short story collection that possesses the “surreal, dialectical quality of a funereal bouquet;” a hybrid, Croatian novel that is “a process of accumulation, a buildup of detritus over a life;” a Turkish epic that shines a spotlight on the dangers of masculinity and authoritarianism; a multigenerational novel from a Congolese-Canadian author; a Spanish novel full of cults and supernatural evils; and more.
We hope you find something you love here, and hope you’re staying warm and reading widely.
Sweetlust
by Asja Bakic (tr. Jennifer Zoble)
Translated from the Bosnian
Featuring eleven short stories, Sweetlust is strange, dystopian, and undeniably human. Themes of climate change, late-stage capitalism, and relationship complexities are portrayed at their most extreme, leaving the reader with an unsettling feeling of relatability. Bakic's Bosnian heritage interweaves itself into her writing, my favorite way being through heartfelt odes to homemade rakija (fruit spirits). — Charlotte S.
Evil Flowers
by Gunnhild Øyehaug (tr. Kari Dickson)
Translated from the Norwegian
True to its Baudelaireian title, this delightfully morbid short story collection from Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug possesses the surreal, dialectical quality of a funereal bouquet: something wild yet contained; singular yet multiple; alive yet ephemerally so. Nestled within its arrangement are twenty-five compressed and fast-paced stories, some even resembling flash fiction or prose poems. Together, they coalesce in a dream-like manner, by way of echo and accretion, so that across a perceptive field that includes slime eels, deceased bog queens, homicidal cell phones, Baudelaire’s disdain for photography, psychic midges, and Virginia Woolf’s toilet, no detail feels out of place. Indeed, the more gratuitous the better. Thanks to Dickson’s lively translation, which crystalizes the text’s playful and deadpan quality, Øyehaug’s collection is, in short, a marvel, with stories that left me thinking on the bizarre pleasures of reading and writing, and feeling not unlike her character Elos in ‘A Visit to Monk’s House’ upon seeing hollyhocks: “touched by…something extraterrestrial and mysterious, as if they had been planted there only to remind me of something.” — Alexa W.
Our Share of Night
by Mariana Enriquez (tr. Megan McDowell)
Translated from the Spanish
I’ll be honest: I did not expect the size of this book, but wow am I grateful that Enriquez was generous enough to let us spend so much time in the world of Our Share of Night, a book that is epic, horrific, and incredible. The story centers around a recently widowed father and his young son, who is maybe on the verge of inheriting his father’s powers as a medium. There are cults and supernatural evils alongside the very real-to-life threats from wealth and power, set against the Dirty War in Argentina. A description that barely hints at the mastery and complexity within Our Share of Night. It’s only February, but I’m calling it now: I’m sure this one’s going to be a favorite 2023 read for me. — Kelsey F.
It’s the End of the World My Love
by Alla Gorbunova (tr. Elina Alter)
Translated from the Russian
From writer Alla Gorbunova (by way of translator Elina Alter): a naughty, vertiginous stew of fairytale-like episodes, bookended by the (ostensibly separate) arc of a young woman’s alcohol-, desire-, and poetry-fueled spark of adolescence across the shadowy underbelly – the “unholy filth” – of 1990s Russia. In the weeks, here in Oregon, that wildfire smoke submitted to rain and we pushed further into the hem of the season, Gorbunova’s coarse, philosophical masterclass in the novel-in-stories – weighted down by generational divisions; inherited Russian sadness; young, impossible love; premature cynicism; the dark, marvelous shapes of a vigorous folkloric tradition – felt, to me, overwhelmingly, radiantly appropriate. — Annabel J.
A Silence Shared
by Lalla Romano (tr. Brian Robert Moore)
Translated from the Italian
Recommended for fans of Tove Ditlevsen and Rachel Cusk, this 1957 Italian classic has finally been translated into English. Set against the backdrop of German-occupied Italy during World War II, A Silence Shared is the story of a young woman forming a unique relationship with a couple as they all struggle with the displacement and uncertainty of war. This short novel is brimming with poignant descriptions of the natural world and of human connection, highlighting the universality of our experiences with places and people across different times and nationalities. — Alyssa C.
Deceit
by Yuri Felsen (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Translated from the Russian
Author Yuri Felsen comes with a lot of epithets; a Russian Jewish emigré, he’s been described as the “Russian Proust” and Nabokov called him “real literature.” The pseudonym for Nikolai Freudenstein, who died in Auschwitz in 1943, his writing had been lost until recently, thanks to translator Bryan Karetnyk efforts to resurface the many manuscripts and letters that had long been forgotten. Deceit is an epistolary novel from the perspective of a Russian expat living in Paris between wars. The novel explores many themes, including unrequited love, identity, survival, safety, and, of course, (self-)deceit. An important, overdue work. — Kelsey F.
The Private Lives of Trees
by Alejandro Zambra (tr. Megan McDowell)
Translated from the Spanish
The premise of Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra’s quiet and bewildering novella is deceptively simple: a writer named Julián waits for his wife Verónica to return from an art class, passing the increasingly anxious hours by telling bedtime stories to his step-daughter, Daniela. Julián’s stories entail imagined conversations between various sentient trees – their passions, their gossip, what they notice among humans – in an attempt to fill Verónica’s mysterious absence with a long-limbed and gratuitous presence. Yet of course, there’s more to the domestic mise-en-scène than meets the eye, and as Julián’s tales unfold, a whole spectrum of life stirs and wrestles itself awake beneath his white-knuckled placidity. Ricocheting between memories of the past and imagined futures, Zambra’s fractaling stories-within-stories, translated with lucid, poetic prose by Megan McDowell, ultimately enfold readers in the “fragile armor of the present,” that vulnerable space towards which the mystery at the heart of life itself — its happenstance and grace — bends its branches. — Alexa W.
Abyss
by Pilar Quintana (tr. Lisa Dillman)
Translated from the Spanish
Abyss, a short Colombian novel, is told through the eyes of eight-year-old Claudia, whose world continually shifts as new people arrive and her mother battles depression, so she’s forced to face the idea of the “abyss” again and again. Appearing here in a beautiful translation by Lisa Dillman, Abyss reads like all of our beating hearts: terrified of being abandoned, desperate for love, and caught in the tides of life changes they don’t understand. Oh, Claudia, I wish I could hug you! — Kelsey F.
The Incredible Events in Women's Cell Number 3
by Kira Yarmysh (tr. Arch Tait)
Translated from the Russian
From the former press secretary to a Russian opposition leader, the title of this book says it all: set in a detention center, where Anya is sent for ten days after being arrested at an anti-corruption rally. Over those ten days, she bonds with the other five women in the cell with her, trading stories about their politics, their families, and the world outside the four walls of their cell. At times surreal, at others terrifying, The Incredible Events in Women’s Cell Number 3 is a surprisingly sweet and occasionally tender debut. Kira Yarmysh is a thrilling new voice. — Kelsey F.
Battle Songs
by Daša Drndic (tr. Celia Hawkesworth)
Translated from the Croatian
The late Daša Drndic is what happens when a psychiatrist and diplomat have a kid who grows up to be a writer: a disposition attuned as acutely to psychic typographies as to the insidious, tectonic activities of nations.
Battle Songs (reductively marketed as a novel) is a process of accumulation, a buildup of detritus over a life — wending and incoherent — punctuated by starts and stops, old wars and new wars, one political system and the next, displacement and incomplete resettlement.
More concretely, Battle Songs is about Yugoslavism and the post-Yugoslav peoples who, like shrapnel, fanned outward from a burning epicenter nearing the turn of the century, resettling in far-flung places like St. Louis, Chicago, and Toronto. The unnamed narrator and her preteen daughter land in the latter; it's their narrative arc (and by extension, the distant family in Croatia with its secrets, diaries, and decorous letters to President Tito) that grounds the book. Drndic describes her compatriots as remade in Canada (the fissures and contractions of which she is uniquely poised, as an outsider, to unearth): proverbial doctors and lawyers who fill envelopes and sell hot dogs on the street. A well-trod immigrant tale.
Some chapters tumble irretrievably into murky depths of history — one indexing, for example, a cast of (very real) WWII-era war criminals (WWII being an especially dense specter over the Balkans) who at the time of writing enjoyed relative peace and obscurity, or died never having answered for their crimes. Obsessive research (often in the form of lists or extended footnotes) is integral to Drndic's process: one full page merely lists the titles of scholarly papers (written about her native Croatia, read from her adoptive country).
Another chapter — a breath of levity in bleakness — describes the "cult" status of the pig in the former Yugoslavia (hence the cover art), drawing parallels between the plight of the post-Yugoslav and that of the Vietnamese Pot-bellied Pig (a lovable but high-effort pet that rose to staggering popularity in 1980s America upon import only to wilt as rapidly, forgotten and surrendered to shelters).
Battle Songs is by no means a light or a passive read, but is an instructive tool for those interested in literary hybridity, the melding of fiction and reportage, and the kind of non-linear, associative logic that can hold those two seemingly disparate poles together. — Annabel J.
Eastbound
by Maylis de Kerangal (tr. Jessica Moore)
Translated from the French
This novella, slim though it may be, contains an incredible amount: the story of two fugitives, one running from his conscription into the Russian army, the other trying to escape an abusive ex. Neither know where they’re going or how to get there, and they’re strangers who don’t speak the same language — all elements that make for a thrilling, suspenseful ride, as the train they’re on rolls through the desolate, beautiful Siberia. There is love and lyricism, hope and horror and beauty. Like I said — this slim novella contains a lot. — Kelsey F.
In the Belly of the Congo
by Blaise Ndala (tr. Amy B. Reid)
Translated from the French
A necessary and timely, multigenerational novel about the effects of colonialism in the Congo. The story toggles between 1958 and 2004. In 1958, at Brussels World Fair, one of the exhibits is a “Congolese village” of Africans and a princess of the Congo is put on display; in 2004, that princess’s niece crosses paths with another descendent, carrying a familial secret from that time. An engrossing, poetic novel that looks at how insidious the history of colonialism continues to be in the present. — Kelsey F.
Dying is Easier Than Loving
by Ahmet Altan (tr. Brendan Freely)
Translated from the Turkish
The third book in Ahmet Altan’s Ottoman Quarter, Dying is Easier than Loving is an epic about love and war and the dangers of masculinity and authoritarianism, set in the Ottoman Empire in the years leading up to WWI. The world of the book is lush, beautifully rendered, and atmospheric. Ahmet Altan is outspoken in his dissent of his country and was recently released from prison; this outspoken dissent shines through in Dying is Easier than Loving, one of the many elements that contributes to the book’s compelling depth. — Kelsey F.
For more literature in translation, check out our recommendations from December 2022 and January 2023.
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