Lists
by Powell's Staff, July 26, 2022 8:06 AM
![New Literature in Translation: July 2022](https://www.powells.com/portals/0/Images/July22trans_800.jpg)
If you (like me) aren’t a huge fan of the heat, then July is the perfect month to hunker down, turn on the fan for some good, cool air and white noise, and pull out your next great read. Below, we’ve rounded up some of the books in translation released this past month that we’re the most excited about. In this month’s selection, you’ll find a generational story about Guadeloupean siblings that spans decades; a "fiercely anti-sentimental meditation on the unsettling paradoxes of motherhood" from Spain; a long road trip filled with stories about cigars and cars and life from a Swiss author; a bleak, necropastoral landscape in Canada; an “anti-voyeuristic portrait of a people visited by tragedy” from a Polish war correspondent; a Swedish novel featuring a writing fellowship and a mysterious talk show; and a new book from "a kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic" Argentinian author.
Dig in; explore; stay hydrated!
Where Dogs Bark with Their Tails
by Estelle-Sarah Bulle (tr. Julia Grawemeyer)
Translated from the French
Bulle has filled this fun and fascinating yarn with great characters and sensory images that put the reader right there in Guadeloupe, a former French colony that is now part of the French Republic, in the Caribbean to the east of Puerto Rico. Aunt Antoine, never married, with her beauty and audacity, her great height and the men's shoes she wears, is a superlative guide to this tale that spans from the 1940s to the early 2000s. She and her siblings grow up in Guadeloupe and see it slowly change and finally ignite in protests and crackdowns in the 1960s, and then the story follows them to Paris, where they go to find a better life. It's not always easy to be a French citizen of darker skin, however, as each of the siblings come to realize. — Jennifer K.
Brenner
by Hermann Burger (tr. Adrian Nathan West)
Translated from the German
There’s some distinct overlap between the narrator of Brenner — a suicidal depressive, heir to a small cigar fortune — and the author, Hermann Burger, a suicidal depressive who was descended from cigar makers. This is the first time that Brenner, Burger’s last novel, has been translated into English. The book is at its best when it goes full Proust: the narrator, intent on ending his life, buys an expensive and flashy car (a red Ferrari!) and goes on a long, winding road trip, recounting recollections and thoughts as meandering as the roads he travels along the way. Archipelago is one of the best publishers working today, so you know when they put something out, it’s worth picking up. — Kelsey F.
The Remembered Part
by Rodrigo Fresán (tr. Will Vanderhyden)
Translated from the Spanish
The closing entry in Rodrigo Fresán’s incomparable Part Trilogy — rendered from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden, winner of the Best Translated Book Award — The Remembered Part follows The Invented Part and The Dreamed Part to conclude a brilliant, sprawling, referentially maniacal triptych about an ex-writer. Called "a kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room" by Jonathan Lethem, Fresán is a novelist possessed of (by?!) an exceptional imagination and an uncanny tangential dexterity. The Remembered Part is the fitting, final piece of an epic masterwork of startling scope. — Jeremy G.
The Second Substance
by Anne Lardeux (tr. Pablo Strauss)
Translated from the French
Anne Lardeux's The Second Substance, rendered with a wondrous, ambient dread by translator Pablo Strauss, is a beguiling, bawdy chronicle of the lives orbiting an anarchist squat that has settled in a defunct Shell station. As if that premise isn't tantalizing enough, Lardeux's debut is equally impressive as a lyrical hybrid text — a cinematic blend of diary fragments, poetic voiceovers, allusions to Agnès Varda and Truffaut, and jump-cuts that, as we read, "signif[y] the proximity of danger at the heart of everyday life." The overall effect is one of absolute atmosphere, in which the bleak, necropastoral landscape — from junkyards to derelict nuclear power plants — is as integral to the novel’s emotional heart as its vivid characters. Much like the self-described mind of the book's primary narrator The Girl With No Name, Lardeux's writing is "sharp as a blade but tender" and, with this assured first book, claims a unique corner of its own within the wide field of contemporary dystopian lit. — Alexa W.
Roosters Crow, Dogs Cry
by Wojciech Tochman (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
Translated from the Polish
From Polish war correspondent Wojciech Tochman comes Roosters Crow, Dogs Cry, the last in a trilogy of works on post-WWII genocides, brought skillfully into English by Antonia Lloyd Jones (perhaps best known for her English-language translations of Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk). Tochman’s reporting — exemplary "nonfiction literature" — has led him to the most turbulent corners of the world: from the massacre of the Tutsi in Rwanda to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, among others. Roosters Crow takes Tochman to Cambodia, where in the late-1970s the Khmer Rouge (the Communist group that wrested control during the civil war of 1968–75) reigned, wrought havoc, implemented one of the most horrifying genocidal campaigns of the 20th century, purging perceived political opponents and intellectuals (i.e., those who wore glasses, or spoke a foreign language) in the name of building an agricultural Marxist utopia. All said and done, more than 2 million people were killed — a very significant percentage of the population (at that time, around 7.5 million). As with many of Tochman’s works, Roosters Crow is concerned with the lingerings — enigmatic, material, intergenerational — of incalculable historical violence; how such a history corrodes the present: in this case, a particular kind of wound known as "baksbat," or "broken courage syndrome." And how, in this place, virtually no social infrastructures exist to heal the wounded: "there are only fifty psychiatrists in a country of sixteen million people."
Tochman is for the readers of Svetlana Alexievich, the laureate of the post-Soviet condition, and for those seeking a scrupulously sensitive, knowledgeable, and (most laudably) anti-voyeuristic portrait of a people visited by tragedy, then by the evils of Dark Tourism; in an early stage, yet, of recovery.
As has been said of Tochman’s earlier work: "cruelty speaks for itself, and does not need description or colouring." — Annabel J.
Mothers Don’t
by Katixa Agirre (tr. Katie Whittemore)
Translated from the Spanish
Katixa Agirre's Mother's Don't opens in the immediate aftermath of a horrifying act of violence: a woman named Alice has drowned her infant twins. From this dark nucleus, Agirre’s novel fractals outwards into a fiercely anti-sentimental meditation on the unsettling paradoxes of motherhood, all unfolding in the spare yet deeply sensuous prose of Katie Whittemore’s stirring translation. "Literature is an alchemy," Agirre notes near the end of the novel, and indeed, her book is one that troubles the waters in order to remind us that the politics of motherhood is limitless (i.e. far from exhausted) literary terrain. Especially recommended for fans of Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood, or Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory. — Alexa W.
Carnality
by Lina Wolff (tr. Frank Perry)
Translated from the Swedish
This book begins as the story of a Swedish woman going to Spain on a writing fellowship, hoping for a change of scenery and some adventure. What follows becomes increasingly strange as she ventures into the world of a mysterious talk show. Wolff's Madrid is a place that's easy to get lost in, and her characters feel achingly real. This book's dark absurdity and heightened reality captivated me. — Alice H.
The Forgery
by Ave Barrera (tr. Ellen Jones and Robin Myers)
Translated from the Spanish
This ingenious debut features a painter down on his luck, a devious man who offers him a fortune to copy a painting, a trans woman and her strange twin, an enigmatic vagrant, and the magnetic woman of color featured in the painting who seems to control the fate of all who view her. It's such a gripping tale that I'm keen for someone to make it into a movie! Barrera is a born storyteller, and I cannot wait for more of her works to be translated.— Jennifer K.
Bad Handwriting
by Sara Mesa (tr. Katie Whittemore and Frances Riddle)
Translated from the Spanish
I remember reading Sara Mesa’s Four by Four in one big, uninterrupted gulp, so moved and compelled and unnerved by the way the story wrapped its vice grip around my lungs. Her newest book, Bad Handwriting, a collection of short stories, is just as precise, angry, and beautiful. Her work somehow manages to go both micro and macro, intimate and vast, disturbing and lovely. In an interview she did with LitHub on the release of Four by Four (it’s a great interview, definitely read it), she said: "There is subversion in...compassion, starting from the moment compassion is directed at people who don’t normally receive it." An idea that holds true throughout this new, incredible story collection.— Kelsey F.
Goodbye, Ramona
by Montserrat Roig (tr. Megan Berkobien and María Cristina Hall)
Translated from the Catalan
Montserrat Roig was a great Catalonian feminist and activist who spent most of her life under a fascist government; her works are just now being translated into English. In Goodbye, Ramona, the first of her feminist novels, she tells the stories of three generations of a family's women against the backdrop of Catalonian history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Roig writes about personal and collective memory with poignancy and humor.— Jennifer K.
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