Lists
by Powell's Staff, March 29, 2023 9:06 AM
Spring may bring spring showers, but it also brings new spring books! We're happy to present to you our favorite new works in translation published this past month. On this list, you’ll find a tidy piece of perfection from an Argentinean master of the short novel; a chronicle of wartime Kyiv from 2022, written by a Ukrainian writer and photographer; a supposed-prequel from 1935 to a Japanese author’s most famous work; a “bewitching, exquisite, almost unbearably bittersweet” German novel; the final book in an ambitious triology from a Mozambican author; a Korean novel about gender, alienation, and survivor’s guilt; a novel built from 66 vignette-like chapters about a Buenos Aires garbage collector; a new collection of science fiction shorts from a wonderfully entertaining Mexican author; a Hungarian novel that’s a profound and beautifully clever character study; and a German novel about a British-Ghanaian woman's reincarnations through the centuries.
Grab an umbrella, because it’s raining books! (Too much? We won’t be apologizing.)
Fulgentius
by César Aira (tr. Chris Andrews)
Translated from the Spanish
Although this one is long by Aira standards at 163 pages, it's still the tidy piece of perfection readers have come to expect. Thoughtful, funny, and delightfully strange, pivoting on a dime, Aira's work always delivers. In this one, we are treated to the portrait of a Roman general, Fulgentius, who has known much success and acclaim in his campaigns to subdue local populations and put them under the imperial yoke, but now is aging out of the profession and might be turning into a ridiculous figure. There is tension in seeing through his eyes the horrors of battle resulting from his murderous orders and yet hearing his bizarre, romantic thoughts about it all. Fulgentius makes himself ridiculous by his insistence upon staging his own, critically savaged, play wherever he leads his armies. It's a play Fulgentius wrote in his youth, originally as a joke tragedy for his teacher's amusement, but which now appears prescient about his own career arc. Aira may have been inspired by the lampooned writings of Fabius Fulgentius, a Latin writer of late antiquity, but the details and twisty fabrications are all the author's own. — Jennifer K.
War Diary
by Yevgenia Belorusets (tr. Greg Nissan)
Translated from the German
When in February 2022 Russian troops entered Ukraine, the writer and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets was in Kyiv, her hometown. Russia had been in Ukraine since 2014, of course, under the guise of the "peaceful and civil annexation of Crimea" – a not-war tenor to which residents had gradually if coercively grown accustomed and the rest of the world indifferent. Russia's insidious presence could no longer be overlooked when Putin mobilized novel "military exercises" along borderlands, sharpening years of ambiguity. What had long been obscured and denied was newly unmistakable.
War Diary chronicles the early weeks of Russian aggression in and around the Ukrainian capital – the first time since World War II that the city had come under fire. Belorusets wrote almost daily despite blackouts and scarcity and air-raid sirens, sending her entries to the German newspaper Der Spiegel (Belorusets made a second home in Berlin) where they were almost instantly picked up by other groups and translated for publication across the globe.
The entries describe broad, empty avenues clear of cars and pedestrians; the cautious, calculated routes and movements with which one navigates a city in wartime; the fresh dangers of grocery shopping and park-going; the swiftness and ease with which a subway station becomes a bomb shelter; the suspicions lodged against a woman with a camera and questions. Belorusets' wartime Kyiv reminded me of being in Manhattan in the spring of 2020, when the mundanities of ordinary life became refracted through the trifecta of surveillance, infection, and death. A different kind of contaminant, of course. One that approximates but could never compare.
On one of her walks, Belorusets passes a group of men and women – new initiates of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense – and recognizes among them a local barista who was loved for the delicate swans he made in milk. On another, she finds city workers have painted over public street maps, presumably to thwart the maneuvers of Russian troops. She learns that in Mariupol, hundreds of people have sought shelter in a downtown theater, and that satellite images reveal the Russian word for "children" twice spelled out in large white letters on each end of the building.
And yet, despite all, "islands of peaceful life" prevail: bakeries open their doors for business; her father continues his diligent translation work – "despite the danger, or maybe because of it" – bringing German poets into the Ukrainian language (having largely cut ties with Russian after 2014).
Most entries grapple, finally, with indecision – whether to flee or to stay – and with the international community's failure to intervene. Always are the specters of Mariupol, Bucha, Schastia, Chernihiv – the atrocities of which are slow to surface and impossible to quantify, metabolize.
I finished War Diary as the conflict entered its second year, mere days before the International Criminal Court (the jurisdiction of which the Kremlin does not recognize) issued an arrest warrant for Putin.
March 16, 2022: an estimated 300 die in the bombing of the Mariupol theater.
For her part, Belorusets concludes her text: "This diary cannot be completed, it can only be interrupted." – Annabel J.
The Flowers of Buffoonery
by Osamu Dazai (tr. Sam Bett)
Translated from the Japanese
Translated for the first time in English since its publication in Japan in 1935, The Flowers of Buffoonery is described by the publishers as a 'hilariously comic and deeply moving prequel' to Osamu Dazai's most famous novel, No Longer Human (1948).
After reading the novel, I disagree with their description on two counts; it is much more tragic than it is comic, and it does not fit the description of 'prequel,' since the events in this novel take place in the middle of the events of No Longer Human, during the narrator's time in a sanitarium after a failed lovers' suicide.
However, I do agree that it is deeply moving. Though it was published over ten years before NLH, this earlier novel likewise explores the narrator's feelings of alienation from society, from nature, and from his family and friends. The author particularly emphasizes the inauthenticity of the characters' social interactions, in which they rarely say what they mean, enhancing the main character's sense of isolation.
More present in this novel than in NLHL are the metafictional elements, in which the narrator comments upon the novel itself. In these many asides, the writer grapples with the purpose of art, the difficulty of faithfully portraying the characters' actions and emotions, and the desire for critical acclaim and financial success while maintaining artistic integrity.
So, to anyone who has ever felt disconnected from the world, to those who have experienced a crisis of creativity — you may read this book and feel at least slightly less alone. — Alyssa C.
Rombo
by Esther Kinsky (tr. Caroline Schmidt)
Translated from the German
Bewitching, exquisite, almost unbearably bittersweet (I had to blink back tears more than once), Rombo evokes the transience of all life through seven characters' accounts of what happened on the day and night of a devastating earthquake in the mountains of northern Italy in May 1976. Intermingled with their ruminations on the day that changed everything for them and their villages, as well as the long aftermath of the quake, is a kind of testimony from the plants, animals, and rock formations that make up the area, making the novel part of the emerging pluriversal genre, which feels so current and fresh, yet so ancient in its scope and wisdom. Kinsky enchants the reader throughout, especially when she begins weaving in a thread of local tales of witches turned to mountains, magical dwarves, and Riba Faronika, the fish-tailed woman bearing the world on her back who sleeps at the bottom of the sea and causes earthquakes as she stirs in her sleep. — Jennifer K.
The Drinker of Horizons
by Mia Couto (tr. David Brookshaw)
Translated from the Portuguese
The Drinker of Horizons is the conclusion to an ambitious, epic trilogy from Mozambican author Mia Couto. The trilogy as a whole is deeply concerned with the violent effect of Portuguese colonialism within Mozambique; The Drinker of Horizons pushes this portrayal from every angle. Through the eyes of pregnant translator Imani, on a boat traveling from Mozambique to Lisbon, we see the various ways the colonizers around her assume their rights to her body, her life, and the lives of those around her. A beautiful, and beautifully translated, look at the ravages of colonialism and a character's determination to survive on her own terms. — Kelsey F.
Walking Practice
by Dolki Min (tr. Victoria Caudle)
Translated from the Korean
I couldn’t stop thinking about Under the Skin while reading Walking Practice, a Korean novel about gender, alienation, and survivor’s guilt. When an alien hungry for human flesh finds itself trapped on Earth, it decides to satisfy its cravings via dating app. This book is hilarious, grotesque, murdery, and yet, somehow, deeply moving. All of that, wrapped up in a bow with that beautiful cover? Incredibly satisfying for my hungry human heart. — Kelsey F.
Bariloche
by Andrés Neuman (tr. Robin Myers)
Translated from the Spanish
Andrés Neuman first garnered stateside attention with the 2012 translation of his remarkable Traveler of the Century. Since then, English readers have been treated to two additional novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of travel writing. But it was his very first novel, translated now at long last by Robin Myers, that brought him so many well-deserved early accolades. Published when he was only 22 (and begun at 19), Bariloche was the runner-up for the Premio Herralde, Spain’s prestigious literary novel prize. Award jurist Roberto Bolaño said of Neuman’s debut:
"In it, good readers will find something that can only be found in great literature, the kind written by real poets, a literature that dares to venture into the dark with open eyes and that keeps its eyes open no matter what.”
Across 66 vignette-like chapters, Bariloche tells the story of Buenos Aires garbage collector Demetrio Rota. With melancholic beauty and his trademark emotional depth, Neuman chronicles Rota’s life, alighting on moments past and present, memories bucolic and brutal, to offer a stirring, rich portrait of an individual life awash in loneliness and hauling around so many discarded dreams. Matching the novel’s mournfulness is the sheer magnificence of Neuman’s prose, as well as the Argentine-Spanish author’s impressive capacity for compassion. Bariloche is a near-perfect sketch of imperfect people — tender and touching in its telling and further proof of Neuman’s massive storytelling talents. — Jeremy G.
Ten Planets
by Yuri Herrera (tr. Lisa Dillman)
Translated from the Spanish
Yuri Herrera is a wonderfully entertaining author, and I want all his books to be made into movies because the characters and the environments they inhabit in Mexico are so vivid and the plots so dynamic. This new collection of twenty stories is a departure from Herrera's previous novellas, however; not only in length, but also in that they're science fiction shorts instead of gritty dramedies. Each story is distinct and unpredictable and fabulous, as in "Whole Entero," about a gut bacterium that gains consciousness after coming in contact with LSD in a man's bloodstream, or the delightful "Consolidation of Spirits," in which a bureaucrat makes a successful career of reasoning with unruly poltergeists of an increasingly abandoned Earth until he, too, becomes a ghost, at which point he happily joins the unholy chorus. Herrera is clearly a master of the short form; I'd follow him anywhere. — Jennifer K.
The Fawn
by Madga Szabó (tr. Len Rix)
Translated from the Hungarian
Which of us hasn't known — or been — a person so roiled with jealousy at another's consistently great fortune that it twisted them up inside? This may be the greatest psychological portrait Szabo has ever accomplished, which is saying something; as ever, she incorporates great humor as well as pathos in her depiction of Eszter, who grows up very poor and coldly envious in pre-communist Hungary. Then World War II and the Soviet takeover level the field economically, and she becomes successful and relatively well-off, but old memories still haunt her. Can she heal her psyche from the traumas of her childhood in order to truly open up her heart to love and be loved? A profound and beautifully clever character study, like a cross between Dostoevsky and Elena Ferrante. The reader is left guessing until the very last sentence. — Jennifer K.
Ada’s Room
by Sharon Dodua Otoo (tr. Jon Cho-Polizzi)
Translated from the German
Ada’s Room is the story of Ada — the Ada who lives in 15th-century Ghana, the Ada who is held captive in a brothel during WW2, the Ada who lives in 19th-century London, the Ada who is pregnant during Brexit. Through all of these reincarnations, we are led through a thought-provoking and inventively woven story, where the lives accumulate like strata across time. Beautiful, ambitious, great, and the perfect example of that infamous Faulkner quote about how the past is never dead, “It’s not even past.” — Kelsey F.
For more literature in translation, check out our recommendations from February 2023.
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