By skin of my teeth I am getting this Women in Translation Month blog post out into the ether. I thought it would be cute to read Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season after reading Laurie Colwin’s A Big Storm Knocked It Over. Colwin’s essay collection Home Cooking was a great comfort to me and, not surprisingly, there was so much to love about her last novel, which is the first novel of hers that I read. At the same time, I can see issues of race in this 1992 novel that feel a bit out-dated, but I can relate to the protagonist’s anxiety as a Jew and her desire to belong.

The transition to Melchor’s 2016 novel Hurricane Season (translated in 2021 by Sophie Hughes) was not at all cute. That novel is as intense as its title suggests and then some. The chapters are long and devoid of paragraph breaks, creating textual claustrophobia as the cherry on top of the unrelenting anger, violence, misogyny, lust, and homophobia that wreaks havoc on a poor Mexican village where, at the opening of the novel, a witch has been murdered. The lack of paragraphs reminds me of László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango (trans. George Szirtes), another novel of unrelenting darkness, but that one moved like suffocating sludge, whereas Melchor’s novel is more propulsive (if also increasingly horrific in its violence). I would not recommend Hurricane Season to the faint of heart, but if you can handle a dark story that will get you outside of your comfort zone and show you a desperate corner of the world, and if you’d like to see how the author manages a different point of view in each chapter (with something of a dusky reprieve by the end), definitely check it out.

I have been wanting to read The Hottest Dishes of Tartar Cuisine (Europa Editions, 2011) for years. I don’t know why other books kept getting in the way because I very much enjoyed finally reading this dark, prickly novel. Narrated by the highly unreliable Rosalina, a controlling matriarch in the Soviet Union who fears her daughter Sulfia is an inept mother to her granddaughter Aminat, the story is both hilarious and depressing. We learn about the effects of the Soviet Union on ethnic identity, the ways Rosalina twists things to get her way, and how this unravels in her attempts to marry Sulfia off to foreigners who could, in theory, help them leave the crumbling USSR. Each of these attempts feels quite tragic, even when successful!

Rosalina, or Rosie as her husband Kalganow calls her, knows little of her Tartar background, having grown up in an orphanage. Her husband’s family is also Tartar but she views them as back-country rubes—though she enjoys taking Sulfia to them as a child so she can drink their goat’s milk (viewed as nutritious to Rosalinda, and as vomit-inducing to Sulfia). Kalganow prefers to use Russian names—Sonja for Suflia, Anja for Aminat—he prefers to erase ethnic identity. But Rosie, who believes Aminat resembles her and who names her after her grandmother, “who’d grown up in the mountains,” insists on calling her Aminat and that she not become “just another Anja.”

As I mentioned, there’s a lot of humor that shows the sad state of things. Condoms are “rare and valuable” so while Rosalina believes child-rearing is a bad idea, she washes them and hangs them to dry for re-use: “I let them dangle from the clothesline in our room. I had a feeling that the longer they hung there, the less frequently my husband made advances on me.” A couple pages later, this image of dangling condoms is juxtaposed with horse meat sausages made by Kalganow’s relatives, hanging “out in the sun for several days.”

Rosalina is highly critical of just about everything and everyone. I found myself wondering what Alina Bronsky’s background was as the narrator poked fun at rural ways and especially as Jewish characters came into the picture and Rosalinda’s anti-Semitism comes out. Sulfia’s other daughter, by a Jewish man, is welcome to emigrate to Israel with her father; Rosalinda just doesn’t seem to care. I found this interview with Bronsky interesting, and I appreciated her insight into her sense of humor:

Sometimes I do readings and people can’t stop laughing, but I’m reading about pretty tragic things. I think Soviet humor is a desperate humor, rather typical of very different nations, of Jewish people, Ukrainians, and of course, Russians. It’s despair — just keep laughing, until you are dead.

For my second Women in Translation Month post of 2022, I’d like to tell you about Winter in Sochko (Open Letter Books, 2021), which I devoured in May on the flight home for my grandmother’s funeral and back, the first novel I have been able to devour since becoming a parent in January 2021. Its spareness, and its tense family relationships in relation to food, reminds me of another favorite work in translation, Lise Tremblay’s Mile End (trans. Gail Scott, Talon Books, 2002), though here the anger is more subdued and there’s no psychosis. The comparison to Marguerite Duras on the cover also feels apt. The writing is quite fluid and poetic. In fact, perhaps because of its fluidity, I read it too fast to truly appreciate the lyricism.

Oozing winter and fish, Sokcho waited.

Here is a characterization of Sokcho, the resort town on the border of South and North Korea. The protagonist is a young French-Korean woman working in a hotel, relieved to not be living with her mother anymore, who stuffs her with food and comments on her appearance and suffocates her each weekend visit. It’s the off-season, windy and raw; few guests are in the shabby hotel: a woman recovering from plastic surgery and, just arrived, a French graphic novelist who asks the narrator to show her around town. She has a boyfriend, an aspiring model, but surprise-surprise, it’s an unsatisfying relationship and the graphic novelist, an older man, holds a certain amount of intrigue. While she cooks for him she thinks:

Beef and raw fish smells were wafting together, heavy and pungent. I pictured Kerrand at his desk. Lips pursed, hand drifting through the air before landing at exactly the right spot on the paper. I always had the finished dish in mind when I cooked. Appearance, taste, nutritional balance. When he drew, he gave the impression of thinking only of the movements he made with his wrist and hand, that was how the image seemed to take life, with no prior conception.

An image taking to life with no prior conception: this seems to bring together for me the themes of identity in this book, of how to forge one’s identity through creative acts and how to try to live comfortably within one’s own skin. The many accolades this book has received comes as no surprise!

It’s Women in Translation Month! For The Fiddlehead’s Stop! Look! Listen! series, I wrote about Scholastique Mukasonga’s haunting novel Our Lady of the Nile. Here’s how the blog post begins:

Recently, I read Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile (Archipelago Books, 2014). Set in a Catholic lycée for elite young women in Rwanda in the 1980s and told in a lyrical style, the novel develops an atmosphere of dread for the genocide to come while shedding light on the legacy of colonialism. 

continue reading

Stay tuned for one, hopefully two, additional reading recommendations for Women in Translation Month (#witmonth) , right here on this blog.

Happy Summer! I am once again contemplating how to merge Summer Book Bingo with Women in Translation Month. This year, I'm a new parent (have I said anything about that on this blog???), so my reading time is quite constrained. I have given up on trying for a blackout and am just focused on reading five adult books by September 7 (I will have read Goodnight Moon 50,000 times by then. Luckily it's a brilliant book! I love Kate Bernheimer's essay on it in Lit Hub.)

I am two books into my goal. I very much enjoyed Rabbits for Food by Binnie Kirshenbaum, which I put on the "Made You Laugh" square. It is a dark book about depression with a sharp sense of humor, narrated in a voice I need to return to (I also enjoyed the voice of Kirshenbaum's An Almost Perfect Moment). The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim, which I put on the "Asian American or Pacific Islander" square is a beautiful novel which has one of those surprising-yet-inevitable telescoping endings that you just want to keep mulling over. The next square is "On Your Shelf," and I'm reading R.L. Maizes's story collection We Love Anderson Cooper. I am loving it. So this is a very fruitful book bingo thus far!

"Set in an Olympic Host City" is the square I am going to merge with Women In Translation Month. The Seattle Public Library has a list of recommendations on their blog here. I'm thinking I'll opt for Valeria Luiselli's Mexico City-based The Story of My Teeth (trans. by Christina Macsweeney). Then I also need a book for the "QTBIPOC" square; SPL once again has suggestions on their blog. Maybe I'll re-read Baldwin's Giovanni's Room as I so rarely make the time to re-read, but then again, branching out would be good too. Hmm...

In any case, if the thought of book bingo intrigues you, I also want to share the Women in Translation-focused bingo card Meytal Radzinski made. I made a WITMonth bingo card several years ago, but what I like about this one is it focuses in on specific regions so you get to zoom in on parts of the world you might not have explored yet.

What are you reading this summer?

Last week I was nervously waiting at the eye doctor (nervous mainly because of the pandemic, and a woman sitting just a smidge too close, though everyone was masked if not double-masked) and reading Maleficium*, a slender novel-in-stories by Martine Desjardins (trans. Fred A. Reed and David Homel), when I came upon the chapter "Oculus Malignus," a 19th century confession from a maker of tortoiseshell eyeglasses who has recently gone blind. (*Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.)

The speaker had traveled to Muscat in search of tortoiseshell. There, in addition to slaughtering turtles, he meets a missionary with a scar on her upper lip and "irises [...] of an acidic ocher hue." The missionary shows him her pince-nez, much finer than any tortoiseshell he'd ever seen. Greedily, he asks where she found such material, and she is happy to oblige. By staring directly into the sun, "her lachrymal glands [would secrete] a substance that solidified when exposed to sunlight, and formed scaly tears."

All of the stories are sensory-rich confessions, nearly all from greedy men who had traveled from Montreal east in search of some prized exotic material. They all come upon this mysteriously seductive woman with the scarred upper lip and some other monstrous quality. They all suffer horribly for their transgressions. As other reviewers have noted, this could be a bit repetitive, but there is a certain satisfaction in seeing the particular twist Desjardins puts on each tale. The gem-like prose, even when discussing all manner of effluvia, is a joy to read.

Here is one more example that captures the beautiful but bizarre storytelling, this time about the woman's ear:

"The circumvolutions formed a perfect helix at the tip of each lobe, and the vortex with its spirals drew me into the mysterious orifice of her ear canal. I would have liked to place my eye against it, as a keyhole; through a kind of subtle intuition, suddenly I was sure I would find the key to new architectures there."

The saffron-rich first story inspired me to make a saffron-infused gin cocktail for the virtual version of Publishing Cocktails' annual summer book swap. Last summer, when an actual book swap was possible, I gave one of my absolute favorite books, Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment and received Charlotte Perkins Gilman's What Diantha Did. I hope next summer it will once again be possible to actually foist a favorite on a fellow book lover.

The sixth Women in Translation Month is coming to an end soon. It was an atypical WITMonth for me, with the cross-country move and so many of my to-read books still in storage. Still, I'm excited to read Heike Geissler's Seasonal Associate (trans. Katy Darbyshire), which Michael reviewed for The Seattle Review of Books. And, for the same publication, I interviewed Meytal Radzinski, the founder of WITMonth, about her project to crowd-source a new canon, 100 Best Books by Women in Translation.

I was excited to see some of my nominations on the final list, such as Mercè Rodoreda's Death in Spring (trans. Martha Tennent) and Mireille Gansel's Translation as Transhumance (trans. Ros Schwartz). And a good number of books in my to-read pile are there too, if I can just get them out of their boxes! I hope to start with Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear (trans. Susan Bernofsky). Did any of your favorites make it to the list or pique your interest?

I first came upon Laia Jufrese's Umami (translated by Sophie Hughes) thanks to the Seattle Public Library's personalized recommendation system, Your Next 5 Books. Of the five books recommended, Umami zoomed to the top, as I have a soft spot for precocious 12-year-old narrators and an inclination toward foodie things. (You can see the whole list they recommended to me here.)Umami is not a food novel in the sense of Like Water For Chocolate (which is not a criticism of either book and is just an observation) and it doesn't just follow the travails of Ana, the Agatha Christie-gobbling, traditional Mexican-gardening tween. There are five narrators in this achronological story, each grappling with grief. Ana is creating a milpa in her parents' underutilized garden, part of the mews in which they live. Doctor Alfonso Semitiel, an anthropologist who studies pre-Hispanic food systems and brought the term "umami" to the Western world, owns the mews and lives there too. He named each of the houses of the mews after each type of taste: Sweet, Bitter, Sour, Salty, and Umami.Alfonso is a widower, Ana's little sister Luz mysteriously drowned two years before the novel opens, and Ana's friend Pina (named after the contemporary dancer Pina Bausch) and Pina's father Beto have been abandoned by her mother Chela. Ana, Alfonso, and Luz all narrate their own chapters in the first person. Pina and Marina, another resident of the mews who babysits Ana and who suffers from depression, are narrated in the third person. There's a lot going on here, and it took me a while to get into the flow of the book. Though I enjoyed Pina and Marina's chapters, Ana, Alfonso, and Luz were more compelling to me. Their wordplay was snappier (though Marina invents names for colors, like "obligreenation...Green out of obligation"), their interests more idiosyncratic. It's hard to feel close to every narrator, and the voices were not wildly different. Ultimately, what pulled me through was the mystery of Luz's drowning, gradually revealed through her narration, using the fairy tale-ish perspective of a five-year-old. The other hook came somewhat late in the book, two creepy AF dolls, one of which can breathe.  The fabulist in me was charmed by this surprise, and they become quite a heartbreaking addition, in the end. 

I adored the film Persepolis, based on Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir of growing up during the Iranian Revolution. So when I stumbled upon Chicken with Plums (trans. Anjali Singh) in a Little Free Library, I knew I hit Little Free Library gold. The title, too, is tantalizing. (Some of you may be familiar with my obsession with plums.)Set in November 1955, Chicken with Plums is the story of Satrapi's great-uncle Nasser Ali Kahn, a pre-eminent tar player. (The tar is a string instrument from the Caucus region.) It's a heartbreaking story—I nearly burst into tears by page 36—about love, loss, and longing. (Apropos of love, loss, and longing, what would a tango played on a tar sound like? Is that possible? Please comment with links or research leads!) Nasser's beloved tar breaks, no replacement will do, and he loses the will to live. I read this book just after Anthony Bourdain committed suicide, so this may be why I found it particularly affecting. But Nasser finds some comfort in his brother and a beloved childhood dish, chicken with plums. (Here's a recipe. The author of the recipe calls saffron "the world's most expensive Prozac.")In addition to being heartbreaking, Chicken with Plums highlighted so many things about the history of Iran that I just didn't know much about, such as the nationalization of the oil industry, which led to the U.K.- and-U.S.-backed coup in 1953. To paraphrase my high school English teacher Mr. Faciano: if you read literature, you get everything—in this case history, politics, music, gastronomy—plus a compelling story, gorgeously told.

I'm happy to have my review of Alicia Kopf's Brother in Ice (translated by Mara Faye Lethem) over on The Seattle Review of Books today. Here's how it begins:

If you’re a fiend for story, Alicia Kopf’s Brother in Ice (translated by Mara Faye Lethem) will not necessarily scratch your itch. But if you crave novels that put the “novel” back in novel — here mashing up research in arctic exploration with travelogues, diary entries, diagrams, photographs, text messages, and the economy of Facebook likes — come a little closer, friend.Continue reading

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

On WA-20 west toward the Anacortes Ferry Terminal, Michael and I found a Spanish radio broadcast with news relayed at a curiously slow pace, so that even we, with our limited Spanish, could understand. It was a multicultural station based in Vancouver. We got news of sex trafficking in Buenos Aires, corruption in Brazil, and an interview about traditional foods in a certain town in Mexico whose name eluded me: horchata tamarindo, pavo, taquitos fritos, plus socializing at church. There was mariachi music, then a pan flute.

In the next hour, the language switched to something I couldn't recognize. Something Scandinavian? South Asian? I had no clue. But then bhangra music came on, so maybe it was Punjabi?

At the ferry checkpoint (we were on our way to Victoria, British Columbia), I lowered the radio, as if customs would find foreign sounds questionable. Once we were on the boat, I switched my phone to airplane mode and concentrated on Mirielle Gansel's Translation as Transhumance (trans. Ros Schwartz), which Michael found at Alley Cat Books in San Francisco, when I was there on book tour in April.

It seemed appropriate to read a memoir and philosophical treatise on the act of translation while crossing into Canadian waters. Gansel's family survived the Holocaust; she grew up in France and remembers the special occasions when a letter would arrive from Budapest and her father would solemnly translate it aloud. Some of her memories remind me of visiting Freiburg, Germany with my grandmother, who spoke a mishmash of Romanian and Hungarian with her cousin and uncle (they saved Hungarian for dirty jokes), and where the cousin's husband spoke German and their children spoke English to me. Here is the lovely excerpt which prompted my reverie:

In the 1960s and '70s, Gansel went on to translate poets from East Berlin and Vietnam. Something she touches upon which I would like to research further is the "de-Nazification" of German and the attempt to translate Vietnamese poetry without exoticization. She mentions Bertolt Brecht de-Nazified Hölderlin's translation of Antigone without comparing examples. But she does offer this translation of poet To Huu (translated into English, in turn, by Ros Schwartz--oh, the layers!):

Casuarina forests,

Groves of green coconuts,

The shimmering of the white dunes

where the sun trembles,

garden of watermelons with red honey!

Gansel quotes Nguyen Khac Vien, who invited her work to on an anthology of Vietnamese poetry in translation: "Exoticism arouses simply a sense of foreignness, without being able to communicate the emotions, the deeper feelings that inspire a work."

On that notion of digging for deeper feelings, Gansel shares her approach to translating the entire oevre of Nelly Sachs, a Jewish German-language poet who lived in exile in Sweden. She ended up rewriting the work four times, using the Bible's four levels of meaning, according to the Jewish tradition of exegesis: Peshat (literal meaning), Remez (allusive meaning), Drush (deeper meaning), and Sod (secret, esoteric meaning).

I could go on and on and on about how much I love this slender volume about exile and empathy.  This book has opened so many doors for me.

Every summer, I am simultaneously excited for and stressed out by the Seattle Public Library and Seattle Arts & Lectures Adult Book Bingo program and Women in Translation Month, which happens in August. These are supposed to be fun efforts to read a lot, and they are fun, and yet I develop anxieties about time. (Ah, time. I am forever losing to time.) In any case, the 2018 book bingo card was recently released, and I eagerly printed out a copy and penciled in my aspirations for the season.So, what are some books on my docket? My ideal reading diet consists of reading fiction, poetry, and nonfiction simultaneously, and my current reading manages three bingo squares:

• Takes Place in the Area You Were Born: 10:04 by Ben Lerner. Lerner will give a talk at Hugo House on August 9, on the novel as a curatorial form. Intriguing!
• Poetry or Essays (why, why aren't these separate boxes?): To Repel Ghosts by Kevin Young, a book of poetry inspired by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which I picked up at the Brooklyn Museum while on book tour.
• Finish a Book You Started and Put Down: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. The second section of this book, on processed food, was dry and slow, and I almost gave up on it. But I am super interested in the section on the rise of organic farming and look forward to the final section on foraging food, the reason I picked up the book in the first place. As I slowly work on a series of lyric essays about food and culture, I am finding Pollan's research and writing mostly delightful and always informative.

Of course, none of these books are by women, nor are they in translation. So, here's what's next for me:

• Written by An Author From Another Country: Brother in Ice by Alicia Kopf
• Award-Winning Author: The Appointment by Herta Müller
• Fiction: The Hottest Dishes of Tatar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky

I also participated in the Seattle Public Library's Your Next Five Books program, asking for smart, zippy books by women, ideally in translation. I'll let you know what they recommend!  (In the meantime, if you are looking for recommendations from me, here are my previous posts on women in translation.) What are you reading this summer?UPDATE (5/30/18): Here are the five "smart, zippy books by women" that the Seattle Public Library recommended. I am particularly excited about Umami by Lala Jufresa! From the title, to the author's name, to the promise of a precocious 12-year-old girl protagonist (a soft spot for me), this book will for sure go on my Recommended by a Librarian bingo square.

The term "dumpster fire" has been used in reference to 2017 at least several million times. At one point in October, I considered taking some classes on how to cope with anxiety and insomnia that were organized specifically in response to our collective ongoing sense of doom. I didn't though—because I was overwhelmed! Ha.Despite everything, I need to celebrate 2017 on a personal level. Daughters of the Air, which I'd toiled over for years, finally came out, and people are reading it and telling me they are enjoying it! Michael and I celebrated the holiday season with candles and latkes and lights and dim sum and snow (!) and The Shape of Water (a beautiful love story!) and chocolate peanut butter pie and New Year's Eve back at the Hotel Sorrento's Fireside Lounge for reading (me, Teffi's Subtly Worded, him Hanna Krall's Chasing the King of Hearts, which I'm happily adding to my Women in Translation Month queue), writing, live jazz, people watching, and bubbles. What more could I ask for?The day after Shelf Awareness called Daughters "a striking debut from a writer to watch," The Seattle Review of Books included it among five Seattle novels that made Paul Constant's year:

Anca Szilágyi’s Daughters of the Air is a fantastic debut — a magical realist fairy tale set in gritty New York City. It’s the kind of book that leaves you utterly confounded at the end, as you try to remember all the twists and turns that you took along the way. It feels like an impossible book, somehow — a product of alchemy, a creation of unearthly talents.

Wow! The book hasn't been panned yet, but when it does, I'll hang on to these two reviews for dear life. I was also super happy to see Tara Atkinson's novella Boyfriends included in the end-of-year list; I gobbled it one sitting and highly recommend it.Yesterday afternoon, I was thrilled to see The Seattle Times reviewed Daughters too—my first review in a major American newspaper!

Anca L. Szilágyi’s intense debut novel, "Daughters of the Air," locates a deeply personal story against the surreal backdrop of [Argentina's Dirty War].

  [gallery ids="4953,4952" type="rectangular"]I'll be moseying up to a newsstand later today so I can rustle up the paper and feel the newsprint on my fingers.In other news...

• Every year, I strive to collect 100 rejections. (Why? See this wonderful Lit Hub article by Kim Liao.) In 2016, I made it to 106, plus eight acceptances. In 2017, I garnered 93 rejections and 16 acceptances. This is actually bad in terms of my other annual goal, which is to be rejected 90% of the time. I need to aim higher.
• There are just four spots left in my online Fiction II class at Hugo House, which begins on January 14. You can sign up here.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this longer-than-usual blog post! As a gift, here is a Goodreads giveaway for you. Already read Daughters? Leaving a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or Powell's would help spread the word! You can do this regardless of how you obtained the book (other bookstores, my publisher, the library, and all that fun stuff).Onward!

After I read The Land of Green Plums a few years ago, Herta Müller joined a short list of authors whose work I want to read all of.  I am not the sort of reader who methodically works through an oeuvre; I crave different voices. But this list includes Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Mavis Gallant. (It used to include Angela Carter; I adore her short fiction, but actually found trying to read her novels like trying to eat an entire chocolate mousse cake.) Müller's fiction is poetic and harrowing and sheds light on the country my family comes from.  For me, she is a must.For my third installment of  Women In Translation Month, I tackled The Hunger Angel. This novel tells the story of Leo Auberg, a young German man in Romania deported to a labor camp in Russia in January 1945. I was surprised to learn that this happened: all Germans living in Romania and from the ages of 17-45 were forced to "rebuild" the Soviet Union. Indeed, as Müller explains in her Afterword, this was something shameful that Germans in Romania only discussed among themselves, if they discussed it at all. (Müller emigrated to West Germany after being persecuted by Ceausescu's secret police.)The Hunger Angel meditates on objects. Life in a gulag is tedious, so in lieu of a tight narrative arc, the first two-thirds of the book move laterally from things like cement and coal to yellow sand and firs. There's a weirdly loving chapter about a kind of shovel known as "the heart-shovel," which, by virtue of its design, allows Leo to forget himself as he works in ways that other tools or tasks don't.And, of course, as the title implies, there's a food problem. With just one piece of bread a day and two bowls of cabbage soup, and no mid-day meal, the hunger angel emerges an antagonist who skews how prisoners perceive their world and how they behave. But memories of food from childhood buoy Leo and his prison-mates. One day, every summer, his mother would take him to the Café Martini where he could gorge himself on sweets:

We could choose among marizpan truffles, chocolate cake, savarins, cream cake, nutcake roll, Ischler tartlet, cream puffs, hazelnut crisps, rum cake, napoleons, nougat, and doboschtorte. And ice cream--strawberry ice cream in a silver dish or vanilla ice cream in a glass dish or chocolate ice cream in a porcelain bowl, always with whipped cream. And finally, if we were still able, sour-cherry cake with jelly.

As if being in a gulag is not challenging enough, Leo is in the closet. When men and women dance on Saturday nights (who knew they had dances, albeit sad dances, in gulags?), he remains off to the side. Men and women couple in the barracks; he does not. Though he observes: "Half-starved humans are really neither masculine nor feminine but genderless, like objects." Over the course of the novel, this meditation on objects also becomes a larger meditation on loneliness and longing and trying to stay alive.Leo has a poet's eye, and it is that vision, that attention to language, which makes reading this essential book bearable.

August is Women in Translation Month. This is the fourth year of the campaign, which was founded by literary blogger and biophysicist Meytal Radzinksi. I'm a big fan of this effort to raise awareness about women writers in translation and read more of them. And, I'm super excited to have my piece "Translation is not kale" in The Seattle Review of Books today, which discusses WITMonth in a wider context and revels in some of my favorite-favorite books. You can read "Translation is not kale" here. I've also got three reviews scheduled right here on my blog, starting today and continuing the next two Thursdays. More soon! 

Women in Translation Month is around the corner! Last year, I compiled a list of translated books by women that I enjoyed and created a Women in Translation Bingo game. I also wrote about novellas by Marguerite Duras and Eileen Chang and poetry collections from Rocío Cerón and Angélica Freitas.This summer has been a bit more hectic as I've been teaching more, taking my second novel through an eighth draft, and researching my third novel. However! I'm excited for Women In Translation Month and wanted to share with you four books on my to-read pile.What have you been reading?

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

10:30 on a Summer Night operates at a slow boil. The noir-ish 80-page novella follows a French couple, Pierre and Maria, on vacation in Spain with their four-year-old daughter Judith and their friend Claire.  The story opens with talk of a murder in the small town where they've landed, their plans to get to Madrid thwarted by a storm. Rodrigo Paestra, having killed his wife and her lover, is on the run. With that crime of passion in the background, tension between Pierre, Maria, and Claire builds, complemented by the landscape's moody weather:

"The afternoon's dark blue, oceanlike mass moved slowly over the town. It was coming from the east [....] The water that ran between their feet was filled with clay. The water was dark red, like stones of the town and the earth around it."

Maria drinks manzanilla after manzanilla. Customers in a local cafe talk about the horror of Paestra's crime while "eating, more or less heartily." Like many tourists stuck in the town for the night, the family and Claire must sleep in a hotel hallway.  In Maria's wooziness, her thoughts drift between Paestra's whereabouts (they say he's on the rooftops), and the possible budding infidelity between Pierre and Claire. Her restlessness tears her from the claustrophobic hotel hallway, out into the wet night, looking for Paestra:

"He had gone around the chimney. Maria kept singing. Her voice clutched her throat. You can always sing. She couldn't stop singing once she had started. He was there."

The novella twists and turns into scarier and scarier landscapes.The extreme weather of the lightening storm is followed by extreme mid-day heat of the open country. Maria wonders, "What would you save, if you took Rodrigo Paestra to France?" The double love triangle leads to a bizarre chain of events I have no intention of spoiling. But the last image of the three adult travelers at a night club, finally in Madrid, watching a man with a "chalky laugh" singing with "loving, languorous, nauseous drunkenness," evokes the complexity, the utter tangled thorniness, of this story.

You can get a copy here.

---

---

---

Stay in the loop! Sign up here for a short & sweet monthly newsletter of upcoming events, publications, and tiny bits on art, food, cities, and literature. Like this blog, but less often and right in your inbox.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

For Women in Translation Month, I'm reviewing three novellas right here on this blog, as well as tweeting poetry in translation daily. The first of the three novellas is "Love in a Fallen City" by Eileen Chang. Stay tuned for a selection from Alexandra Kollontai's Love of Worker Bees and Marguerite Duras' "10:30 on a Summer Evening."

Eileen Chang has long been on my to-read list. So when I learned about Women in Translation Month I put her at the top of my agenda. You may know her through Ang Lee's adaptation of her 1979 novella Lust, Caution. Born in Shanghai in 1920, she straddled two radically different worlds. Translator Karen S. Kingbury writes in her introduction to Love in a Fallen City that "Chang's worldly form of the sublime was achieved [...] by viewing her father's [aristocratic, traditional] Qing world from her mother's [modern, Edwardian] perspective, but with an artist's compassionate detachment." This straddling of eras is apparent from the start of "Love in a Fallen City." Liusu, a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee, struggles to live with her stifling family in Shanghai. Their clocks are literally one hour behind the rest of the city to "save daylight," and, "The Bai household was a fairyland where a single day, creeping slowly by, was  a thousand years in the outside world."

When news of her ex-husband's death arrives, her family tries to convince her to return to his family as his widow--thus relieving themselves of her burdensome presence.  Rather bleakly, her elderly mother says, "Staying with me is not a feasible long-term plan. Going back is the decent thing to do. Take a child to live with you, get through the next fifteen years or so, and you'll prevail in the end." A matchmaker suggests Liusu find a new husband or become a nun and eventually convinces the Bai family to allow Liusu to travel with her to Hong Kong. There, the major conflict unfolds, when it becomes clear that Fan Liuyuan, "an overseas Chinese" had contrived to have Liusu come to Hong Kong. He wants "a real Chinese girl," "never out of fashion," and when she calls him a modern man he replies, "You say 'modern,' but what you probably mean is Western." Their uncertain budding relationship takes Liusu into territory as ambiguous and unsettling as being a widow in her mother's home, but with the frightening freedom of being more or less alone in a huge, unknown city.

Chang's writing is intensely visual, influenced by modernism while maintaining sparkling clarity. On Hong Kong's waterfront:

"it was a fiery afternoon, and the most striking part of the view was the parade of giant billboards along the dock, their reds, oranges, and pinks mirrored in the lush green water. Below the surface of the water, bars and blots of clashing color plunged in murderous confusion. Liusu found herself thinking that in a city of such hyperboles, even a sprained ankle would hurt more than it did in other places."

Her binocular vision (to borrow the the title of Edith Pearlman's collection, another straddler of worlds) is the kind of perspective I find endlessly fascinating. The invasion of Hong Kong has serious repercussions for Liusu and Liuyuan's future together. It's the sort of widening out, from the deeply intimate to the global, that I love to encounter in fiction and strive to achieve in my own work. I'm so glad I finally got to this novella and look forward to reading the rest of the collection. "The Golden Cangue," another novella in the volume, is translated by Chang herself--it'll be a real treat to get a sense of how she viewed her own work and how it should feel in English.

For more Women in Translation Month goodness, check out Meytal Radziniski's wonderful blog Biblibio.

---

---

---

Stay in the loop! Sign up here for a short & sweet monthly newsletter of upcoming events, publications, and tiny bits on art, food, cities, and literature. Like this blog, but less often and right in your inbox.

[mailchimp_subscriber_popup baseUrl='mc.us16.list-manage.com' uuid='f003e73335195658bffdce511' lid='45632cd706' usePlainJson='true' isDebug='false']

The Seattle Public Library and Seattle Arts & Lectures launched Summer Book Bingo in Seattle this month. I got all excited, printing out my card and jotting a book in each category I want to read, for example:Checked out from the library: The Woman Upstairs by Claire MessudCollection of short stories: The UnAmericans by Molly AntopolBanned: Fun Home by Alison BechdelThere are 24 categories in all. Librarians are on hand to make recommendations. Thanks to them, I've added V is for Vendetta and Eleanor and Park to my reading list!Because of my already ambitious reading plans for the summer, including Women in Translation Month, I'm not aiming for a blackout, just BINGO. But it occurred to me. Book Bingo is endlessly adaptable. What about Women in Translation Bingo? Each category satisfied by a book in translation, by a woman.I made my own card, based on SPL & SAL's card, simply swapping out Set in the NW, Translated from another language, and local author for Author 10+ years older than you, From a culture you want to know more about, and International bestseller. Then I really nerded out, thinking about Linguistic Diversity Bingo, based on language families. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. One Book Bingo at a time.If you're planning to participate in Women in Translation Month (I hope you are!) this would be a fun way to do it.What books are you reading this summer?