La Sagouine by Antonine Maillet, trans. by Wayne Grady

Posted on March 23, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Humor, humility, and subtle wisdom pour from this rich translation.

sagouine
Antonine Maillet (Pélagie-la-Charrette; Don l’Orignal) is perhaps best known for La Sagouine, an icon of Acadian literature, translated from the French by Wayne Grady in this new edition. In the simplest of formats, the protagonist’s voice and life story are evoked with delightful realism. La Sagouine, as she calls herself, is a singular personality.

…Click here to read the full review.

This review was published on March 2, 2016 by ForeWord Reviews.

5 hearts

My rating: 7 poutines râpées.

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The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal, trans. by Sam Taylor

Posted on March 10, 2016 by pagesofjulia

The story of a heart transplant, from life to death to final outcome, is viewed through the varied perspectives of some of the people involved.

heart

Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, spans just 24 hours but covers some of the most profound material imaginable. Simon and his two friends leave the beach after a pre-dawn surfing session and crash off the road. In the hours that follow, Simon’s parents are asked to make decisions about the removal of his organs. A woman with three sons waits for the heart transplant that will, hopefully, prolong her life. De Kerangal follows these and other players–doctors, nurses, family and friends–as the drama unfolds: of Simon’s heart, life and death and definitions, the meaning of generosity and what we love.

The Heart delves deeply into its subjects: the transplant operations are described in precise detail. The anguish of parents losing a child is explored at some length in its various incarnations–aggression, confusion–and compared to that of shipwreck survivors, or of a man who has just been in a fight with “some guy who was asking for it.” Characters are complex–the nurse who met with a lover last night, “sober and ravishing”; the soccer-obsessed surgeon with the violent girlfriend; the man from the Coordinating Committee for Organ and Tissue Removal, whose job it is to convince the parents to approve the transplant and who is passionate about music and his Algerian goldfinch. Through these and other points of view, an extraordinary and shocking story is revealed. Taylor’s expressive translation renders a sensitive, stark and entirely engrossing novel.

This review originally ran in the January 19, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 minutes.

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The Vegetarian by Han Kang, trans. by Deborah Smith

Posted on March 7, 2016 by pagesofjulia

A South Korean woman’s decision to become a vegetarian has surprising and memorable consequences.

vegetarian

Yeong-hye was an ordinary woman–a trait her husband appreciated–until she made the shocking decision to become a vegetarian. In South Korea, this is unusual and socially scandalous; her family reacts by railing and trying to force her to eat meat. “I had a dream,” is all she says in explanation. Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian recounts Yeong-hye’s choice and its consequences.

Three sections tell the story from different perspectives: Yeong-hye’s disgusted and frustrated husband; her brother-in-law, a video artist whose work and every thought become fixated on Yeong-hye and her “vegetal” nature; and finally, her older sister, in the late stages of the extreme situation brought about by a seemingly simple decision. Their different relationships to the protagonist reveal more of her personality, but they cannot understand her. Vegetarianism is only one stage in Yeong-hye’s extreme plan for metamorphosis, as it turns out. As her story unfolds, this single decision brings increasing disgrace, violence and subversion, and her limited control over her own life diminishes.

This is a dreamy story with depth and mystery, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith with nuance and a tone of growing wonderment. Yeong-hye is a confounding and almost mystical character, never seen through her own point of view. In the end, The Vegetarian asks questions about mental illness and the significance of personal choice. Yeong-hye’s story is disquieting, thought-provoking and precisely formed.

This review originally ran in the February 12, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 trees.

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Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark by Volker Weidermann, trans. by Carol Brown Janeway

Posted on February 24, 2016 by pagesofjulia

This poetic contemplation in translation illuminates an uneasy creative community of artists and writers gathered one summer as fascism and Nazism are growing in Europe.

ostend

Volker Weidermann’s Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark is a glimmering work of language and an insightful tribute to literary friendship in a singular historical moment.

Stefan Zweig was a successful and popular Austrian writer; Joseph Roth was less successful but also gifted, a tortured, heavy-drinking writer whom Zweig called his “literary conscience.” When war loomed in the summer of 1936, Zweig returned to the Belgian seaside town of Ostend, where he had spent the summer of 1914. His work no longer welcome in Germany, his home in Salzburg defiled by police and his marriage collapsed, he nonetheless joyfully embarked on new work and new love with his secretary, Lotte Altmann. And he brought along Roth, supporting him financially and in his work (support that would strain their complex, fraternal relationship throughout). The troubled Roth, too, found new and rejuvenating love with a German writer, Irmgard Keun, one of the few non-Jews in their small émigré community.

Aside from brief background and epilogue, Weidermann stays within the boundaries of the summer of 1936–the summer before the dark, in which Zweig, Roth and an assortment of “detractors… fighters… cynics… drinkers… blowhards… silent onlookers” manage for a single season to love, laugh and exercise creative genius in a world rapidly falling into war and fascism. Translated from the German into lyrical, meditative prose by Carol Brown Janeway, Ostend is a brief but scintillating portrayal of this season, its spirit and a set of remarkable characters.

This review originally ran in the February 5, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 8 little schnapps glasses.

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The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Ji Xianlin, trans. by Chenxing Jiang

Posted on February 22, 2016 by pagesofjulia

This memoir by a survivor of the Chinese Cultural Revolution poignantly sheds light on an under-examined period in history.

cowshed

Ji Xianlin was one of many Chinese intellectuals held in makeshift prisons, called cowsheds, on university campuses during China’s Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and lasted for 10 years. He was mocked, humiliated, beaten and starved. He wrote about these experiences only reluctantly, observing late in life that none of his fellows had done so and that younger Chinese need to know their history in order to learn from it. In 1998, he released his memoir, now translated into English for the first time as The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Ji narrates his years of torment compellingly, in remarkably fair-minded fashion. He claims that his work is not literary, but it is adorned with lovely metaphors: he compares his torture to Indian and Chinese concepts of hell, “a veritable pagoda of horrors,” and makes reference to the steep path to Mount Tai, one of five Taoist sacred mountains.

Ji’s story is painfully moving and beautifully related, elevated by his preface and journalist Zha Jianying’s introduction, and his appendix, an abbreviated memoir of Ji’s whole life that puts the bulk of The Cowshed into perspective. He ponders the question of human nature as basically good or bad, and illuminates Chinese culture with sensitivity and humor; for example, “We Chinese intellectuals are descended from a tradition of scholars who would rather be killed than humiliated.” Until his death in Beijing in 2009, the wise older man who wrote this book remained a patriot who wanted the best for China and who appreciated that he saw the Cultural Revolution so intimately, if only so that he could bear witness.

This review originally ran in the February 5, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Rating: 7 cornmeal cakes.

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The Merman by Carl-Johan Vallgren, trans. by Ellen Flynn

Posted on December 24, 2015 by pagesofjulia

In this grown-up fairy tale, a young women’s battles with poverty, violence and neglect are further complicated when a mystical creature enters her life.

merman

Carl-Johan Vallgren’s The Merman, translated from the Swedish by Ellen Flynn, concerns the realistic and heartbreaking circumstances of teenaged Nella and her little brother, Robert; at the same time, it is a dark fairy tale about a mythical creature from the deep and the possibility of resisting evil.

Nella and Robert’s parents are terribly incompetent, uncaring people, more focused on drinking and crime than their children’s welfare. Robert struggles with learning disabilities and is bullied at school; protecting him, getting him the glasses he needs, and his general well-being falls to his sister. Nella is hard-pressed to handle the responsibilities of the household, including cleaning up after her alcoholic mother, about whom she muses, “it was about as hard to judge her as it was to understand her.” This mature and nuanced observation is typical of a girl who, despite her own troubles, seems drawn to others who need her help, such as a disabled man who is one of her few friends.

When the neighborhood bullies begin to threaten Robert with violence, Nella turns to her only ally at school, a boy named Tommy. But contact with Tommy’s brothers presents a new difficulty. They have pulled a mystical being from the ocean, whose otherworldly nature and wordless communication will change everything Nella understands about her life. All at once, Nella struggles with the bullies’ extortion and Robert’s fear; their father is released from prison and brings criminals home with him to disrupt their fragile household; their mother threatens to leave; and the sea creature looks to Nella for help. A burdened but strong and compassionate young woman, she will learn and grow through these tests, and wins the reader’s heart by the time her story reaches the final, hard decisions.

Nella is a compelling protagonist, reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Matilda in her miserable circumstances, but with a harder, more adult edge. Robert’s suffering is almost unbearable, but sadly realistic. In Ellen Flynn’s translation of Vallgren’s tale, dialogue can be a bit stiff and formal, especially in the children’s cases, but overall she establishes a tone appropriate to the balance of reality and mysticism in Nella’s story, and the stark ugliness of her life. Vallgren evokes his fantasy element with wonder and detail; The Merman is a singular story. Fans of adult fairy tales and bleak realism will be haunted and enthralled by this novel of human tragedies, and the mystery of what lies beyond.

This review originally ran in the November 5, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 cartons of cigarettes.

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Because She Never Asked by Enrique Vila-Matas, trans. by Valerie Miles

Posted on December 17, 2015 by pagesofjulia

This enigmatic novella in translation asks if life imitates art or vice versa.

because she never asked

Enrique Vila-Matas (Illogic of Kassel; Dublinesque) experiments with form and his reader’s trust in Because She Never Asked, a novella about the circularity of art and life.

This twisting story is told in three parts. In the first, a young artist, Rita Malú, lives in Paris and obsesses over another artist, Sophie Calle. Rita “carrie[s] out a series of experiments with truth”; in one of these, she embarks on a journey to Portugal to search for an author she does not really want to find. In the second part, a narrator reveals that he has written Part 1 at Sophie’s request, as a work of art that she will then live out as written. Part 3 questions again what has come before it. This convoluted structure, almost a story told in reverse, discloses details and layers of artifice as the reader proceeds. At least two subtly distinct voices demand attention and credibility.

Valerie Miles’s translation from the Spanish preserves a roguish tone that feels apt in this playful and puzzling novel, whose brevity–under 100 pages–belies its complexity. The narrator labors with questions about the reality of life, its relationship to art and their relative worth. He invokes the dreaminess of Don Quixote and the inscrutability of Marcel Duchamp, and when he becomes frustrated in explaining the jealousy of lovers, commands his reader to “read Proust to understand it better.” Vila-Matas’s novella is about something different by its end than at its beginning: a carefully packaged riddle, intriguing and stylish.

This review originally ran in the November 24, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 moments of circular imagination.

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One Out of Two by Daniel Sada, trans. by Katherine Silver

Posted on October 26, 2015 by pagesofjulia

This delightful novella translated from the Spanish, about identical twins and the tricks they play, asks questions about identity and loyalty and answers them with glee.

one out of two

Daniel Sada (Almost Never) died in 2011, but the prolific Mexican writer left behind many short stories, novels and poems. Katherine Silver has translated his humorous novella One Out of Two into English for the first time.

“Now, how to say it? One out of two, or two in one, or what?” Constitución and Gloria Gamal are identical twin sisters, and this is their shared identity and life’s work. At 13, they were orphaned by a car wreck, but they did not notice for weeks, not until they ran out of food, so consumed were they with one another. Now in their 40s, they dress alike, wear the same makeup and hairstyle; whoever gets up first in the morning gets to choose that day’s attire for both. They have practiced the same gestures and mannerisms until they are indistinguishable. They even switch names from day to day. (“Why shouldn’t they!”) Established as seamstresses in a small Mexican town where everyone knows them–but can’t tell them apart–they take pleasure in their indistinguishability, the singular quality in their mundane existence.

This strange, even surreal description of twinned lives begins Sada’s magnetic tale. Then a problem challenges the Gamal sisters’ contented tricks of identity: one of them meets a man. They brought this startling element of difference into their lives somewhat on purpose, when they decided to send only one twin to a wedding, expressly because they believed she would have a better chance of catching a male eye if she were not half of a whole. After all, “this business of having a double can be vexatious, almost almost leech-like.” So Constitución comes home to announce: “I danced all night with a slender man of interesting age.” The novel calls this “her best sentence ever,” and it may well be, but it is not Sada’s; his winding, lyrical, frequently abstract language is one of the great joys of this comical, silly and touching story.

Of course, the introduction of a suitor raises questions for the twins. Separate or share? He has no idea that there are two, and so they take turns in romance. But two women who have split everything up to this point find a man harder to enjoy as equals. The tension of One Out of Two is related to illusion, deceit and identity, as Constitución and Gloria discover envy and competition for the first time. In a mere 100 pages, Sada dances his reader through these conflicts and on to a joyfully droll and loving conclusion. His playfulness with language, plot and character make One Out of Two a true pleasure; his readers’ only regret is that it is over so soon.

This review originally ran in the October 22, 2015 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 grape sodas.

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book beginnings on Friday: One Out of Two by Daniel Sada, trans. by Katherine Silver

Posted on August 28, 2015 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

one out of two

This is a very slim (100-page) novel in translation from the Spanish, and I am excited and charmed by its first lines.

Now, how to say it? One out of two, or two in one, or what? The Gamal sisters were identical. To say, as people do, “They were like two peas in a pod,” the same age, the same height, and wearing, by choice, the same hairdo.

My ARC offers a blurb on the front cover from Robert Bolaño: “Of my generation I most admire Daniel Sada, whose writing project seems to me the most daring.” Sada died in 2011.

This quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, trans. by Richard Howard

Posted on January 14, 2015 by pagesofjulia

little princeThe Little Prince is a classic children’s book that has been on my list for some time, so imagine my surprise when it appeared as well in a book I recently enjoyed, Hell and Good Company: The Spanish Civil War and the World it Made by Richard Rhodes. I had no idea that Saint-Exupéry played a role in the Spanish Civil War – apparently he volunteered there as a pilot. This helped The Little Prince jump to the top of my list, and here we are.

As it is a children’s book, it was an easy, quick read, just under 90 pages and full of delightful illustrations by Saint-Exupéry himself. These illustrations are an important part of the story: the power of art, and its greater or lesser power to realistically capture appearances. Apparently my edition is a new translation, by Richard Howard, and comes with newly restored illustrations as well. Howard opens with a brief meditation on the important work of translation that I found thought-provoking.

And then the story itself, which concerns our narrator, a pilot crashed and stranded in the African desert, and the little prince he is surprised to meet there. The prince tells us he has come from his own tiny little planet, far away. He is worried about a very special flower he left there. Thus proceeds the story of the little prince, and our pilot’s somewhat clumsy attempt to help; the prince’s departure, and the pilot’s dealing with it.

The morals here are sweet, as one might expect, and as I hadn’t expected, also offer some words about handling grief and loss. The image of one’s departed friend living in the stars and comforting us from afar is familiar and cozy. The Little Prince also comments on the strangeness of the adult world:

If you tell grown-ups, “I saw a beautiful red brick house, with geraniums at the windows and doves on the roof…,” they won’t be able to imagine such a house. You have to tell them, “I saw a house worth a hundred thousand francs.” Then they exclaim, “What a pretty house!”

…That’s the way they are. You must not hold it against them. Children should be very understanding of grown-ups.

Further allegory and comment are provided by the little prince’s bemusement at the confused values of those he meets on his interplanetary travels, before reaching Earth: the king, the vain man, the drunkard, the businessman, the lamplighter, the geographer; and those (considerably wiser) he meets on Earth before the pilot: snake, flowers, and others; and the wisest of all, a fox. It is the fox that teaches him that “anything essential is invisible to the eyes” and that “you become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed.”

A beautiful story, sweetly told and charmingly illustrated, with layers to appreciate on different readings and at different ages: everything a kid’s book should be.

Rating: 7 boas with elephants inside them.

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