Happy August, everybody! Somehow it’s August of 2021, which is a fact I don’t want to dwell on too much because HOW, but the good news is that it means we’ve circled back once more to Women in Translation Month! While books in translation still don’t comprise a huge chunk of my reading, I fully credit WIT Month and, more broadly, its inventor Meytal of Bibliobio, for making translated books feel less scary to me. I used to require a lot of persuasion before I’d try a translated book, and now I’m actively allured by them, especially when the authors…
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Here’s something that has changed under quarantine: I now place holds on books. I so rarely did it in the olden days! I used to go to the library every Saturday or every second Saturday, and I didn’t need to place holds, because there were always loads of amazing books to read. I would make a list of maybe five specific books that I wanted to get that day, and I’d get them, but then I spent most of my library trip trawling the New Books shelves in every genre. I had a system! Nonfiction first! Then regular fiction! Then…
Leave a CommentI didn’t do this on purpose, although I would have if I’d thought of it: The book I read immediately after the election turned out to be a work of experimental fiction that explores how life and education in a dictatorship narrows the range of thoughts that it is possible to think. Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, is a spoof on the Academic Aptitude Exam, required for all college-bound Chilean students, which Zambra took in 1993, when Chile was in transition to democracy following years of dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet. In an interview with The…
11 CommentsMy A+ year with African literature continues in José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, translated by Daniel Hahn. When I first heard about this book, I believed I squawked at Whiskey Jenny, “Look, ooh, oh, look at this! It’s about an Angolan woman who walls herself up in her house during the Angolan fight for independence! Sounds amazing!” and Whiskey Jenny was like, “….Does it?” I get her point. When you read a lot about nations fighting free of colonialism, there are patterns of violence and oppression that repeat themselves in exhausting, predictable ways. Police oppression, warring ideologies, journalists…
10 CommentsSo I read Christian Kracht’s much-praised satirical novel Imperium, and for once, I enjoyed satirical writing for the length of a full book. Typically after a chapter or two, satirical novels become too arch for me to enjoy, but no, Kracht keeps it up pretty good. Me and this book could have been friends, I think, if it hadn’t kept making me sigh. Have you had books like that? Where they’re not so ideologically maddening that you want to write a post denouncing them and all that they stand for, but there’s just a couple of things about them that…
21 CommentsNot to be confused with Megan Whalen Turner’s book of the same title, although each depicts a clever theft by a protagonist unhappy in his circumstances. The beginning: There’s some weirdness about timelines, so I may have this wrong, but okay, there is a pickpocket who has returned to Tokyo although it is unsafe for him to do so. He formerly worked with another gifted thief named Ishikawa, and he now works alone. Reasons unclear, though there are hints that Ishikawa came to a Bad End. Oh, gosh, I hope there’s a crime syndicate! The end (spoilers in this section…
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