All to say, I wanted to mark the occasion (instead of forgetting to post about it like I usually do) with a rundown of a couple of my favorites among the translated books by women that I’ve read in the last year.

Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi, trans. Chris Andrews

French Algerian author Kaouther Adimi tells the story of the famous Algerian bookshop and publisher, Les Vraies Richesses, and its owner, Edmond Charlot. Half the book is set in Algeria’s colonial and independence eras, in diary entries and third-person narration of Charlot’s experiences in the 1930s and 1940s. The other half is set in the present day, a time when Les Vraies Richesses has been sold to be a beignet restaurant, and a young man has come to the village to clear the old bookstore out. While my knowledge of Algerian history is patchy, and my tolerance for books about books has gone way down over the last decade, I genuinely loved Our Riches. The author’s love and admiration for Charlot, for literary culture, and for Algeria in all its incarnations shines through every page.

Earthlings, Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori

If you came out of Convenience Store Woman (Murata’s previous novel) whispering “what the fuck” quietly to yourself, you are fully not prepared for the what-the-fuck-ness that awaits you in Earthlings. It’s about a young woman who — along with her beloved cousin — believes that she is an alien, a fact that would explain her deep disconnection from those around her. When she and her cousin sleep together, it causes a family scandal, and they’re separated. Years later, Natsuki is in a marriage of convenience. She and her husband flee to the family home in Akashina, where they’re reunited with Natsuki’s cousin Yuu. It’s…. shit gets weird. Is what I’ll say. Sayaka Murata is not afraid to write the absolute weirdest, darkest shit, and I respect her for that.

cw for child sexual abuse and a whole bunch of violent murder

Eartheater, Dolores Reyes, trans. Julia Sanchez

Speaking of violent murder, Eartheater follows a young woman in the slums of Argentina who discovers, after her mother dies, that she can eat earth and gain visions of the lost and disappeared. Her newfound talent unnerves many of the people around her, and she’s left with just her beloved brother, Walter, for company and guardianship. Gradually she gains a better understanding of what she can do, and her neighbors begin to come to her with dirt for her to eat to find their missing loved ones. The narrator even teams up with a gentle local cop to solve crimes! But there’s an emotional cost to constantly witnessing the violence that befell the people around her.

This is another one I really loved. A thing that I’ve grown to love in translated literature is how often it denies the necessity of explaining what the fuck is happening. It just is what it is! This woman can eat dirt and get visions of what happened to the dead! No follow-up questions!

What translated literature have y’all been enjoying lately? What are you planning to read this August?

The post It’s Women in Translation Month! appeared first on Reading the End.

But now I do not go to the library, because libraries shouldn’t be open for browsing, because library staff need to be safe from COVID too. Instead I swing by and do holds pick-ups. This is sad and I miss my old routine. I miss all my old routines. THAT SAID, because I have to place holds if I want any library books, I am forced to place holds on books that cannot be found at my primary library location. I never used to do this! I never needed to! Now I am doing it, which means I am getting my hands on books I have been meaning to read for several years. Like Kaveena. Hat tip to my library for getting weird translated small-press African literature. I respect you, library. I desire your prosperity for all of time.

Kaveena is about the collapse of a fictional African dictator in a country that was once colonized by the French. It’s also about the white European businessman who orchestrated his rise and fall, and it’s about the military general who finds himself living with the corpse of the dictator and in fear of the businessman. At the center of everything is the memory of a six-year-old child, Kaveena, killed several years ago in a ritual murder of which the businessman is definitely guilty and the dictator insists that he is not.

Kaveena is about colonial and postcolonial economies: The European guy, Pierre Castaneda, owns a mining company and exerts most of his effort to protect his financial interests no matter the human cost. Castenda is based — the book’s introduction helpfully informs me! I would not have known this on my own! — on Jacques Foccart, who spent most of his career variously propping up African dictators who were friendly to French economic interests and sabotaging African leaders who were not friendly to French economic interests. It was a terrific reminder that colonialism didn’t end when formerly colonized nations attained independence. By contrast, the colonizers continued to hold sway over many/most of those countries, refusing to let go of their businesses there unless absolutely forced to do so. Extractive imperialism! It never fucking ends!

Though the point-of-view characters are the dictator, N’Ko Nikiema, and the general, Asante Kroma, the true drivers of the plot are not the men. The memory of Kaveena hangs over everything that happens: One of the reasons the general is at such perpetual risk from Pierre Castaneda is Castaneda’s fear that Kroma has and will reveal the videotape of Kaveena’s death. It’s the one atrocity (in a career of atrocities) that Castaneda can’t deny and can’t escape from. And what you realize as you continue to read the book is that Castaneda isn’t truly running things; Kaveena’s mother is running things. She is an artist and a sex worker and someone whose words and actions the men can never quite read. But she is, inexorably, pursuing an agenda of her own.

As I have expected for the two years it has taken me to read this damn book, I really really liked Kaveena. It’s a beautifully written, flawlessly imagined depiction of the wounds of imperialism, greed, and misogyny. It depicts a world in which economic interests take precedence over everything else. So. You know. The real world.

GRIM POST ENDING HAPPY MONDAY

The post Kaveena, Boubacar Boris Diop, trans. Bhakti Shringarpure and Sara C. Hanaburgh appeared first on Reading the End.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Zambra says this:

Those tests have multiple “authors,” but when we were kids we thought there was only one, a single God-dictator-author, who knew all the right answers and hid them. While I was writing the book, I thought a lot about how those exercises were, in a way, the opposite of literature. They teach you to put stories in order, for example, following some kind of fixed structure—from the abstract to the concrete, chronologically, from the general to the particular.

This all sounds very somber, and Multiple Choice is anything but. If there can be good, un-cynical parodies of dictatorships, Multiple Choice is one, and in a reading week where my brain was 90% blank terror for the future of our democracy and only about 10% available for processing words in books, it was a lighthearted read that didn’t feel like a cop-out from what’s happening in the world right now. Zambra is kidding on the round, because while dictatorships are absurd, their absurdity is a rhetorical disguise for the very real oppression they’re trying to get you to overlook.

For instance, the fourth section asks you to choose which sentences may be eliminated from a paragraph without damaging the meaning of what’s being said. Zambra launches into the story of a good man who didn’t mean any harm: Sure, the narrator acknowledges that he hated gay people and knew about the torture and disappearances, but so did everyone, didn’t they? And he was still fundamentally a good guy. Not a villain. One of the answer options lets you eliminate all the sentences that mention specific crimes, leaving only this:

(1) I was his friend, I was his pal. I knew him. And it’s not true what they say about him. Some things, sure, but not all of it. I care about what they say, it hurts. It’s as if they were talking about me.

(12) Whatever they may say of him, it’s easy enough to badmouth him now that he’s dead. But I would like you all to know that my friend isn’t all that dead, because he still has me, come what may. I’ll always defend him. Always, buddy–always.

TOO REAL, n’est-ce pas?

A government-controlled structure like the standardized test forces you to choose between a finite set of options, of which zero might make sense — but getting it right (for the government’s definition of “right”) will shape your future and the possibilities that will be open to you. I tried not to apply Multiple Choice too literally to America’s situation, even though I feel real damn dire. But one thing I took away from it, as I read headline after headline in supposedly liberal newspapers that refused to identify Steve Bannon as a white nationalist and anti-Semite, is that the words we use over the next four years are going to be everything. We can’t back away from the truth, no matter how ugly it is.

The post Review: Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra appeared first on Reading the End.

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 being disappeared, developed nations denying aid and responsibility. You can sympathize with the heroine of A General Theory of Oblivion, Ludo, who builds a wall between herself and her terrifying, rapidly changing world. She retreats behind it and finds a way to live her sharply circumscribed life without reference to the people and events happening beyond her borders.

In the midst of the most poisonous election season in my memory, at a time when a man with legally purchased guns can walk into a gay night club and murder dozens of people, it’s easy to see the appeal of the kind of detachment that Ludo creates for herself. Instead of engaging with the world she’s been given, she chooses a world she can control. She has to eat trapped pigeons, burn her books, write on her walls, and content herself with the tiny, incomplete glimpses of the rest of the world that she can spot from her own window; but it at least puts herself in her own power and nobody else’s.

Except: We are not made to be islands. Ludo is a cog in the history of her country (as we all are), and a cog in the lives of other people (as we all are). Even as extreme a retreat as Ludo makes from the world is insufficient. There are always other people, and they will come climbing up scaffolding and battering through walls, and you are a citizen of the world whether you want to be one or not. A General Theory of Oblivion is a dreamy meditation on the connectedness of human lives, strangely merciful in spite or because of its clear-eyed acknowledgement of the horrors of which we humans are capable.

In related news, I don’t know enough things about Angola. Must rectify.

The post A General Theory of Oblivion, José Eduardo Agualusa appeared first on Reading the End.

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 make you sigh? In Imperium, the only gay character rapes a kid and is subsequently violently killed. And also: “one of [the indigenous people] even wore a bone fragment in his lower lip, as though he were parodying himself and his race.”

Look, I get it. It’s satire. It’s not reality, it’s what the protagonist sees. The European rapist stands in for the greed and rapaciousness of European colonialism. I get all that, don’t write me a cross letter. It’s just that sometimes you feel like dealing with this kind of thing, and sometimes you don’t, and I didn’t, and it made me sigh.

Since that isn’t much of a review, let’s talk about something awesome that Kracht mentions in this book: BOMBAY FORNICATORS.

Have I told you about how I really, really want a Bombay fornicator? I have wanted one for years, ever since Tom Stoppard mentioned them in his play Indian Ink. They are a type of chair, popular amongst European colonials in tropical climates, that is pleasant to sit upon even when the weather is very hot, and the armrests fold out into footrests, as seen below.

Good, eh? Are you duly impressed? The proper, nonslang name for these chairs is super gross, so let’s stick with “Bombay fornicator,” SHALL WE? Because the thing is this, my friends: I have just recently discovered where one would get a Bombay fornicator (if you click on the picture it’ll take you to their website), and through a superhuman effort of self-control, I have not made pricing inquiries. Because that would be an insane thing to buy. (Right?)

I don’t care how much it costs to get a Bombay fornicator. It’s irrelevant to me.

I don’t.

So shut up.

The post Bombay fornicators appeared first on Reading the End.

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 only, so skip it if you don’t want to know!): The thief gets shot in an out-of-sight alley and left for dead by the boss of — something? It’s not clear yet. CRIME SYNDICATE PERHAPS? If so, maybe not a very good crime syndicate: it feels like a rookie mistake to leave somebody for dead instead of all the way killing them. The thief has a coin that he can possibly throw at someone to get their attention. The book ends when he throws the coin, so you must draw your own conclusions as to whether he succeeds.

(Y’all know I like ambiguous endings.)

The whole: I don’t know what to make of this book. It’s thoughtful and elegant in some ways, and I tend to enjoy a story where the protagonist gets in over his head and has to struggle to extricate himself.

But there’s something more mythic than narrative about the story: The thief (his “real” name is Nishimura, but we don’t find out what name he goes by day to day) is given three tasks that he must complete in order to have his life back. The tasks are set by an apparently all-powerful figure (the head of a crime syndicate!), and each one is more difficult than the last, as in any proper myth. In the thief’s head there is an image of a tower, ominous and looming, and although the jury’s out on what exactly its appearance portends, you can assume it’s not good.

Nakamura keeps the reader at arm’s length in this book in a few different ways: by not naming the thief, by keeping back most of his life story, and by a general feeling of shabbiness that pervades the book, all the places the thief goes and all the decisions he makes. It’s a strange combination of dreaminess and grime, combined with some interesting depictions of the mechanics of pickpocketing. Not exactly my thing, but I can see the worth of the endeavor.

MOSTLY. There’s only one lady character, and she’s this total caricature of a drug-addicted prostitute. The thief spots her making her kid shoplift in the grocery store, and he covers for them and gives the kid some money and some tips on how to steal better. Later he offers the mother some money to release the kid into foster care, and she’s all like, “Great! Money is better than kids anyway!” Major eyerolls from me on that.

Final verdict: The Thief was not my thing, but it is also really short, so if you feel like trying something in translation and you find the premise interesting, I say go for it.

affiliate links: Amazon, Book Depository, B&N

The post Review: The Thief, Fuminori Nakamura appeared first on Reading the End.