Reviews

Glimpses of Kashmir: On For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul

May 16, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

[For Now, It Is Night] is a collection that represents Kaul as a chronicler of his times, mapping memory and history.

For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul, translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob, Archipelago Books, 2024

Hari Krishna Kaul (1934-2009) was a Kashmiri writer dedicated to inscribing the quotidian lives of people in the valley, releasing their stories in both fiction and dramatic works throughout his life. Some of these pieces have now been collected in For Now, It Is Night, which features seventeen stories picked from the four collections spanning Kaul’s career—two written and published before the watershed year of 1989, while the writer still lived in Kashmir; and two published after he and his family had migrated—just like many other Hindu families—in the Kashmiri Pandit exodus, which occurred upon the onset of militancy and rise in communal tensions after India’s Independence in 1947. As Kalpana Raina, Kaul’s niece and one of four translators in this volume, writes:

There are no grand themes in Kaul’s work, but an exploration and an acceptance of human limitations. He used his personal experiences to explore universal themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, and the shifting circumstances of a community that went on to experience a significant loss of homeland, culture, and ultimately language.

One would assume that Kaul would become prejudiced after his exile, but that could not be farther from the truth. As Gowhar Fazili, another translator, states: “Unlike a partisan trend in contemporary Kashmiri writing—particularly in English—that victimises a community, demonising the other while valorising the self, Kaul subverts the binaries of good and evil, friend and enemy, self and other.” As exemplified in this selection, Kaul does not create reductive caricatures in the guise of characters, whether Muslim or Hindu. Moreover, neither the exodus, nor the events surrounding it, make up the sole focus of his narratives; he is not interested in the incidents themselves so much as the rootlessness and unbelonging they engendered. Tanveer Ajsi elaborates: “Not assuming the inclusive character of Kashmiri society, he excavated the strengths that bound it together, while also exposing the fault lines that lurked behind its cultural veneer.” As such, Kaul’s work can also be seen as a questioning of Kashmiriyat, the much-romanticised idea of communal harmony and religious syncretism in the Kashmir valley, which—despite its gradual erosion—still sees people swearing by its steadfastness.

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What’s New in Translation: May 2024

May 13, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Danielle Pieratti and Sarah Gear

New titles from Italy and Colombia!

In a fecund month of new translations, our editors select two phenomenal titles: a collection of the later poems by the acclaimed Eugenio Montale, and an intimate epistolary fiction leading readers to a seldom-seen region of Colombia. 

Late Montale – New York Review Books

Late Montale by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by George Bradley, New York Review Books, 2024

Review by Danielle Pieratti, Poetry Editor

“The world exists,” declared Eugenio Montale in the poem “Wind and Flags” from his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, published in 1925 (translated by Jonathan Galassi). Given the frank, existential agnosticism that governs the poet’s later work, it feels a little like whiplash to return to this otherwise characteristically subtle poem after reading Late Montale. Translated from the Italian by George Bradley, this collection comprises Montale’s published and unpublished poems from the second half of his life, offering glimpses of the poet first in the period of his Nobel win and later, as an increasingly reflective and skeptical widower. Yet ultimately, Montale seems to arrive where he began. “Unarguably / something must exist,” he writes in an unpublished poem at the end of his life,

But with [regard to] this,
science, philosophy, theology (red or black)
have all misfired.

If this isn’t faith,
O men of the altar or the microscope,
then go f. yourselves.

Given that these works range from the 1960s to his death in 1981, the fact that Montale circles back to this revelation bears noting. While his underlying ironies and symbolism persist, there’s a definitive “shift from formality to intimacy and self-revelation,” Bradley writes in his introduction, which “parallels the course of twentieth century poetry as a whole”. In poems taken from Satura, first published eight years after the 1963 death of his wife Drusilla Tanzi, Montale retains his characteristic imagery and density, but his focus has drifted from the tangible nature symbolism of his earlier works to more abstract questions of grief befitting an older poet experiencing loss. Many of the poems speak to memory and to individuals from Montale’s past, including several from two long sequences addressed to Tanzi. Others allude frequently to Montale’s former life as an opera singer. Indeed, the tension between then and now pervades Late Montale, and the poet’s apparent scorn for the passing of time lends a hint of tragedy to poems increasingly pensive and raw. “We were two lives too young to be old but too old to feel we were young,” he writes to Tanzi in “Lake Sorapis, 40 Years Ago”, which ends:

That’s when we learned what aging is.
Nothing to do with time, it’s something that tells us,
that makes us tell ourselves: “Here we are,
it’s a miracle and won’t come again.” By comparison
youth is the most contemptible of illusions.

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Room of Mirrors: On Ángel Bonomini’s The Novices of Lerna

May 9, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Jordan Spector

It is a testament to this collection’s dizzying, wandering nature that the reader is left to consider: what if this story is true?

The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman, Transit Books, 2024

Ángel Bonomini is one of those extraordinary literary figures who—despite having been lauded for his singular, masterful inventions—has somehow fallen into oblivion. In addition to being a cultural critic and prolific translator, the poems and stories published throughout Argentina in his lifetime represented a vital contribution to the nation’s phenomenon of fantastic narrative. While he remained largely unknown to international readers in his lifetime, such work earned him multiple distinguished accomplishments in his home country—including two Premio Konex awards and personal accolades from Jorge Luis Borges. In 1994, at the age of sixty-four, Bonomini passed away, and sadly, his writing seemed to disappear with him.

Now, in The Novices of Lerna, Jordan Landsman has captured the author’s wistful and pensive voice in a stirring collection of sixteen previously untranslated stories, spreading the magic to a new generation of readers. With candles melted “as if light had been slit from their veins,” theories “woven like black thread in the dead of night,” and people “like books with transparent pages where the lines don’t match up,” Bonomini glides vividly and lyrically into worlds where time warps, people live and die and live again, doppelgängers are plentiful, sentences disappear into amorphous paragraphs, and Buenos Aires isn’t quite the same urban sprawl that one might see in Argentina. While the pieces in this collection have no crossover in plot or character, some subterranean power connects them, with favored symbols and images appearing and reappearing—figs, trees, fires, death, and the landscape of the city.  READ MORE…

Announcing our April Book Club Selection: Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis

April 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Sofija Popovska

Nikolaidis’ very literal rendition of the Book of Revelation is unflinching, darkly humorous, and relentless in its pursuit. . .

In Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly, no one is safe. Not only is the world ending, but everything is being unearthed up along with it—every confidence, every disgrace, every deception. With his signature blend of rapturous imagery and indomitable intellect, Nikolaidis forces humanity to face its horrors while still allowing us some potential for redemption, a characteristically penetrating move for an author who is also an outspoken activist against war and corruption. Just last month, Nikolaidis faced intimidation and public harassment for his bold political work in Montenegro, underlining the necessity and urgency of his dissent. We are proud to announce this exemplary title as our Book Club title for the month. It’s a hell of a ride, literally.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Anomaly by Andrej Nikolaidis, translated from the Montenegrin by Will Firth, Peirene Press, 2024

I am an Apocalyptist. I believe that Good will win out in the end, and when it does, the world as we know it will be abolished—it will no longer exist. So, once that world is gone, Good will prevail. If the concept of the Apocalypse isn’t the ultimate irony, I don’t know what is.

—Andrej Nikolaidis

Andrej Nikolaidis’ Anomaly, published in Will Firth’s translation, begins with a verdict: “The human race owes its history, as well as its future, to the fact that we’ve always been able to turn our backsides to the graves of those we maltreated, and then seek absolution.” Though this has been the case for millennia, the novel insists that human censorship will not be able to preserve its euphemized retellings for much longer. After a freak incident involving “a machine that would give each of us . . . all of the possible scenarios and outcomes of our lives”, past and present begin to merge: a mammoth falls and crushes a man brooding on a quay in Chile; a cruise ship collides with three women contemplating shop windows on Ferhadija Street; a man haunted by an incestuous affair is killed by a cannonball fired in 1805 by Napoleon’s fleet, while praying in the Kotor Cathedral. The truth of never-ending human cruelty—“one drop” of which is “enough to destroy the world”—finally refuses the revisionism afforded to us by the present, and becomes unignorable by physically unfolding everywhere, all at once. Nikolaidis’ very literal rendition of the Book of Revelation is unflinching, darkly humorous, and relentless in its pursuit of the uncomfortable details we tend to suppress.

In 1992, Nikolaidis and his parents fled to Montenegro from his native Sarajevo to escape the mounting ethnic strife that would soon erupt into the Bosnian War; the author, then, is no stranger to the tumultuous experiences at the core of Anomaly. Decidedly anti-war and anti-nationalist, Nikolaidis is also fearless in voicing his views. When his 2006 novel, Sin, was awarded the 2011 European Union Prize of Literature, the announcement detailed how his public defense of “victims of police torture. . . resulted in his receiving many threats, including a death threat during a live radio appearance”. His insistence on “freedom of speech [as] the basis of freedom” is obvious in his literary and journalistic work—and the way he implements this freedom is equally noteworthy. READ MORE…

Slivers of Beauty and Optimism: On Artem Chapeye’s Love Letter to Ukraine

April 25, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sarah Gear

Chapeye . . . focuses on the effect of these [linguistic] dynamics on the individual and the local rather than society at large.

The Ukraine by Artem Chapeye, translated from the Ukrainian, Russian, and Surzhyk by Zenia Tomkins, Seven Stories Press, 2024

‘This next part is my favorite part of traveling’, the narrator of the Artem Chapeye’s opening story ‘Pan Ivan and the Three Bears’ tells his friends as they are invited into a local man’s mountain home to shelter from the cold. Pan Ivan feeds them borsch and hot tea as he regales them with stories about bears—nearly all ending in death, but all endearing in their own way. Chapeye’s beautifully fairy tale-like opening invites us to explore his provocatively-articled short story collection The Ukraine, translated by Zenia Tomkins. Chapeye—a writer, photographer, and now soldier—wrote these stories between 2010 and 2018, blending fiction with autobiography. Snippets of rural and urban life shot through with perceptive encounters with a rich cast of characters, these stories form a love letter to Ukraine and its people. 

While some stories are told from other characters’ points of view, the narrator of the majority  appears to be Chapeye himself as he travels around Ukraine on a beaten-up motorbike, sometimes accompanied by his wife Oksana. While Ukraine is doubtless the main character, Chapeye himself emerges as the most sympathetic and immediate of storytellers. His ability to see the good in everyone, and his gentle questioning of the people he meets is one of the most endearing aspects of his book.  In ‘A Fancy Send-Off,’ Chapeye—who, in the present day, is a soldier fighting against Russia’s invasion—meets Baba Shura, whom he describes as ‘very Soviet’ because of her view that Russia and Ukraine should be ‘together forever’. Rather than argue with her, Chapeye allows her to voice her opinion, before permitting himself only the most agreeable of disagreements: ‘“They’ve supposedly separated already,” I reply, allowing myself to contradict her, which I only do very, very hesitantly.’ He leaves the subject there, instead describing the elderly lady with warmth: ‘Baba Shura never stops smiling, even when she’s talking about something sad, like that fancy send-off of hers. Periodically, she adjusts her scarf. She looks at me kindly. She’s waiting for the rain to pass. She’s worried that she’ll get drenched on her bicycle in the five kilometers she has to ride home.’

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What’s New in Translation: April 2024

April 15, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Georgina Fooks, Nestor Gomez, and Willem Marx

New titles from Kazakhstan, South Korea, and The Netherlands!

This month, our editors introduce three incredible new works that delve into family, solitude, and fractured legacy. From the lyrical explorations of family by Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, the delightful oddities of Yun Ko-Eun’s sincere and humorous short stories, and the vivid, compassionate vignettes of Kazkah author Baqytgul Sarmekova, these newly published translations invite reflection, tenderness, and joy.

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Off-White by Astrid Roemer, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott and David McKay, Two Lines Press, 2024

Review by Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large

In Off-White, Astrid Roemer weaves a grand, multigenerational narrative around the matriarchical figure of Grandma Bee and her family in Suriname, a South American country on the Caribbean coast. The year is 1966, and each member of the Vanta family is going about their lives in different directions, threatening the bond that is necessary to continue Grandma Bee’s vision of the family’s legacy.

While one part of this narrative is deeply embedded in identity, exploring how structures of race, class, and gender have been encoded within the family, another part is inextricably tied to loss and getting lost, as various characters all reckon with their history (cultural, personal, and traumatic) in different ways. Translators Lucy Scott and David McKay demonstrate remarkable skill and artistry in conveying the story with ease and clarity, relaying the subtle tensions in both the spoken and the unspoken. Through their work, Roemer’s prose enlivens with emotive and physical details (especially that of meals), deeply coloring the multiplicity that threatens the family’s unity while highlighting their diversity of experiences.

Even before beginning the novel, we are immediately confronted with the issue of color in the title: Off-White. The Dutch term, “Gebroken Wit,” is also included in the book’s very first page, and Roemer describes it as having multiple translated meanings, such as “broken white” or “refracted white.” In a conversation with Two Lines Press, Roemer states: “essentially, [gebroken wit] refers to refracted sunlight—a rainbow, for instance—showing a wide range of colors. . . [It] also means that sunlight always finds a way through time and always keeps gathering together.” This imagery of sunlight resonates strongly throughout the novel in the many harrowed struggles of the Vanta family: Heli’s burgeoning relationship with an older married man who teaches at her school, Louise’s ongoing incestuous relationship with her brother, and Laura’s diminishing mental health from the sexual harassment she experienced as a child at the hands of Grandma Bee’s brother, Lèon.  READ MORE…

“I’ve hidden in the details whatever remains”: On Tomasz Różycki’s To the Letter

April 8, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Michael Collins

Throughout this collection. . . one must continually meet Różycki’s challenge to read across the gaps between poems.

To the Letter by Tomasz Różycki, translated from the Polish by Mira Rosenthal, Archipelago Books, 2024

“It’s my word, my letters against your minutes,” writes Tomasz Różycki in To the Letter, the most recent English-language volume from the distinguished Polish poet. The line concludes the poem “Shadow,” in which the speaker—himself already “gone, no longer”—addresses an equally enigmatic audience: “From the shadows / perhaps you’re watching me pass through the gate.” Such confrontations between experiential time and textual consciousness, individual mortality and the ghosts of cultural consciousness, reverberate throughout this collection. The speaking voice of these poems is always aware of itself as text—a part of history inhabiting a living reader.

The book’s macrocosm integrates Jungian insights about how the shadows of history intermingle with the personal and cultural shadows of the living. In literature, these exchanges are facilitated through the act of reading, and To the Letter presents various perspectives on—and within—this process, incorporating allegorical considerations of the reader-writer, as well as direct addresses to the mutable beloved facing the pages. In collaborative, interdependent structures (numerical sequencing, narrative fragments, various configurations of speaker and addressee, and dream-like recurrences of theme, image, and setting), Różycki displays the dynamics between unconscious and conscious, self and other, individual and culture, all captured in a fine translation by Mira Rosenthal. Her English iterations fully relay the poems’ accessibility, music, and humor—as well as the ways they integrate into surprising valences with creativity, love, and interbeing. Within them, one identifies an existentially grounded, metaphysically nimble soul, intrinsically defying the authoritarian project that empowers itself by convincing people that they are drastically oversimplified, reified versions of themselves.

The central character in the collection is Lieutenant Anielewicz, who often appears in cameos. His unexpected arrivals, usually in a capacity of investigation or covert sabotage, befit the historical Mordechai Anielewicz, a leader of the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. In using this character to stage ongoing psychological engagement with creativity, trauma, and finality, Różycki finds both literal and metaphorical affinities between the commander’s resistance against the Nazi genocide, and the poet’s evocations of the soul’s potentially destructive aspects. READ MORE…

Yet So Alive: A Collection of Groundbreaking Latin American Horror Stories

April 1, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sharon Beriro

The horror in all of these stories slithers in stealth . . .  it quietly intoxicates, revealing its true colors in a hypnotizing fashion.

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories, Two Lines Press, 2024

For some time now, Latin American literature has engrossed readers with magical realism, fantasy, surrealism, and most recently, horror. These aren’t necessarily the stories of the region’s most considered authors—Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Horacio Quiroga, Amparo Dávila, and other giants among them—but rather the work of bold, fearless, and independent writers who, in the last decade, have honored and twisted these genres in unprecedented ways. Their work represents a new generation of talents, who are redefining their region’s legacy in gothic literature.

Many call it horror. Others, like Carmen Alemany Bay, a literary scholar at the University of Alicante, call it “narrativa de lo inusual”—narrative of the unusual, or the strange, defining a subgenre “in which the reader is ultimately the one who decides what is possible and what is not.” Whatever one wants to call it, the certainty remains that these voices are as powerful as they are unflinching, grounded by a sincerity and authenticity faithful to their geographies; that is to say, these stories are as “unusual” as they are Latin American, which is in part what makes Through the Night Like a Snake all the more visceral.

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Movement and Stagnation: On Virgula by Sasja Janssen

March 28, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Areeb Ahmad

The comma is . . . perpetually in motion . . . a relentless zest for life, a desire to fill the emptiness with words, to delay the inevitable.

Virgula by Sasja Janssen, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, Prototype, 2024

I write to you because you hover in the corner of my eye
I write to you because you never answer
I write to you because, like me, you dislike stagnation

In Wit, Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer-winning one-act play, the main character, English professor Dr Vivian Bearing, re-lives crucial moments of her life while undergoing an experimental chemotherapy treatment for late-stage ovarian cancer. In one instance, she remembers a comment made by her college professor, Dr E M Ashford, reprimanding her for taking language too lightly in an assignment on Donne’s sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud”; Ashford is quick to point out that the edition Vivian consulted contained faulty punctuation, and surmises that the simple message of the poem—“overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life”—gets sacrificed to the ‘hysterical’ punctuation of semicolons and an exclamation point. Vivian’s iteration—“And Death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die!”—distorts what is conveyed by a single comma: “And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.” One can clearly see the importance of one simple symbol: how it can make or break a poem.

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‘Lost and Found in Maps of Wandering’: A Review of Bothayna Al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca

March 18, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Lost in Mecca is not a one-dimensional story; it is paradoxical, repelling readers while captivating them.

Lost in Mecca by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated from the Arabic by Nada Faris, Dar Arab, 2024

Best-selling Kuwaiti author Bothayna al-Essa’s Lost in Mecca —first published in Arabic in 2015 as Maps of Wandering/خرائط التيه—is more than just a literary crime thriller; it’s a journey through Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, as well as into the minds of its protagonists. Al-Essa moves from a mere personal incident to a human plight and the global crisis that is human organ trafficking, resulting in an expansive narrative and a much welcome addition to the growing list of modern Arabic fiction available in English.

Lost in Mecca opens with the ordeal of a couple on Haj. As a flood of pilgrims circumambulate the Kaaba, al-Essa focuses on a Kuwaiti woman, Sumaya, holding the hand of her seven-year-old son, Mishari—who she has brought along even though it’s not obligatory for children to participate in this annual journey. Sumaya’s husband, Faisal, is also performing the same ritual nearby. All of a sudden, a group of Africans rushes forward, holding onto each other, and in the chaos, Mishari’s hand slips away from Sumaya’s. In this human flood, Mishari is lost.

The spiritual scene soon fades away, and the flooded square transforms into an empty place filled with the echoing cries of a grieving mother, repeating, “Mishari! Oh God! My son!”, over and over again. The bodies diminish, the crowd thins, the distances shorten, the gaps decrease, and Mecca itself becomes a maze. How could a child possibly vanish in all this confusion?

From that point onward, the tragedy truly begins with the search for Mishari, a pursuit that transcends the boundaries of pages to become a terrifying nightmare. The ensuing chapters chronicle Mishari’s wanderings between the 7th and 29th of Dhu al-Hijjah, continually being confronted by the ‘forgotten’ worlds and stories of human negligence taking place across the Middle East. Al-Essa stretches out his challenging storyline from Mecca to ‘Asir, Jazan, and the Red Sea coast. Eventually, Mishari’s parents will even cross the sea towards Sinai through restricted maritime routes. The narration covers the Sinai desert and its vast expanses, up to the borders of Al-‘Arish in the north. It also highlights the geographical boundaries of occupied Palestine, and sheds light on what the Western media has reported regarding human organ trafficking, and secret deals involving Israeli and Egyptian officials.

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What’s New in Translation: March 2024

March 11, 2024  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Bella Creel, Daljinder Johal, and Kathryn Raver

New works from Alexander Kluge, Marjane Satrapi, and Jón Kalman Stefánsson!

The latest text from one of German New Wave’s founding members and all around heavy-hitter; a wide-ranging compilation of art and testimony championing the Iranian feminist movement from Marjane Satrapi; and a moving, braided narrative of grief and recovery from a lauded Icelandic author. Our editors review some of the most exciting works in translation coming to the Anglophone this month. 

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The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul by Alexander Kluge, translated from the German by Alexander Booth, Seagull Books, 2024

Review by Bella Creel, Blog Editor

Filmmaker, author, and philosopher Alexander Kluge’s most recent oeuvre, The Book of Commentary / Unquiet Garden of the Soul, is an act of rethinking. Born in Germany in 1932, Kluge blurs the edges of the many years of his life in this ambitious work, expanding beyond the first-hand, beyond generations, drawing connections between now and before, all in order to fully describe the experience of a single life. Alexander Booth offers a wonderfully dense and witty translation from the German, with no aversion to a confusing syntax that demands rereading and rethinking.

Kluge is trying to find the right words throughout this collection, which, in the process of its creation, must have been turned over and inside out, stretched to snapping and magnified to the molecular; reading it, in turn, requires a certain liquifying of the brain. This giving-in allows one to absorb the words, which only then can be reformed into some sort of meaning. Kluge himself seems to follow a similar process:

Where does all my ‘fluent speech’, my rabid desire to write, come from? I listen to others. And carefully! A word that flies towards me, an observation that charms me into conversation, a quotation that I read: all of this gets stored inside me for the long-term.

I usually tear books to shreds, marking any places that captivate me in colour pencil before ripping the page out. These I attach to other findings of mine with a paper clip. They’re often annotated. My flat is full of these piles of paper. My personal bastion against the ‘ignorance that shakes the world’.

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Riveting Banality: On Rebecca Gisler’s About Uncle

March 6, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Sharon Beriro

It’s the pungency of this story—the characters, the house, Uncle’s habits—that keeps us locked in tight.

About Uncle by Rebecca Gisler, translated from the French by Jordan Stump,  Two Lines Press, 2024

About Uncle is Swiss writer Rebecca Gisler’s debut novel, translated by Jordan Stump—a dazzling and intoxicating story that takes a microscopic view at the banal and unnerving details of family dynamics. A love letter to the oft hidden odd and grotesque mannerisms of our family members, About Uncle boils over with emotional distress, set just on the verge of the first COVID lockdown in spring of 2020. But, it’s not COVID that sets the tone, it’s everything else: family at its most banal, at its most crude, with an emotional tinge humming with tenderness.

At the center of the story is the unnamed narrator’s uncle, a 52 year-old recluse who seems to thrive among the squalor and filth built up over 30 years of hygienic apathy. In an unkempt house in the Brittany region of France, Uncle lives with his niece and nephew as “a congregation of do-nothings.” The siblings struggle to balance their personal struggles with their shared concern for Uncle’s health and lifestyle, and the “involuntary flatshare” is the centerpiece of a claustrophobic world that quite literally reeks of death and decay. READ MORE…

Announcing Our February Book Club Selection: Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek

February 29, 2024  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Alex Tan

Where the Wind Calls Home sidesteps the instant of carnage and cruelty, focusing instead on its shattered aftermath. . .

Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek’s latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture. Written from the perspective of a young soldier as he lays dying from his wounds, Yazbek describes both the unthinkable wreckages of conflict and the translucent totems of faith with her singular musicality and vividity, tracing backwards through recollections and reveries to collage all the brute realities of civil war with the individuals whose rich internal lives pattern the battlefields.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, World Editions, 2024

There is an unforgettable moment in Adania Shibli’s Touch when the child narrator, through whose eyes the world arrives in intensities of colour and sensation, attempts to decipher words emanating from the TV. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of indistinct syllables, she finally makes out “Sabra and Shatila”. She thinks then not of the horrific massacre in Beirut but of the sabr cactus growing in her vicinity; the name, stripped out of the matrix of history, can only signify as something tangible, close at hand.

Such strategies of defamiliarisation came to mind while I was immersed in the free-floating atmospheres of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home. Its oneiric rhythms, elegantly recreated in the English translation by Leri Price, mimic the roving consciousness of an adolescent soldier, known only as Ali. Forcibly conscripted into the frontlines of the Syrian Civil War, he survives an enemy attack in the Latakia mountains only to hover on the edge of death. As he struggles to regain a feeling of where his injured, possibly dismembered body might begin and end, his mind takes flight; memories of childhood creep back into him. Time on the narrative surface runs the course of a single day, blue sky shading into a “raw and tender” moon. Beneath reality seethes the inexpressible current of remembrance, obeying its own laws of sequence and cadence.

Yazbek is more interested in the sensuous immediacies of embodiment than in the airy abstractions of power. Her previous offering, Planet of Clay—a finalist for the 2021 National Book Awards, also translated by Price—inhabited the perspective of a mute girl, similarly caught starkly within the crossfires on the Civil War. Against its barbarities, she seeks a sanctuary in crayoned drawings and imagined planets. Even in Yazbek’s non-fictional accounts of revolutionary betrayal, ranging from the diaristic to the journalistic, she retains a similar sensibility: “Oh spinning world, if my little heart, as small as a lump of coal, is wider than your borders, I know how narrow you are!” READ MORE…

‘Obliged to Serve a Memory’: A Review of Vera Mutafchieva’s The Case of Cem

February 19, 2024  |  in Reviews  |  by Kathryn Raver

Cem . . . is silent, an inanimate object in his own story, only moving when and where other powers will him.

The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Sandorf Passage, 2024

Cem—born in the burgeoning Ottoman Empire, the second son of the legendary Mehmed the Conqueror, and in the eyes of history, the exiled prince. In his time, Cem was lauded by storytellers the world over for who he might become and what he might accomplish, until finally he was pitied for all that he endured. But these portrayals of Cem, some true and others exaggerated, have all but faded from the public eye over time—a fact that renowned Bulgarian author and historian Vera Mutafchieva sought to remedy with her comprehensive account of his struggle in her novel, The Case of Cem.

Mutafchieva’s works have been published in nearly a dozen languages, the most recent being Angela Rodel’s English translation of The Case of Cem. Originally published in Bulgarian in 1967, the story follows Cem as he tries and fails to usurp his older brother at the behest of some of his countrymen. He is forced into years of exile that take him far from home, from Rhodes to France to Italy. His imprisonments—though those holding him would call it refuge—turn the almost-sultan into an unwilling pawn and bargaining tool for European powers, and eventually lead to his tragic downfall. 

The Case of Cem is a daring blend of court intrigue, tragedy, and historical fact that masterfully captures complex layers of history in its prose and reads like an epic. Just as prevalently, though, it is a reflection on memory, identity, homeland, and what it means to lose them.

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