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Written by María Negroni
Translated from the Spanish by Anne Twitty
Argentina | Novel (Excerpts) | Spanish
October, 2009
Synopsis:
Ursula's Dream is a multi-layered construction, a coded journey that redefines the rules of the epic genre. Any outline of the plot would be misleading, since María Negroni’s method is to question the distinction between dream or vision and historical, fictional, and legendary reality, while refusing to respect the limits of chronology. The medieval histories of Ursula that inspired this thoroughly contemporary novel recount the life of a young woman near the end of the first millennium. Heiress to the throne of Cornwall, in order to escape immediate marriage to a suitor and on the advice of an angel, she lays down three conditions: that her suitor be baptized, that she be supplied with eleven ships and eleven maidens to command them, and that she be given three years to make a pilgrimage to Rome. Ursula—according to the many surviving versions of her life—made the pilgrimage with her companions and was killed before her return. Accounts of her death differ; perhaps she died at the hands of Attila the Hun, perhaps her vengeful suitor pursued and killed her.
On the whole, the novel follows these legendary events, depicting Ursula’s youth at the court of Cornwall and the arrival of the suitor’s messengers, then introducing her companions and narrating the progress of their journey while incorporating the characters—from bishops to minnesingers—that they meet along the way. There are debates, crises, and defections among the women, a plot of sorts. Yet the question of Ursula's death remains unresolved. The larger action of the novel takes place out of time, as Ursula’s Dream continually departs from the linear, through apparitions and presentiments, embodying figures from other realms of reality: some who died before the pilgrimage began and others who were to live—and write—of her in future centuries.
Expressing the polyphony of inner life through female voices, the novel reveals the depth and risk of feminine experience in a world controlled by patriarchal institutions. Its concerns are millenary: the confrontation with death, time, love, historical circumstances, and destiny. In endowing them with a contemporary perspective, Ursula’s Dream rediscovers for its readers the spiritual quest that gives a deeper meaning to the epic gesture.
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Written by Inaam Kachachi
Translated from the Arabic by William Hutchins
Arabic | France | Novel (Excerpts)
August, 2009
Synopsis:
As an adolescent, Zeina left Iraq for the United States with her family, her father having been accused of conspiracy against the regime of Saddam Hussein. Well-integrated in her country of adoption, but raised in the love of her native land, at the age of thirty she decides to return there as an interpreter with the American army. Convinced of the nobility of her mission, yet slightly ashamed of returning in this uniform, she delays in informing her grandmother, the widow of colonel in the Iraqi army. Given the job of translating and sensitizing the American military to Arab culture, the young woman realizes that her role goes beyond this: with reluctance, she is present at interrogations, or bursts into suspect houses during the night... Uneasiness sets in. And disapproval as well, that of her grandmother, of close ones, and, worse still, her own....
Through the beautiful character of this woman torn between two identities, the author paints the picture of the life of expatriate Iraqis in America and of their intensely close relationship with the mother country. The resentment of Iraqis on the inside toward the American occupier is echoed by the pain of families in mourning in the United States. Written in a pacy, punchy language like a soldier’s logbook, this novel renders with great subtlety the wounds that war inflicts on each individual, whether in uniform or not, and thus is universal in effect.
The novel was published in Arabic by Dar el-Jadid, 2008, and in French by Liana Levi, fall 2009.
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Written by John Antoine Nau
Translated from the French by Michael Shreve
France | French | Novel (Excerpts) | Short Fiction
August, 2009
Synopsis:
Force ennemie (Enemy Force) was awarded the first Prix Goncourt in 1903. In 1906, Paul Léautraud said: “The Prix Goncourt has really only been given once—the first time to Nau.” And years later Huysmans would say, “It was the best one that we ever crowned.”
A visionary masterpiece: Phillipe Veuly, accursed poet, wakes up in a rubber room. Where is he? An insane asylum. Why? He doesn’t know and the doctors refuse to tell him. Is he crazy? Or rather are the ‘psychiatrists’ the ones who should be in his place? Stricken with amnesia, he learns from a guard that he was committed by his cousin to separate him from his alcoholic tendencies. In reality, he is the victim of the imaginary (?) jealousy of this relative. Soon he thinks he is inhabited by a being from another planet: Kmôhoûn, the ‘enemy force’, (among others), a disembodied spirit who fled the insupportable conditions of his home planet, Tkoukra. It’s not easy living with this naughty tenant who doesn’t hesitate to act insanely, speak extravagantly and even vulgarly, or even scream inside your head when others talk to you. And the “semi-lucid mental patient” falls passionately, madly, desperately in love with a female inmate, Irene. She leaves, disappears; he flees after her. He runs to the ends of the earth to find her. Enemy Force tells the story of the troublesome cohabitation of these two beings in the same body, and Veuly’s desire to concretize his love for Irene while protecting her from Kmôhoûn.
Also featured is a short story by Nau called The Emerald Eyes.
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Written by Luc Lang
Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith
France | French | Novel (Excerpts)
July, 2009
Synopsis:
The novel excerpted here, La fin des paysages/The End of Landscape is a suspenseful and obsessive oratorio about brotherhood and affiliation, not only between the twin brothers at the center of the book, and the sisters they love, but also between Africa and Europe, and the ties—affective, artistic, and political—that bind them together.
The setting is Liverpool in the final days of the Thatcher administration, hovering between the rioting youth of an abandoned industrial working class and the burgeoning gentrification of the all-but-abandoned port area and its forlorn population. The symbol of this moment is the opening of a new outpost of the Tate Gallery in the former Albert Dock. Sir Abel Manson is the Irish-born curator of the first exhibit, "A Century of Africanism: 1850-1950."
The novel opens with a gruesome accident on the docks: while unloading a shipment of priceless artifacts on loan from the governments of Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Kenya, a chain breaks, a man is swept up by the loose wire of a crane, his body sectioned, and a crate smashes open on the ground. Some sculptures are lost in the space between the boat and the dock. A fallen landscape painting is slashed by an angry worker and some masks are purloined by a mysterious stranger. A narrator describes the scene. His voice is unpunctuated, relentless, and the reader seems to become this man, Martin Finlay, as he tries first to help his employer get the exhibit back on track, and then solve the mystery of the missing masks.
French critic and literary blogger Pierre Assouline on The End of Landscape:
Here is what the author calls venturing into the labyrinth of time—that time which, in the words of Faulkner used by Lang as an epigraph, is "longer than any distance." Revisiting a story he first told fifteen years earlier, Luc Lang has produced a block of prose with an energetic and sinewy rhythm, at times Céline-like and stuffed with narrative detonations reminiscent of Dos Passos. The novel turns on twindom, on doubles and duels: the harbour master and the museum curators, two brothers that everything sets against one another, two sisters standing for two ideas of love.... Lang has not chosen an easy path. So much motion gives rise to a highly visual story. Luc Lang has filmed his own On the Waterfront in his head...a boundless palimpsest. The experiment can take the reader's breath away, and this quite literally: no white space, no extra leading, no paragraphs, no air. No better way, though, to approach a paroxysm. But the reader who feels that this is a mere exercise in bravura will surely suffocate.... Luc Lang clearly enjoys the role of an (anti-)landscape architect on the terrain of the novel.... This was a risky undertaking, but a successful one. It is impossible not to think of both Joyce and Lowry, for both of whom Lang confesses a passion.
Luc Lang on novel writing:
One day in the early 1990s, I heard a news report on the radio. There, in the incandescence of the facts, was a model for fictional narrative.... A woman pulls up in the fast lane of a highway and begins to change a wheel, as though she was on the hard shoulder. Just as she is removing the wheel with the puncture, she is struck by a fast-moving car and killed, borne aloft along with her wheel, her jack, and the rear wing of her car—bone, flesh, and metal exploding on the hood of the other vehicle. Was she stupid? Was her psychological make-up involved? Her mental state at that particular moment? Her age? Sex? Family history? Her psycho-socio-historico blah-blah-blah background? Who cares? We could not care less! From the point of view of the novel we could not care less. Only the act matters, in all its madness, all its intensity. No chatter, no analysis, no glossing, no academic editorializing on universal lessons. And no intellectual detachment either! All null and void. No distance! None! Just the facts! Write inside the fact, the fact in its opacity, its mystery, its chance quality—in its humaness therefore, its, mad, mad unpredictability, partaking of the order of creation. Because the act is all: the act in itself reveals and illuminates the whole world that is ours.
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Like dance, it seems to me, the novel should forbid itself to think, to think itself, to reflect itself, to theorize itself within its own realm of movement. Failure to abide by this principle means slowing down, unbalancing, or even destroying the movements of writer and dancer alike. Dancers cannot comment on their movements while executing them, for the time in which they move is of great intensity and the sequence of their gestures is part of an irreversible fusion of duration and speed. This is not to say that the novel cannot become a subject of analysis outside its own space: but this must only happen after that space has been traversed and experienced at first hand, along with the characters, their story, and the writing that brings them into being. Like speaking of swimming only after allowing oneself to be swept down a river, and not while still on the bank, imprisoned in some distant, inert form of knowledge.
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A novel is a black box, closed around its own time yet without beginning or end. A place where what is living speaks and tells of the world to which it belongs from within its own continuum, which is, to say it once more, the coherence not of a subject but of a time, constituting ultimately whatever remains of the universal despite the fury, whatever its source, that strives to silence or instrumentalize its voice.
(From Luc Lang, Notes pour une poétique du roman (Paris: Inventaire/Invention)).
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Written by Moacyr Scliar
Translated from the Portuguese by Andrea Rosenberg
Brazil | Novel (Excerpts) | Portuguese
July, 2009
Synopsis:
Moacyr Scliar was born in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1937. He is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the author of more than 60 books published in 18 countries, many of which have won awards or been adapted for the movies, stage, or television. He also writes for newspapers around the world. His books include O centauro no jardim (1980; published in English as The Centaur in the Garden, 2003), Max e os felinos (1981; published in English as Max and the Cats, 2003), A mulher que escreveu a Bíblia (winner of the Prêmio Jabuti, 2000), and Saturno nos trópicos (2003). A majestade do Xingu (1997) received the Prêmio José Lins do Rego from the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
The excerpt featured here begins at page 35 of the novel.
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Written by Carmen-Francesca Banciu
Translated from the German by Elena Mancini
German | Germany | Novel (Excerpts)
June, 2009
Synopsis:
Carmen-Francesca Banciu’s Song of the Sad Mother is a novel about an anguished mother-daughter relationship set against the backdrop of Communist Romania. Its protagonist Maria-Maria is the daughter of two passionate party loyalists. Her academic aptitude and upbringing seem to destine her to become the embodiment of the party’s utopian concept of the new human. The only problem is that Maria-Maria is intent on writing her own destiny. The predetermined quality of Maria-Maria’s life coupled with the fact that she is tyrannized by a mother who is depressive and deeply distrustful of any type of happiness or pleasure, rob the protagonist of a childhood and cause cruelty and harsh discipline to take the place of maternal nurturing and reassurance. It is thus that Maria-Maria’s mother, whose only indulgence was deprivation, cold-bloodedly destroys her daughter’s dolls only to replace them with books, out of love and to impart upon Maria-Maria the valuable lesson of self-reliance. Armed with this lesson, Maria-Maria is able to take possession of herself and defy every party--and familial--expectation. She does this by leaving the past behind and becoming an émigré writer in post-Communist East Berlin. While the crossing of national and political boundaries proves catalytic for Maria-Maria in that it enables her to discover her autonomy and individuality, it does not wipe the slate clean of her psychic and emotional wounds. It is only by doing the work of remembering that she begins to exorcise her demons and heal the trauma of her painful relationship to her mother and her country.
(Elena Mancini)
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Written by Tetsutaka Shibata
Translated from the Japanese by Christopher Southward
Japan | Japanese | Novel (Excerpts)
December, 2008
Synopsis:
One of Japan’s most revered mythological creatures, the tengu is believed to inhabit mountainous regions, where it exacts revenge for wrongdoings committed against community members. It is often blamed for abducting people and animals to later return them endowed with heightened senses and abilities, and for playing pranks on priests who have strayed from Buddhist precepts.
The reader is introduced to Keiichi Michihira—an investigative journalist on a journey to unearth the truth behind a series of murders that occurred a quarter-century earlier in Shikamata. Residents of this secluded hamlet are convinced that the culprit is the fabled tengu, and though Michihira is skeptical, their belief compels him to dig deeper, leading him on a wide-ranging investigation from the supernatural to the geopolitical.
(Christopher Southward)
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Written by George Pavlopoulos
Translated from the Greek by Evangelia Avloniti
Greece | Greek | Novel (Excerpts)
December, 2008
Synopsis:
It is the spring of 1897. Two ships set sail from the port of Gothenburg carrying Salomon Andre, Nils Strindberg, and Knut Fraenkel aboard. With them travels a team of skeptical meteorologists, suspicious journalists, overwrought engineers, and talented cartoonists. Their destination is the Arctic Sea. Soon the journey through the frozen North leads the three men to an enigmatic structure at the edge of the world, inside of which is a hot-air balloon. This is when the real journey begins. As the 20th century approaches and man’s domination over Earth nears completion, the three men seem determined to leave their mark on the new era through a bold undertaking; one which is entirely dependent on the mercy of the Northerly winds. Years later, through a succession of objects, impressions, and visits, the story continues...
(Evangelia Avloniti)
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A Novel About a Chameleon
Written by Curzio Malaparte
Translated from the Italian by Michael McDonald
Italian | Italy | Novel (Excerpts)
April, 2008
Synopsis:
Malaparte witnessed first hand the consolidation of Mussolini's dictatorship in the critical years 1922-1925. Highly intelligent, he was also a literary artist of distinction with a talent, typical of Tuscan writers since Dante, for barbed invective. These qualities led him to challenge Mussolini to make good on his promises of reform in the years when an open debate was still possible. "It was not Mussolini who carried the Fascists to the Prime Ministership, but the Fascists who had carried Mussolini to power," Malaparte thundered in 1924 in his newspaper, La conquista dello Stato. And, in the wake of his realization that Mussolinismo had triumphed over the kind of idealistic left-wing fascism he advocated, it was these same qualities that led him to write what the critic Giuseppe Pardini has labeled "one of the few strictly original products of fascist culture": Don Camalèo: A Novel About a Chameleon.
The American reading public was first introduced to Malaparte in the aftermath of the Second World War when Kaputt appeared in English in 1946. At the time, interest in Malaparte in the States was such that his portrait appeared on the cover of The Saturday Review of Literature on November 14, 1946. Two other books by Malaparte would make their way into English in later years. But Kaputt, that long, rich and macabre mediation on the horrors of war, remains the single book for which Malaparte is chiefly remembered today.
Don Camalèo, written in 1926-27, like Kaputt, has a strange publishing history that Malaparte describes in the preface he wrote to the first integral edition of the work, which appeared in Italy in 1946 and which I have included here. At the time of the book's publication, Malaparte was basking in the international success of Kaputt, but his reputation in Italy remained suspect. Publishing Don Camalèo thus served two purposes: it enabled Malaparte to offer his recently acquired immense readership yet another "new" novel at the same time as it bolstered his claim to have been part of a fronde within Fascism. Don Camalèo is also like Kaputt in that Malaparte relies upon a first person narrator modeled closely on himself, sharing his name and many of his biographical details, to shepherd the reader along the twists and turns of the story’s path. But there the similarities end. In lieu of a series of darkly surrealistic encounters with death, we find a spirited, fast-paced comedy in the form of an eighteenth-century roman philosophique by Voltaire or Diderot.
Malaparte wrote Don Camalèo to deny validity of the equation that fascism equaled Mussolini. At its most basic level, the novel is an anti-Mussolinian satire characterized from start to finish by the knowledge that the kind of revolutionary fascism that Malaparte and others had urged upon the regime since 1922 was dead and that Mussolini would do little more than mouth revolutionary platitudes as he maintained power by appeasing the reactionary elements that had always counted in Italian life. But the novel has a deeper side. Malaparte would later write: "It is not possible to draw a portrait of Mussolini, without drawing one, too, of the Italian people. His qualities and his defects are not his own. Rather they are the qualities and the defects of all Italians." Accordingly, as it pokes fun at Mussolini, the reader also finds Don Camalèo cutting deeper to mock many of the centuries-old vices besetting the Italian people as embodied in a series of broadly drawn characters.
The initial chapter (of twenty-three), presented here in translation, with its semi-serious use of classical erudition concerning the nature of salamanders, basilisks, and chameleons, sets the tone for the peculiar kind of jocular satire that will characterize the novel as a whole.
In the second chapter, current events then heave into view as Malaparte describes what it was like to have observed the March on Rome in 1922. He then recalls how one day he was outdoors horseback-riding with Mussolini when a chameleon appeared out of nowhere. This animal ex machina is what launches the tale since before Malaparte can object, Mussolini has assigned him the task of raising the beast, certain in the knowledge that the chameleon will be able to adapt to Roman political society.
Malaparte entrusts the chameleon to a Panglossian tutor by the name of Sebastiano, whose methods and mentality symbolize the hidebound nature of traditional Italian culture. Following this initial education, Malaparte introduces the chameleon, who has learned to speak, into political society, where he learns the finely-honed Italian art of trasformismo—what today’s spin doctors would call “triangulation”: finding out what you need to say you will change in order to win support, and then maintaining the status quo. But by dint of spending time with Malaparte, the chameleon comes to believe in the Fascist Revolution. He takes to the street to protest the slow pace of reform and his popularity soars with the common people. Seeing this, Mussolini decides he has no choice but to invite the chameleon into his inner circle of advisors.
Malaparte cautions the chameleon: "Everyone knows that the Head of the October Revolution, like any good Italian, doesn't love revolutionaries; in fact, it's likely that he despises them." And he adds: “It's true that you're a chameleon, but if you join Mussolini in power, you'll change colors so furiously that you'll die from all the effort." But the chameleon accepts the invitation in the belief that he will make the Revolution live up to its promises. Sadly, the lizard’s proximity to Mussolini, day in and day out, in Parliament gradually causes his political positions to mutate yet again. When, in January 1925, Mussolini institutes his personal dictatorship and calls upon all good fascists to embrace order over the Revolution, the chameleon does likewise. The novel predates the Lateran Pact of 1929, but it is prophetic in that it depicts Mussolini introducing the chameleon to a certain Dr. Libero, a Jesuit, who inadvertently causes the animal to believe he is the Son of God by goading him into reading The Imitation of Christ. Things do not end well for the poor lizard at the book’s conclusion, which takes place in Saint Peter's Cathedral.
In sum, then, there remain three compelling reasons for Don Camalèo to appear in English: to add to our historical knowledge of the period; to add to our knowledge of Malaparte's literary career and strengths as a writer; and, for the sheer enjoyment to be had from this minor literary gem, once believed to have been lost.
(Michael McDonald)
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(La Décomposition)
Written by Anne F. Garréta
Translated from the French by Robert Bononno
France | French | Novel (Excerpts)
September, 2007
Synopsis:
Anne Garréta's La Décomposition, written over a four-year period and published in 1999, is the story of a serial killer. However, given that the author is a member of Oulipo, and the killer well versed in literature, we shouldn't be surprised to discover that victims are chosen from among the characters in Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Their flesh-and-blood counterparts are hunted in a contemporary Paris of video arcades, bars, and shadowy corners by the Seine. As the murderer dispatches the victims, their fictional counterparts are eliminated from a digitized version of Proust's magnum opus. Every reference to the “murdered” character is expunged from the book, reducing the novel's length with each fresh kill. To complicate matters, the philosophical and ruminative killer, who is, disturbingly, also the book's narrator, chooses these victims on the basis of a grammatical rule: they must agree in gender and number with the character in the novel. Otherwise, they are chosen randomly.
As should be obvious in a book with such a literary plot device, albeit a quirky one, La Décomposition is not simply the story of a serial killer, even a well-read one. For along with the victims, the narrator is also murdering Proust's novel, lopping off body parts bit by bit, cutting it down to manageable size. At one point in the beginning of the book, the narrator even comments, “For life is too short, and Proust is too long.”
In the novel two ideas widely found in twentieth-century literature are merged: the perfect crime and the gratuitous act. Through their amalgam the murderer hopes to raise murder to a fine art, to blend fiction and reality. And what better way to do so than to use a literary masterpiece as the scaffolding for one's crimes? For, in doing so, murder will wrap itself in the aesthetic mantle of the fine arts. But ethics is lost in aesthetics.
Filled with dark humor and dense, classically tinged prose, La Décomposition is ultimately not about serial killers but the role of the reader. For Garréta not only cuts Proust down to size, she questions literature's complicity with violence. In allowing us to identify with a murder, even a fictive one, literature provides a way for us to identify with evil, to absorb it through our sympathy with a character. In what is ultimately a profoundly ethical book, La Décomposition questions the mechanisms used by fiction to enable us to experience violence from within, vicariously, safely.
(Robert Bononno)
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