Recent Reading in Translation

Selva Almada and Kjell Askildsen

I’m planning on using this newsletter mostly to talk about recent reading, so for today I thought I’d write about two books in translation I finished in the last couple weeks. First up is The Wind That Lays Waste by Selva Almada, translated by Chris Andrews. This is a very short book, really a novella. I remember someone describing this book as people sitting around talking about God, and that’s basically true. That’s why I picked it up I think — give me novels where nothing happens, please!

Things do happen in this book, but it has the plot structure of what could be a short story. It takes place over the course of one day. Two people, a preacher and his teenage daughter, find themselves stranded after their car breaks down. They are on a rural road in Argentina, and they get a ride to a mechanic who lives with a teenage boy named Tapioca. The novel tells about their interactions throughout the day as the travelers wait for their car, and it fills us in on the characters’ backstories, how the preacher took his daughter and left his wife and they have been traveling around the country preaching ever since, and how the boy’s mother left him at a young age for the mechanic to raise. The mechanic used to travel for work but has settled down to raise the boy in relative peace and quiet.

But the presence of the preacher and his daughter disturb their calm, especially when the preacher begins to try to convert the boy. A storm begins to churn, both literally and metaphorically.

This is a book about God — how the preacher became a believer, how the daughter is skeptical of him, how the mechanic has raised the boy with a kind of godless spirituality based on being in tune with nature — but even more it’s a book about longing and desire, the force that makes some turn to God and others turn elsewhere. Like the wind that moves in and whips up a storm, this longing haunts the older characters and wakes the younger ones up. It’s a book about movement and restlessness, how some learn to rest and be still while others are forever moving on.

It’s a wonderful book. The Argentinian landscape becomes its own character. The novel is grounded in everyday details (its opening line is “The mechanic coughed and spat out a gob of phlegm”) while giving space to the preacher’s metaphysical arguments and including a few of his sermons. The point of view moves easily and seamlessly from character to character so each one comes alive. It feels like a bigger book than it actually is.

Next is Everything Like Before by Kjell Askildsen, translated by Sean Kinsella. It comes out this April, but I read it early to write a review. It contains 36 stories, some as short as a page or two, others longer. They are realistic stories about unhappy people: tales of unsatisfying marriages, quarreling parents and children, elderly men struggling with loneliness. In many of the stories not much happens, action-wise. The tension and drama comes from quarrels, fraught conversations, roiling emotions.

Askildsen is excellent with the telling detail: so much gets communicated through food, drink, clothing, household objects. The characters are always wandering around streets, going into cafes at the wrong time, staying up late drinking, trying to avoid their problems.

I really liked most of this book — yes, it’s often grim, but the situations and emotions described are gripping and true. I believed in these characters and felt for them. I began to like it less as the book went on because the stories get repetitive, similar situations and characters recurring again and again. Many of the shorter ones are more descriptive scenes than stories and I didn’t always get why they mattered enough to include in the collection. But there’s so much that’s good here that makes up for the weaker pieces.

Don’t Forget About

Marriage by Susan Ferrier (originally published in 1818): Ferrier is a Scottish novelist who lived from 1782-1854. This is a great book for those who love nineteenth-century novels and want to read some of the lesser-known works of the time. It tells the story of Lady Juliana who elopes and comes to regret it. She has two daughters, one of whom she leaves with her sister-in-law in Scotland and the other she takes to England, and we get to see their differing fates unfold. It’s both a fun read and a great exploration of life as a woman in that time and place.

Publishing This Week

New books I haven’t read that are going on my TBR pile:

• Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay by Jana Larson (Coffee House Press): a genre-bending nonfiction book about Jana Larson’s obsession with Takako Konishi, who was found dead in North Dakota in mysterious circumstances. It’s about the “space between fact and fiction, life and death, author and subject, reality and delusion.”

• Proceed With Caution: Stories and a Novella by Patricia Ratto, translated by Andrea G. Labinger (Schaffner Press): a debut collection of surrealist stories from an Argentine writer that explore the line between the natural and supernatural.

• W-3: A Memoir by Bette Howland (Public Space Books): this book is introduced by Yiyun Li, which immediately caught my attention. It was originally published in 1974. “W-3” is Ward 3, the psychiatric wing of a Chicago hospital, where Howland was admitted after swallowing pills.

Newly Acquired

All my new books this week are advanced reader’s copies (ARCs), although my reasons for receiving them vary. The first four books came as a reward for supporting the Between the Covers podcast, associated with the publisher Tin House. Between the Covers is truly great if you like bookish podcasts! The last two came from the publisher for possible review:

• White Magic by Elissa Washuta (Tin House Books, publishing April 27th): White Magic is an essay collection about Washuta’s Native roots and culture. It’s one of the books I’m looking forward to most in 2021.

• Bride of the Sea by Eman Quotah (Tin House Books, publishing January 26th): a debut novel that’s a coming-of-age story and a family saga.

• Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller (Tin House Books, publishing May 18th): a novel about family set in a small town in the English countryside.

• The Kissing Bug by Daisy Hernandez (Tin House Books, publishing June 1st): nonfiction about infectious diseases in the U.S. — relevant, right? — focusing on Chagas, or the “kissing disease.” The book discusses disease, poverty, racism, and public policy.

• Aviary by Deirdre McNamer (Milkweed Editions, publishing April 13th): Aviary is set in a senior residence in Montana, this is a novel about the people who live there and what happens when a fire breaks out.

• I’ll Be Strong for You by Nasim Marashi, translated by Poupeh Missaghi (Astra House, publishing April 6th): a debut novel by an Iranian journalist, following the lives of three young women in Tehran.

Current/Recent Reading

• How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee (Mariner Books, 2018): I just finished this essay collection and liked it, particularly the ones about writing and how Chee’s first novel developed. He also has good essays on life in San Francisco and New York. I loved the on his experience working for William F. Buckley.

• Under the Sign of the Labyrinth by Christina Tudor-Sideri (Sublunary Editions, 2020): I just started this one, a short, philosophical book on the body, memory, and nature.

• The Tradition by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press, 2019): still going!

• Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen (Algonquin Press, 2020): still going!

The Cormac Report

I’m not sure I’m doing parenting right, but during dinner — the family dinner where we’re all supposed to talk to one another and catch up on each other’s day — we basically make Cormac be quiet so we can read. Or we try to. He’s … uh … not excellent at being quiet, so he frequently talks through dinner anyway, but he also talks to us most of the rest of the day as well, so it feels like at dinner we’ve earned some quiet reading time. I typically try to catch up on New Yorker magazines, which I often read without giving them my full attention, since Cormac wants to tell me about his dinosaur encyclopedia or something. And, to be honest, it feels fine. A little cultural criticism mixed with dinosaur facts from my child is okay.

Have a good week everyone!