Coming Soon...

Three Brothers: Memories of My Family
by Yan Lianke
Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas

Coming Soon...

Flight from the USSR
by Dato Turashvili
Translated from the Georgian by Maya Kiasashvili

Coming Soon...

Collected Stories
by Bruno Schulz
Translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine

... In the Time of Peace

In the rule of the great Shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, in Edo period (1600-1868), peace and stability has flourished. The domains are held by feudal lords and one of them is the young Lord Asunaro’s father, and his authority, with the help of retainers, seems running admirably. However, he is troubled when it comes to assuring a successor for his lordship; young Asunaro being an unlikely candidate because of his unruly behavior and disinterest to adhere to the ways for a future lordship. Young Lord Asunaro takes residence in the West Castle of the domain, where arrangements are made for his education and developing skills under tutors – who have hard time¹ teaching him something.

1.       ‘But you understand that it does not improve your progress towards attaining the lordship someday soon of you go on cancelling lesson after lesson like this.’

‘Huh. What earthly use are those things anyway? Are you trying to tell me that I’ll get to Daddy’s position in life just by reading and hearing stuff? Don’t be ridiculous.’

Grown tired of the predicable everyday rituals in the castle, Lord Asunaro ventures out one day, outwitting the ladies-in-waiting to meet a group of girls and comes to the conclusion – that his world inside castle-walls is lowly. In the midst of all this, among the aristocracy and lower ranks², the interest has shifted from military to literary, calligraphic and mathematical skills, owing to the fact that fighting skills are not much needed now. While the retainers and samurai from the times before are finding it hard to embrace the quiet – privilege and luxuries are cut off – Lord Asunaro finds it lackluster to prepare for the lordship.

2.       In any other country, it would be unsurprising if the emperor and his aristocrats, incapable as they were of gripping anything but chopsticks or a writing brush, were sooner or later exterminated and the nation seized; the fact that this didn’t happen in Japan was because… despite their military power these people felt a deep admiration for the cultured aristocratic world of the capital, and a yearning to learn its elegant ways.

A blend of historical facts and figures portrayed in the light of an extraordinary time in Japanese history, in which transformation from war to peace opened up new ways of life among the aristocracy, The Chronicles of Lord Asunaro, establishes an anti-hero, who against all odds relished his life and times feeling no urgency to glorify himself in the historical tome. Though small in development, a father-son tension in the ruling class, and a glimpse into the private life of the feudal lords, makes this a supplementary work in understanding the inner world of the Japanese rulers, different from those found in the clamor of swords and battles.

After a maiden gives Lord Asunaro a poem before disappearing, he is so unsettled, unable to reply her in poetry, he dedicates himself to learning to write poems. However, his curiosity and whims are not limited to this: instructors, food-tasters and scholars suffer because of his inordinate ways of trying things and making fun, and he scares the wits out of them. Restless and grief-stricken Lord Asunaro, after exchanging poems with the Maiden he couldn’t forget, submerges himself in his new ‘penchant’ for promiscuity.

With his taste growing in poetry and literature, Lord Asunaro remains at his West castle even after his father dies and brings in lavish lifestyle, décor and even women from the capital to the castle, to fulfill his unrestrained passion for aesthetics and pleasure. Over time, his ‘penchant’ bears him as many as 70 children, overcrowding the castle with his look-alikes. The narrator concludes by putting forward a historical and literary streak with a comic and satirical tone, which extrapolate Lord Asunaro from a feudal lord to a normal man who lived his life amongst riches, leisure and with no need to wage war.

The Chronicles of Lord Asunaro is a tale of Japanese history in which warriors turned into privileged aristocrats and of a feudal lord who found new meaning and ways to  live, in contrast to the bravery-laden warlords, in the leisure obtained from peace and luxury received as an inheritance – much resembling our generation.

Author: Kanji Hanawa

Translator: Meredith McKinney

Publisher: Red Circle Authors (Red Circle Minis)
Page Count: 72pp
Price: $9

Author's Photo Credit: https://www.redcircleauthors.com/our-authors/kanji-hanawa/

Review Copy Courtesy: Red Circle Authors 

Coming Soon...

The Refugees’ Daughter
by Takuji Ichikawa
Translated from the Japanese by Emily Balistrieri

Coming Soon...

The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told
Selected and Translated from the Urdu by Muhammad Umar Memon

Coming Soon...

Machado de Assis: 26 Stories
by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Translated from the Portuguese Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson

Coming Soon...

Beirut, Beirut
by Sonallah Ibrahim
Translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti

100+years, 200+pages

The Greatest Odia Stories Ever Told is an anthology of twenty four short stories, and it has collected under its umbrella, the first modern Odia short story to experimental contemporary stories, written by multiple generations of authors. Rich in voices, subjects, themes and techniques, the collection depicts both the historical development and transformation in the art of short story writing, particularly in Odia language, but also in wider context, by establishing socio-political influence taking human characteristics on the main ground. About the stories, like said in the introduction by one of the translators in the trio – …Their tone varies from pathos to irony to satire to humour to righteous and indignant condemnation. They take aim at social conventions, political corruption, religious insincerity, caste restrictions, abuse of power, and hypocrisy in all its forms…

             

The first story by Fakir Mohan Senapati (the father of modern Odia prose fiction) Ananta, The Widower’s Boy is about a boy, quite troublesome among the villagers, from the family of bravest and strongest parents, who turns into the village savior. As we move on, we come across the stories that feature characters from all branches of life and settings – from rural villages to towns. Few glimpses is like: A bullock cart rider’s vibrant days end when modernism takes away his customers and makes his life difficult; A frustrated staff, as a revolt, lets his pet goat eat the important files in his office; A Banyan tree in the village becomes the centre of politics, power and bloody clash until it is poisoned; Village watchman and storyteller draws his inspiration and understanding of politics, peace and independence from the Indian mythologies; The tale of a snake charmer who transforms into a snake for penance. It’s hard to write few words that define all these stories, nonetheless they certainly open up a new space-time and its tangles to the readers, like: In a primitive Indian village, a western anthropologist and his interpreter get to hear the chronicle of an old woman who returned again to the village after living ten years as a crocodile; Amidst the strike lurking in a mining town, an innocent man is locked up and tortured brutally by the police, and his wife has to pay the horrible price for his release; A married off girl taking refuse in her father’s house leaves one night, and returns again after three years with a child and faces off the villagers; After getting a letter that his reclusive father in the village has gone insane, the son brings his father to the town to take care of him, only to find out that his father has turned into a greater and sensitive human being. And the two stories forming the appendix in the collection are the pioneering work of prose fiction in the Odia language. Like Rebati (1898), in which the outbreak of cholera brings down the well-to-do family in a village and along a burgeoning love between an orphan boy and Rebati, the daughter of the family, who wanted to learn to read, and The Sanyasi (1899) in which a man, who after the death of his wife, turns into a sanyasi.

Most often we find smaller details, running along the main narrative, that add liveliness to the stories and are marked with the interactions and intricacies found in the setting. Therefore, we can hear speak not only the intention but also the intensity and grandeur of the formation¹. Since the anthology is composed of varieties of themes, some are profoundly rich in emotions while others describe the passage of time that is heavy and tension that are identifiable. We take chute-the-chute: leaping from political satire to primordial human pathos, magic to social realism and likewise.

1.       Five years went by, with days good and bad, all ultimately drowned in the boundless depths of Time. Many, dragged out of dark despair, reached the blinding illumination of happiness, while others, deprived of joy, were submerged in a bottomless ocean of grief. Who could count the number of human beings Time sent, against their wishes, to their deaths, just as it showered blessings on a grieving world by bringing forth a bountiful crop of babies, as lovely as fresh flowers?

The mere detailing² is enough to qualify the stories’ brilliance and expressiveness. The stories have not only brought together the oddities, troubles and sentiments rooted in the timelines of the Odia region but also the collective experience of people that has surpassed regional boundaries and resembles & reflects the underlying realism that comes in cultural and traditional disguise but are crude and common to all human experience: conventions that hinders love, power and politics that backfires the commoners, hypocrisy that reigns the conscience, and complexities that are accidental, inscrutable and inescapable. The stories in the collection are crafty but simple and we find multiple layers of larger picture as we re-read these stories. Also visible are the caste-based discrimination and women experience and position in the society, though not always weak but at the same time ever in the margins of power and head-on with struggle.

2.       The first time he came to our village he was with a bright-built woman–Malli, the bamboo-queen. She’d climb to the top of a bamboo pole and spin on her belly, like a wheel. Savara would cut her into pieces and then make her whole again. He’d hypnotize her and ask her what he’d hidden in the pockets of the people in the crowd. She always came up with the right answers… The applause that followed would be thunderous and coins would rain onto Savara’s plate, some falling on the ground… Then, bowing low to the audience, he’d announce, ‘That’s all for today, sirs and masters.’

We have to thank the translators-trio, Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre, and K. K. Mohapatra, for these hand-picked stories and of course for this prolific translation of finest Odia short stories that’ll certainly find its way to the readers searching for some magical and palpable concoction.

Selected and Translated by: Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre, and K. K. Mohapatra

Publisher: Aleph Book Company

Page Count: 230pp

Price: $30.12

Translator Photo Credit: 

1)http://www.alephbookcompany.com/authors/paul-st-pierre/; 2)http://www.alephbookcompany.com/authors/leelawati-mohapatra/; 3)http://www.alephbookcompany.com/authors/k-k-mohapatra/

Review Copy Courtesy: Aleph Book Company

The Burden of Choices

The protagonist of the novel Pain by Zeruya Shalev is Iris, who is a victim of a terrorist bombing. But her life is shaped not just by the bedridden chapter of her recovery but by much more things of the past. The novel opens with a morning when her pain from the injury has returned, which often does, and which is enough to awaken troubling memories. Ten years have passed since when the incident happened and a mother of two – Omer and Alma – she is also a school principal which keeps her busy but doesn’t stop her from dwelling over the past: her teenage years when she was madly in love with a boy called Eitan and had dreamed of becoming his wife only that he decided to separate from her after his mother died, which brought her a breakdown; her father who had died when she was still a child and the bombing that left doubts and distance in her family.

Even the blame for the incident happened with Iris lingers in the family, which she formed with her husband Mickey – from whom she is keeping an emotional distance; lacking the passion – meanwhile she also feels detached from her own family, particularly from her daughter Alma. She feels that none of them is sharing and expressing enough as expected in an ideal family. Alma and Omer have grown up and have developed their own characters and views as adults, however she feels that all of them lack harmony at their home and amid all this, she is trying to act as a responsible mother if not a happy wife, struggling with the complexities of her thoughts about the relationship and behavior family members have with each other. The exploration of emotional complexities of a family has been so well drawn, we find an intensifying family drama growing in the story and find similarities with the ways the minutiae of life controls our behavior, in our own personal realities. 

Alma has moved to Tel Aviv and rarely visits home and the intimacy Iris feels with her is heavy and reserved. She feels that she has already suffered so many losses in her life that her children’s parting away from her emotionally is too much to bear. As she reflects upon her personal failures in bringing up the children, she is unable to share her anxieties and whatever the conversation – which involves poking each other or sharing disappointments of their own – she has with Mickey, almost always contradicts to her views about the children, which is unable to bring any peace to her. The intricacies in the story have been dealt until they’re justified and we feel the heaviness Iris is dealing with. The psychological observation, shifts in moods and Iris’s mental space with the burden of the past fit all well as the story progresses.

The unexpected return of Eitan in her life roils everything further. Now Iris is torn between her passion and love for Eitan and her position and responsibilities, at the least, as a mother in her family. She wants to spend much time with Eitan, without feeling hesitation to lie about anything that comes up in between with her family, however the news that Alma might have taken the wrong track, which may ruin her life, alerts Iris or rather unsettles her, making her unable to focus. She doesn’t want to miss the second chance to reunite with her love after decades of separation but cannot also ignore the fact that she has to act as any ideal mother would do for daughter. She is tormented¹ with the thought that she will put her family at stake for her personal passion and happiness. Iris’s life suspended in the memories of the past now faces the difficulties in the present. It’s hard for her to understand and accept the changes – things which are unspoken, silences and nuances in the family and therefore she again finds herself facing memories which are fading – like that of her mother, stubborn – of her love, unreliable – of her daughter, burdening – of her position, saddening – of her failures and losses, and happy memories which short-lived. The narrative detail has been dealt with poetic luster² and we find it flowing smoothly in the translation.

1.       The family you make so much effort to build and watch over will become a burden to them, and even worse, to you. That husband of yours you sacrifice your time for so he can finish his degree or move up at work will leave you in another twenty years for a younger woman, and even if he doesn’t leave, he will most likely become aging, grumpy, and ungrateful, and you’ll find yourselves wishing for a different life. Some of you may try to realize your dream, but only a few will be lucky enough to get another chance, which won’t necessarily be better than the previous one.

2.       After all, she’s so young, and at her age, things change quickly. Perhaps by tomorrow morning she’ll be able to stop worrying and in fact—she giggles under the damp towels like a girl in love—she will be able to keep walking undisturbed along the miraculous path being paved under her feet to the world where the years fall away, where she can step back among the flowering plazas of time, walk over and over again in the perfumed wadi, among the clouds of honey, on the only day of spring when it isn’t too hot or too cold.

Through all the recollections in the form of expectations, reservations and personal relation among the family members at various levels of intimacy and sensitivity, all the characters make themselves present remarkably throughout. However, we only witness the anxiety born out of guilt in Iris and it feels that all the tension of the story puts her in the centre of finding ways to be close to her children who suddenly seem to be parting away from her and desire to be fulfilled with love from Eitan forever. She is a woman who’s trying to keep the past and the present in harmony but is also suffered by it, presenting that there are so many elements of life guiding and shaping an individual, especially who feels that the bond in the family is fragile and vulnerable. Iris is afraid that her children won’t forgive her for life leaving them when finally they’re settling down, afraid of her passion, too strong to ignore and too late to give life to, which might cost her everything. However, the urgency of rescuing her daughter from the cult of misguidance proves her passion unimportant.

Finally, when Iris decides to free her daughter from the enslavement of her boss, possibly a cult guru, she finds similarities between her daughter and herself – both slaves to something or somebody. This gives her courage to try her best to establish or rejuvenate the emotional connection with her daughter. The novel ends in a positive ambience and it looks like all veils has been lifted and doubts cleared, a family coming together as if nothing wrong has ever happened within them – no hatred or distrust but always a subtle love canopying the family. A mother-daughter confession that they always cared for each other and were never emotionally detached is one of the touching sequences in the story.

Pain is a story of burden and complexities of choices, of motherhood and parenting, of coming of age and passion driven solitude, of belongingness and abyss in relation, of estrangement and ignorance, of imperfection in a family and an individual. We may take it as a psychological exploration of love and memories, and a struggle between independence and unalterable responsibilities and connections, choices and complexities. Pain is a perfect novel that once again proves the power of this form.

Author: Zeruya Shalev

Translator: Sondra Silverston

Publisher: Other Press

Page Count: 356pp

Price: $12.19

Author's Photo Credit: https://www.otherpress.com/authors/zeruya-shalev/

Review Copy Courtesy: Other Press

Coming Soon...

Beloved Rongomala, A Novel
by Shaheen Akhtar
Translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya

Freedom to Fall Back

The story starts when a man from the village returns from the closest market town with the news of the army’s arrival – a nationwide phenomenon spurred by the events taking place in Dhaka after March 1971 (the year of Bangladesh Liberation War) to suppress or even eliminate the supporters of the liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistani regime. With no visible liberationist leaders in the village, Akmal Pradhan, a village bourgeois tries to strengthen his influence over the villagers outwitting Ramjan Sheikh, another man who has many followers behind his back. Both of them try to prove themselves as a savior in case the army launches its rage against the villagers. Pradhan – though he isn’t sure of his actions or thoughts on how the army may react upon their arrival – arranges to set some nationalistic tone¹ in the village that may reassure the military about the blamelessness of the village, all done to harvest power in his own favor. Pradhan holds grudge against Hares Master, the village leader of liberationist, who didn’t allow him to hoist the Pakistani flag, and is therefore ready to blame him for all the anti-Pakistan movements once the army arrives. 

1. It made no difference if one learned nothing else. He was realizing in his bones right now how important it was for students to learn the national anthem. And everyone should keep a flag at home. It didn’t matter if the house had no rice, or no cooking oil. But to not have a flag, that made a difference. For instance, if they had been able to fly a Pakistani flag right now from every house in the village, how happy that would make the army when they arrived.

Kobej, Pradhan’s ever furious right-hand, is a reliable man but difficult to understand and be appeased who is easily offended and don’t care much about anything happening around him or rather is disgusted by them. Pradhan wants Kobej to finish off Ramjan, luring him with money and land, so that he doesn’t have to struggle for power anymore in the wake of army’s arrival. However, Kobej doesn’t rush into the action, and though he doesn’t understand much of anything, his questions and doubts over the ways the village is prepared for the military’s arrival surprises Pradhan. Kobej is ready to kill Ramjan, but only at the right moment and circumstances. 

The army arrives in the village and sets up a camp. The army officer is not so much pleased by Pradhan and Ramjan’s procession or greeting and makes his intention clear why they are there, showing eternal disdain for Bengalis. Another arrangement by Pradhan to please the army ends up taking a life of assistant headmaster and creates a backlash for himself. In the following days, Ramjan gains praises from the officer and Pradhan presses Kobej to deal with him before things are out of hand. Meanwhile, the army kills all those people in the village suggested by Pradhan and Ramjan who witness and agree to the illogic and savagery of the army officer, who claims every one ever related to liberation as an infidel and Hindu and therefore punishable. However, Kobej is dissatisfied and unsettled by the killings, arson and atrocity² led by the army. Kobej never understood Joy Bangla and about liberated Bangladesh before, but now he looks for answers in this heightened injustice so apparent, which has enraged him further, and motivated too to kill Ramjan, which he finally does following the aftermath of death of two soldiers before fleeing the village and joining mukti bahini, the liberation army. 

2. When the shooting stopped, the noise of weeping reached the officer’s ears. In a somber voice he asked, ”Why are people crying? Are they mourning these dead kafirs?” After a long silence, Akmal Pradhan spoke up. “No, no. They have no grief for those kafirs. No, they’re crying out of fear.”

Towards the culmination of the liberation war and the novel, Kobej returns to the village and wants to take revenge against Pradhan only to find that he has already fled. The surrender of the Pakistani army brings the struggle to an end with the creation of Bangladesh. Following this, Kobej and Hares Master are left in uncertainty without place to live and source of income, meanwhile Kobej’s rage flares up again when he finds himself in the midst of odd outcomes for his contribution. His dream to be a free man looks remote seeing undeserving impostors taking control over the power and properties, again leaving him to his misery and uselessness just as he was in before, and the circumstances therefore lead Kobej to return again as a mercenary to Pradhan, who rises to power. 

Set in the backdrop of Bangladeshi liberation war of 1971, The Mercenary is a novel which dramatizes how politically liberated Bangladesh and its inner roots fell again in the hand of landlords and powerful people, who took advantage of the political upheaval in favor of their own personal revenge and for gaining the authority that yet keeps people away from personal freedom and justice. The crumbling virtuousness, the moral degradation and the hopeless defiance facing the power capable of whimsical persecution is accounted in the story. The novel sheds light on the hidden and forgotten faces, and the scars and sacrifices left behind in the wake of the independence – which was not so easily earned and not so well protected from the opportunists – and satires the nationalistic and religious fanaticism that accounted for death tolls of the ignorant and weak. We’re left with the question – Does politically liberating a country guarantee the freedom to common people?

The book is part of Library of Bangladesh series.

Author: Moinul Ahsan Saber

Translator: Shabnam Nadiya

Editor: Arunava Sinha

Publisher: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Page Count: 152pp

Price: $11

Author Photo Credit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moinul_Ahsan_Saber 

Review Copy Courtesy: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Darkness Within

The novel starts with the daily rituals of the women in brothel of Golapipatti one morning. Amidst the buzzing of curse words, arguments and yells coming from several rooms and those filling the lane, people responsible for bringing the water and supplies are doing their chores, and some customers from the night before still haven’t left. There are women who take in high paying customers, like Jahanara and Bokul, and have money to spend on meals, make-up and liquors, and there are some like Kusum, who are owned by pimps and goons, and go hungry for days if they don’t get enough customers¹. Jealousy and envy among the girls is quite common and sometimes it turns into bloody fight, like between Shanti and Bokul over a customer of the latter. Many of them live in shared rooms and take the customers, in the same room after the evening falls, in turn. The setting of the novel perfectly captures the minutiae of the brothel: drab, dark and dingy rooms getting feeble light, dirty drain running along the lane, the decrepit structures, flaking walls and broken utensils. And the idiosyncratic obscene language exemplifies the moods and mindset of the girls in such a place.

1.       Not getting a customer means heartless humiliation at the owner’s hands On top of which there’s fear and hunger – the same hunger which most of the girls here have fallen victim to and ended up, willingly or unwillingly, as nothing but bodies in the decrepit rooms in this lane where no sunlight or air gets in, eaten away by commercial deals every day, like slaves traded thousands of years ago, amidst cruel, ruthless, inhuman behavior, surviving as creatures of the night.

When a man with inexplicable interests comes to visit Jahanara – who unlike many others don’t have to pose on the lane and lure customers, and has her own pimp and a woman who works for her – and asks how happy she is and presents his doubts about her future, she throws him out; however he leaves a lasting impression which would later unsettle her. Yasmin, an educated girl who was once honored by the government as Birangona after the war of liberation, during which she was raped and her family was murdered, threw herself as a sex-worker, as a revolt against the atrocities which she had to suffer just after the liberation. She takes customers only when she wants and is pensive about the teenage girls and women who trade their bodies for living in the brothel and is revered by some and others are disgusted by her waywardness. In similar way, all the women and girls we come across have their own personal backstories, which led them to the brothel: girls who are castaways of the liberation war of 1971, victim of famine, abduction and Hindu-Muslim riots, sold off by the relatives, those who could find no means to live and support their family in ordinary ways…

There are people who own the girls, to whom they owe their earnings and their life depends on customers – it seems, they have nothing to call their own, certainly not their bodies, except a tormented, unhappy and famished life which they have to sustain somehow. All of them know what they are into and what might come out of this, still they have no option to get out of this entrap. Meanwhile, some ignorant and innocent girls have already started dreaming of becoming an elegant prostitute who would visit the customers in luxury cars. In the brothel, it doesn’t take long for things to settle, whether it is a quarrel, a fight, a girl being beaten by her owner, a girl being whipped by a customer; Mashi, who looks after the business and girls, knows ways of the men who visit the brothel and under what rules the girls must be kept under, so, girls have to take customers after the evening falls, must attract them with vulgar gestures and talks and keep paying the owners, room rent and go on living. Their life is restricted within the rooms and the lane; the shops are close by, from where they can buy daily necessities like birth-control pills which they must be able to afford anyhow if not food. Almost everyone is afraid of the future, when they might not get customers at all, or may die of disease or hunger, and are threatened by the fate of Rohimon and the old Golapjaan – hungry and retired old prostitutes – who roam around the brothel scavenging food and asking for money.

One day, a journalist named Delwar visits Yasmin, he is the same man who visited Jahanara before. But this time, he has long conversation² with Yasmin, who has many doubts and questions about their plight and unlike Jahanara, she is not offended. Yasmin tries to impart her revolting thoughts to other girls, nevertheless, they are confirmed that brothels aren’t going to close down and believe that they are never going to leave the profession³, for they’ll have no acceptance outside the place. When a heavy rain strikes the brothel, the roofs leak and the rooms are flooded. And in the meantime, it also brings a tragedy in the brothel which is soon forgotten amid the necessity of trading and bargaining the bodies without a moment to pity for personal miseries or dwell upon their collective suffering; even incidents of death are to be forgotten. The range of characters like Jahanara, Moyna, Kanchan, Bokul, Mashi, Zarina, Shanti, Kusum, Kalu, Parul, Piru, Hiru, Marjina, Huree and many others, depict harrowing and horrendous life of sex-workers. And, as the story progresses, we witness how fragile their lives are, with life and death of the girls resting under the choice and tyranny of the owners.

2.       Who are the people in this society? Are those who visit whores to buy their own arousal not part of the society? Are those who pay extra to take away beautiful prostitutes in their cars not part of society? Are those who extort money from us to get us our licenses not part of society either? What happens when that money is converted to government earnings and served on every plate?

3.       But they do not know where to find the unbarred door that will let them stand up for their rights as humans. They do not know how to pass through that door.

Inspired and urged both by the incidents the author witnessed as a child and later through the story featured in a magazine, and written in the time when she couldn’t visit the brothel herself firsthand, Letters of Blood is a daring and genuine work representing the bare and bottom truth behind the woes of the sex-workers in Bangladesh, who are under-represented in the mainstream of rights, acts and talks. The coarse realities of the prostitutes have been sharply portrayed without marring the emotional subtlety and sensitivity of the subject and characters, and some descriptions are visually so much appealing and transporting, as if the brothel has been laid inside out. Deftly translated by Arunava Sinha from the Bengali, Letters of Blood is a bold timeless classic that shows the prowess of Rizia Rahman.

The book is part of Library of Bangladesh series.

Author: Rizia Rahman

Translator: Arunava Sinha

Publisher: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Page Count: 116pp

Price: $11

Author Photo Credit: https://www.deshebideshe.com/wiw/details/392

Review Copy Courtesy: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Remembrance of 1971

Blue Venom

In the backdrop of first few days of Bangladeshi liberation war of 1971, a resident of Dacca, Nazrul is apprehended by the soldiers loyal to Pakistani government, on his way to meet his family – away from the violence in the city. And what at first seems to be a decent interrogation soon turns into brutal and inexplicable sequence of questions, which clearly carry the sentiments of religious hatred for Hindus and the violence against Bengalis demanding a free state.

The interrogators question him about his small movements in the city before the declaration of independence on March 26, 1971. Amidst his fear and trembling, he gets the clue that the interrogators are seeking his association¹ with the liberation movement and revolutionaries. He tries to make a way out with simple truths and lies, even exaggerating other people’s activities in the hope of being freed. And he is scared from the way the interrogators with nationalistic virtues are trying to prove that he is guilty for supporting or acting as a liberationist – questioning even his natural instincts – and what his answers might lead him into. Meanwhile, he doesn’t understand why he’s being treated as if he is a poet who has written rebellious poems in support of the independent Bangladeshi nation. Only when a piece of paper that was found in his pocket containing a poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national poet of Bangladesh, is brought upon he does realize that the soldiers have mistaken him with the poet, when in fact he only shares the same name and even doesn’t know how to write a poem.

1.       “… I neither understand nor enjoy politics. I didn’t even vote during the elections, because I was down with fever. I try to steer clear of marches or strikes because I don’t want to get shot. I can’t stand the sight of blood, which is why I did not opt for the medical profession after passing the ISC. I can’t think beyond my family and that’s why I was afraid.”

He is beaten and tortured when he doesn’t accept to identify as the poet and tries to prove his disassociation with politics. Later, a statement is brought to him that addresses the Bengalis and requests them to quit the liberation movement and to be undersigned by the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, which he refuses to do. In his captivity, he has visions of his first love, his wife and children speaking to him and even the poet Nazrul Islam appears as if in a phantasmagoria, all of which strengthen his courage and true inner motivation for liberation. Nazrul, at first encounters with his interrogators and torturers asks if he will be able to go back to his family, however he transforms into a fervent supporter of liberation movement and sheds all his fear for life which later brings upon him the tragedy.

The novella captures small movements, acts and language of the characters that renders the ambience and tension surrounding the liberation movement, and exemplifies the brutality and defiance in the face of Bangladeshi war of independence. Blue Venom is not only a remembrance to the liberation war but also to poet Nazrul Islam who backed up the rebellion through his poems. Simple but dark and honest account of ordinary citizens suffering the brutality of regime, Blue Venom is a poignant reminder that liberation was attained not at ordinary cost.

Forbidden Incense

The story starts with a train coming to a halt before reaching Jaleswari at Nabagram station. Boarded in the train is Bilkis, who has come from Dacca to meet her mother and siblings in Jaleswari. In almost a godforsaken station, Bilkis tries to find out if the train will ever go to Jaleswari, but soon witnesses it returning back to another station marring her last hope. Then after having a conversation with the stationmaster about the tension in the area between the people and soldiers, Bilkis starts her journey on foot for Jaleswari. Soon she finds out that a teenage boy whom she had seen before at the station is following her. As they progress on their journey, the conversation with the boy leads her to discover that the family of the boy had been killed by the Biharis and that he knows her family well. The boy had escaped from the village when the Hindus were slaughtered and doesn’t exactly know what’s happening in the village and the apprehension of Bilkis grows and so is the urgency to reach her village having already lost (?) her husband in one of the violent attacks raging nationwide.

After reaching Jaleswari Bilkis and Siraj (the boy) find that Bilkis’ house – where everything looks like as if things were left in a hurry – and the neighborhood too is empty. Bilkis searches for traces of any killings while Siraj ventures outside to search for any news, both wary of their movements and taking care to avoid any attention. Siraj brings the news that all of her family is safe and have crossed a river to a safe place, and shortly they leave the house. They come to a house of an old blind man, who has been left by all and now is at the mercy of Biharis. When the old man finally speaks to Bilkis, a truth yet kept secret by Siraj surfaces – Bilkis’ brother was killed among many young boys. The story progresses as both of them venture out again and decide to give proper burial to the victim of genocide until they face the infiltrators themselves.

Like Blue Venom, Forbidden Incense too is a story woven around the Bangladeshi war of independence, when mass killings, displacement, torture and rape were among the atrocities suffered by the common people. The novella delves deep into the psyche of people facing the violence and their struggle for life and safety and foremost the never-ending connection between those who are living and those lost forever. The heartbreaking scenes of killings, dead bodies and tortures make us surprised to feel and understand to what extent human beings can become evil, corrupt and animalistic in the face of war. Combined, the novellas give a true account of humane and inhuman stories resting in the shadow of Bangladeshi war of independence.

The book is part of Library of Bangladesh series.

Author: Syed Shamsul Haq

Translated by: Saugata Ghosh

Edited by: Arunava Sinha

Publisher: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Page Count: 124pp

Price: $11

Author Photo Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Shamsul_Haque

Review Copy Courtesy: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

(Coming Soon…)

Coming Soon...

Twelve Stories
by Hasan Azizul Huq
Translated from the Bengali by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay

Coming Soon...

Depeche Mode
by Serhiy Zhadan
Translated from the Ukrainian by Myroslav Shkandrij

... But Not Defeated

Ahmet Altan was arrested during Turkey's media crackdown after the failed July 2016 coup d'état and he was expecting that sooner or later he would be arrested just like his father was many years ago¹. Just after his arrest, he realized how he would miss the things that he loves, routine he enjoyed as a writer and most importantly his freedom to decide. Nevertheless, he didn't submit to hopelessness and continued his observation of prison details with eyes of a novelist. He yearned freedom which he couldn't ask loud, instead motivated himself to bear the harsh prison reality and terror. In a prison cell devoid of mirrors, Ahmet realized how it feels to be distanced from one's reality and as he got to know the background of other cellmates, slowly the prison life took new form for him, where he was able to uncover the shades of experiences never touched or thought of before. Ahmet tried hard to look normal, so that his loving ones could take it easy and he himself could stand to the burden of captivity, even when knowing that the possibility of a reasonable trial was almost none.

1.       What I was experiencing was not déjà vu. Reality was repeating itself. This country moves through history too slowly for time to go forward, so it folds back on itself instead.

Ahmet got to listen to a story²—and later fabricating it himself— of a young teacher who couldn't bring himself to give out names of his friends to earn liberty, and also of other prisoners with the attentiveness of a writer, blazing his imagination and taking pleasure in the stories he absorbed from them, when he tried to relive someone else's experience when he was not able to live his own³ – which only proves how hungry Ahmet was to get back his creative space.

Ahmet recalls the episodes when he was released before being arrested again and an encounter with a policeman who has read his novel and discovers in prison how the concept of time is rooted in our lives and what happens when it is distorted. In the process he finds a way to measure time in solitude of prison without clocks, when he wasn't able to envision⁴ things, the only creative fodder the writer can live with. Ahmet has taken realistic, philosophical and imaginative route and wiseness to share his experience in a way of an essayist, a novelist and a victim and at times we forget that he is inside a prison writing this.

2.       The only way to move was with the voice – by talking and telling. Anyone on earth who finds a listener has a story to tell. What is difficult to find is not the story, but the listener. I was the listener in that cage.

3.       In a cage that objectified unhappiness, I was thinking about what happiness was. Like a blind alchemist searching for the spell that turns copper into gold, I was trying to find the secret that turned “frozen seaweed” and “coffin lids” into joy.

4.       I was not able to imagine. I could not imagine a single thing. My mind was petrified. Not even an image moved inside it. The magical images of the land of my imagination were glued on the walls of my mind like discolored frescos. They were not coming to life.

Ahmet can see how the shape of truth has changed for him and what it means to write and to be free; he comes across paradoxes or lessons⁵ between the voids and silences of the prison walls and spaces in which he makes his voyages. Struggling with his longing and witnessing that of others Ahmet tries to understand his dreams too – unrelated to his prison life. In a thirteen-foot-long cell the people of different faith and culture has merged into one another, and despite the personal views of Ahmet differs to those of his cellmates, he finds it easy and satisfying to show respect for their faith, and realizes that our primordial connectedness unfurls under the dire situations when human emotions become the only religion we can perform.

As Ahmet is sentenced to life in prison without parole, he is reminded of one of his own characters in a novel, who faced the similar fate as his, and he feels like it was he himself who wrote his destiny or at least he could write his fate⁶. He feels the final flicker of hope dying when he is sentenced for life nevertheless collects himself to keep his fighting spirit⁷ alive though the impact he has suffered internally is not something that he can ignore. When he is able to get a book to read in the prison, he dwells on literature and writing and finally is relieved to find solace in something he loves utmost, meanwhile he encounters the nature of evil and tries to understand it, as he becomes its victim. In the final chapter The Writer's Paradox, Ahmet uses a famous paradox to show his position, while still being a victim inside a prison, and challenges Turkish government and those who imprisoned him that they've failed⁸; they cannot capture a writer's mind.

5.       Forgetting is the greatest source of freedom a person can have. The prison, the cell, the walls, the doors, the locks, the problems and the people – everything and everyone placing limits on my life and telling me “you cannot go beyond” is erased and gone.

6.       I will never see the world again; I will never see a sky unframed by the walls of a courtyard. I am descending to Hades. I walk into the darkness like a god who wrote his own destiny. My hero and I disappear into the darkness together.

7.       I will fight. I will be brave and I will despise myself for it. I will be injured by my inner conflicts. I will write my own Odyssey, write it with my life in this narrowest of cells. Like Odysseus, I will act with heroism and cowardice, with honesty and craftiness, I will know defeat and victory, my adventure will end only in death. I will have the Penelope of my dreams. I will write in order to be able to live, to endure, to fight, to like myself and to forgive my own failings.

8.       I am writing this in a prison cell. But I am not in prison. I am a writer. I am neither where I am nor where I am not. You can imprison me but you cannot keep me here. Because, like all writers, I have magic. I can pass through your walls with ease.

I Will Never See the World Again is a thought-provoking and clear picture of not just Ahmet's case but of all those who are incarcerated, unjustly accused and whose freedom to speak, write and live has been compromised. This prison memoir heralds the endurance in the face of adversity born out of politics corrupt with power which treats every citizen as a threat and puts trial of courts – run by corrupt judges – only as a formality. We see senseless and evil authorities running the prison system and one man struggling, building block by block an internal shield to keep being motivated and preserve his creative spirit and repose to fight so as to be heard – a voice both tender and sharp which speaks to us all.

Author: Ahmet Altan

Translator: Yasemin Çongar

Publisher: Other Press

Page Count: 224pp

Price: $15.99

Author Photo Credit: https://www.otherpress.com/authors/ahmet-altan/

Review Copy Courtesy: Other Press

What's in the Grey?

Yun Yun lives with her widowed father in a quarter of an old people's home and their tie is strong with the family of Mrs Cai whom Yun calls auntie; nevertheless Mrs Cai treats her like her own daughter. Yun wants to spend her time especially with her cousin Zhang Qing – who is almost of the Yun's age but who has started to show sign of adolescence – and takes part in Qing's adolescent fantasy of being made-up or kissed. While Yun's father spends time playing chess with a neighbour, Yun passes most of her time at her auntie's home, listening to her cousin who wants to be grown-up soon or bearing her mood swings or having conversation with aunt who's especially curious about Yun's father and who feels it excessively urgent to take care of Yun Yun. As the story unfolds, cousin Qing seems to part away from Yun, however she takes interest in her cousin's affairs and promises to keep her secrets. Having learnt few things about what the adult men and women do from her cousin, Yun cannot keep it to herself and poses questions at the wrong person, which shows her innocence, caught in the world of grown-up behaviors and unable to make any sense of it. 

As Yun realizes that she is able to understand or predict the consequences of things¹ around her, she learns that the people close to her share some unknown history and personal secrets, and which still haunt them. Qing rebels against her mother for free will to have a boyfriend and spend time in her own way, and Yun observes the clashes between her cousin in adolescent crisis and her aunt whom her daughter thinks² is committing adultery. As the individuals and the two families intersect each other for better or worse, hitched in psychological tangles, Yun Yun finds herself alone with her wit and sharp eyes for details, fulfilling her natural curiosity³ – who is visited by the white horse in unexpected places and circumstances – meanwhile taking her own flight of being grown up and facing the myth of her birth. We take the view of Yun Yun, and the blanketed events, personalities and interests are only as evident to us as to her, and so is the world in the backdrop which is characterized by drama of deception.

1.       My dad squeezed her hand and said solemnly: 'That was a long time ago. It's all water under the bridge.' I suddenly thought of something very philosophical: The world is full of secrets… It certainly was.

2.       'My mum's such a bitch; what made my dad decide to marry her?'

3.       'Don't believe everything you see on TV,' my dad said. 'Only dirty foreigners kiss on the mouth. Chinese people don't.'

White Horse is a story of a child growing up and caught in the world of adults and their affairs, and whose ingenuousness is faced by human relations that may stand on weak or doubtful base and identity. Story, translation and the illustrations – the triad tells the story that is simple but sharp, and though Yun Yun carves a way out or within her space, we still dwell on the complexities of adult life, formed and cracked by love and misfortunes. The White Horse represents the enigma of the world standing on truth and lies, and where sometime we are left alone to be baffled by ourselves.

Author: Yan Ge

Translator: Nicky Harman

Illustrator: James Nunn

Publisher: HopeRoad Publishing

Page Count: 88pp

Price: $12.99

Author Photo Credit: https://www.hoperoadpublishing.com/authors/yan-ge

Review Copy Courtesy: HopeRoad Publishing

The Sad Backdrop

BONDAGE

The first part of the Imdadul Haq Milan’s Two Novellas Bondage is narrated by Lalan, who came to Germany from Bangladesh, and would often wait for the letters from home, where, apart from his family, he had left behind his girlfriend, who was waiting for him to come back so as to get married. Every day, he came to the room from work exhausted, both from working and having to climb six flights to his room. And Muneem, a close friend of Lalan, though complained about everything of their poor living conditions and had things to say how the people from the Third World countries changed after coming to a developed country like Germany, especially his own countrymen, thought Germany was a heavenly place to earn and relish.

Imagine a life: haunted by alarm clocks; always in a rush to catch the bus that leaves on schedule; the movement in life is so limited that you even remember the steps and minutes it takes to reach one place from other—this is common among the immigrant workers, and here the everyday truth of Lalan. Always living under the anxiety of being sacked by the employer or removed by landlord, mostly the immigrants from the Third-World countries have to make themselves accustomed to working like a clock and tirelessly; wary of order of the things to be taken care of.

Then one Friday, when Lalan and Muneem go out for coffee at McDonald's, they come across another Bangladeshi man named Wahid, who hadn’t managed to eat rice for months and looked frail. Later, both of them go to Muneem's room to booze, after finding other options of enjoying off-putting, only to get Lalan blitzed¹. Soon after, Lalan receives the awaited letters from home and his girlfriend, and is burdened and disappointed by the fact—he hasn’t let anyone in the family know, in what draining settings he has to work to earn—that the family is demanding even more without bothering to care about his happiness or how he feels. Nevertheless, Lalan gets another job for making up the amount² asked by the family back home, only adding more rush and fatigue to his life, and when his co-worker goes absent... this finally forces him to seek medical attention and take long needed break from work.

1.       “… When I drink I become aware of myself, I realize I am who I am. The rest of the time, I feel like a stranger. I find it difficult to accept that the young man named Lalan, who toils eight hours every day in a foreign land, is me.”

2.       Money was nothing but a trap for enslavement that each day was turning me a stranger to myself. I’d no idea when, if at all, I’d be able to earn my release from the trap.

In Bondage, we get a clear picture of immigrant workers who are stricken with unhappiness and longing for home and have nothing else to talk about except work, fatigue and money. Meanwhile, they are getting adapted to the people, rules, custom, language and way of life in Germany, though most of them are having hard time keeping up with all of those. There are workers: those who are unemployed and living on the dole; those who have earned work permit and in the meantime are processing their application for political asylum—Lalan is one of them; those who are reapplying to the limit even after their application is rejected thus lengthening their stay. In fact, most of them are not genuine political asylum seekers but economic refugees/migrants.

Immigrants like Lalan and Muneem have been closely observing the changes happened over time to their image among the natives and are afraid of the growing social unrest between the surging migrants and natives. They are already facing unhappy Germans who hate their presence—those encounters have to be born helplessly³ by the immigrant workers and thus try  to avoid it—and who now know well the stories told for backing political asylum applications are all fabricated and thus Lalan and Muneem know that their stay will terminate in future. Toiling Lalan, who feels like smoking when he is angry and curse the money for which he has to be away from home, doesn’t want to stay in Germany any more.

3.       “What’s the point of feeling bad? We’ve to stay here, don’t we? What’s there for us back home? We won’t even get a job that pays four hundred takas.” “At least, we’ll have freedom there. Isn’t that enough to live by?” “You can’t fill your belly with freedom, can you?”

Some struggling to settle, some unsatisfied with their savings and some missing their dearest, their ways and oddities sometimes prove rowdy to the locals and landlords, and the only thing that keeps them occupied, even though for a short time, is the company of their own countrymen amidst the discomfort with the ways they have to follow. And therefore they spend time chattering about everything they are unsatisfied with during weekends, before happily accepting the same throughout the weekdays in their grim and dim existence.

Bondage is an exceptional novel, based upon author's own experience in Germany, dealing mostly with the human side of economic migrants’ problem and Lalan is a strong character who represents all immigrant workers, who face and suffer boredom, disappointments, quandary, hopelessness, estrangement, bouts of silences and also those baffled by the extravagance of their families back home at their expense and also young men in the Third-World country like Bangladesh looking for better life elsewhere in developed countries.

EXILE

In Exile, the main character Abdullah has trouble holding onto a job for long, particularly manual jobs, and has already taken many jobs in the four years of his stay in Germany, without success on any of them, and has even slept on the bus-stand bench in his worst days. Frau Mann, an elderly lady of the employment bureau, is whom Abdullah seeks every time after he is laid-off, and in any case she tries her best to get him a job like always. Abdullah shares a room—one he was provided to dwell while in the job for a construction firm, but which also sacked him within two months—with five Punjabi Pakistanis, with whom he cannot speak in his mother tongue, and he is out of job from last three months, living on the unemployment dole. He cannot manage to live elsewhere, having unstable job and meager income. Meanwhile, Abdullah has picked up German language very well and thinks that he can impress the Germans with it. He finds it hard to befriend other Bangladeshis and keep his miseries to himself¹, and it is even more difficult for him to cope with the attitude, mockery and alienation from the fellow roommates and landlord, and rather feels dispirited and threatened to live among them, taking care not to offend anyone, though he pays for the room too.

1.       Sometimes it seems everything has been for the best. At least my family has not had to suffer the ignominy of seeing the man who once taught at a college trudging miles in the snow to look for a labourer’s or cleaner’s work, being thrown out of his job every now and then, and living furtively like an animal that scarcely dared to breathe. I would rather have taken my own life than made them go through it.

Abdullah was a teacher back at home and had no big dreams except to live an ordinary life with his wife and two daughters. He was progressing quite well in his job and was loved among the students until embezzlement conspiracy forced him to flee from Bangladesh, where imprisonment awaited him in his return, and in the meantime his original plan to bring his family to Germany is never realized, opening a chasm in his relation to the family to whom he has feeble chance of meeting again.

Abdullah fabricates a political lie so that he can get a job and place to stay and meanwhile convinces² the manager of the hotel that he is a genuine runaway who is seeking asylum in Germany, backing his story by political history of his country. As the story progresses, he takes job as a Hausmann in a hotel but finally decides to go back home to face whatever the consequences might be, when something terrible happens to him again.

2.       The Germans were used to taking people at their face value, though these days they, too, had learned to be skeptical of immigrants from the ‘third world,’ each of whom came with their own particular tale of woe in order to get political asylum. The Germans saw them lying, fighting and stealing even after getting work, and had veered somewhat to the opinion that immigrants were not to be trusted.

Exile, like Bondage deals with the similar problem of immigrant workers, however this touches even more personal story of an individual in detail. Abdullah too, like Lalan, doesn’t want to remain away from his family, but he is ensnared with his self-inflicted exile in Germany to save himself from losing freedom at Bangladesh, however, he doesn’t happen to realize it in Germany with constant anguish and subtle melancholy stifling and occupying his thoughts, which in turn never allows him to work for more than few days or months. Combined, the two novellas draw a harrowing image of the economic migrants and those migrating with their personal causes, from Bangladesh, who regardless of everything want to return to their country if ever.

The book is part of Library of Bangladesh series.

Author: Imdadul Haq Milan

Translator: Saugata Ghosh
Editor: Arunava Sinha

Publisher: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)

Page Count: 144pp

Price: $11

Author Photo Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imdadul_Haq_Milon_-_Kolkata_2015-10-10_4866.JPG

Review Copy Courtesy: Bengal Lights Books (Library of Bangladesh series)