by Dina Salustio
Translated from the Portuguese Jethro Soutar
Thursday, December 10, 2020
Coming Soon...
The Great Chimera
by M. Karagatsis
by M. Karagatsis
Translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Monday, November 16, 2020
Coming Soon...
Angels Beneath the Surface
A Selection of Contemporary Slovene Fiction
by Mitja Cander (Editor), Tom Priestly (Editor)
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Coming Soon...
Sisters of the Cross
by Alexei Remizov
by Alexei Remizov
Translated from the Russian by Roger Keys and Brian Murphy
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Coming Soon...
Bellevue
by Ivana Dobrakovova
by Ivana Dobrakovova
Translated from the Slovak by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood
Monday, September 7, 2020
Drift in the Timeline
One Love Chigusa is set in the year 2091 AD. After a severe accident, Xie Hoyu's body parts are gathered,
engineered and brought again to functionality. After his release from the
hospital, Xie, now a cyborg, wanders the city in the Greater Beijing with partly restored memory, but he soon
loses the confidence to go on living2 – a feeling which he had
harvested even before his accident. Xie, a frustrated illustrator, never had
successful relationship with women, and now in his aimless drifting following the memory of his Quantum Data, he's unable to see the regular appearance of the men and women as he sees them passing on the streets - they have demonic, red and angry faces, and have indicators1
glowing on their chest. And in addition, he even has delusional visions and
experiences, and hears voices of unknown origins, which further troubles him in his new life and reality. As Xie Hoyu faces existential
crisis and seeks for a relief, while at a coffee shop, he sees a woman of
extraordinary beauty through the display window. To Xie's surprise, the woman could
smile and doesn't have a demonic face like everyone else, and on seeing her, his
desire to live is suddenly rejuvenated. From that moment on, Xie becomes
restless in the hope of seeing her again and knowing her. His days and nights,
and even nightmares are filled with the episodes where his urge to meet her becomes even more pressing.
1.
People without religion, ideology or faith, only
trust money as the measure of worth and value.
2. If there was a god, he needed to send Xie a
message explaining why he existed, what his purpose was and how he should keep
on living in this world. What reason was there? He wasn't capable of anything.
On one such day, while Xie Hoyu is in the coffee shop as usual, the girl reappears, and after following her path, he manages to locate her workplace and decides to wait for her. Meanwhile, we visit a story of despair from his artificially engineered memory bank, and also come across a voice ringing from inside his head that haunts him, and which provokes him to ponder over the Aryan race and history, domination and development in the light of war and science, electricity and nuclear power, and how all these have added to the world of science and technology. After the woman comes out of the plant (Shankal Electric), Xie follows her secretly along the transport network and dark alleys of the city, and even though a sense of futility and guilt develops in him doing this, unable to find a purpose and unable to let go of the motivation to live he developed after seeing the girl, he follows along. As he grapples with the question and meaning of his existence3, questioning his every move, mode and intentions, he finally encounters the woman he'd been following – the woman of utmost beauty, smile and calm. Xie becomes euphoric and is soon filled with inordinate passion for Chigusa. The naïve and pure conversations on love and the sentiments of heart4 lead them to develop a close relation. But the story takes a sharp turn, when all the hidden details - odd and strange - start to make meaning towards the end, leaving us with the identities of Xie Hoyu and Chigusa in the midst of a despair, and in the depth of possibilities and further questions.
3.
Humankind – why is it organized like this? Why
is it that these creatures live and populate this earth? Does all this any
meaning? Sexual reproduction, and creatures that relied on it, was becoming
less and less important in a civilization now dominated by cutting-edge
technologies. Humans were no more than faded supporting actors, old-fashioned,
with primitive ideas, about to leave the stage. Singularity… In the old days,
it was fashionable to talk about that. You never hear that word now. It is
never on anyone's lips. Why has that happened?
4. 'When one leaves one's own self-interest behind, when one's hopes and decisions are moved by a feeling for others. This is the heart...'
One Love Chigusa has set one foot
on the meaning of human existence and love, and the other one on the visions of
the future where AI might overtake the humans and for better or worse. The
story has everything to be a modern classic sci-fi novella, an existential
brainstorm, and a love story that connects the world that we experience and the world that is close at hand. The story definitely makes one wonder and question
the sorrows of the existence – excited with the possibilities of the future,
and filled with dread for our place on this planet as well. The birth of new
realities that will define and weigh our existence and identity can be profoundly
sensed in this story set in the future. We're left with the question - Is there any place for love in the far more mechanical world where our core human values may not weigh like now and when they may lose their present identity?
Finally, the 6th Red Circle
Minis has added a new storey to the already towering reputation of the series.
Translator: David Warren
Publisher: Red Circle Authors
Author's Photo Source: https://www.redcircleauthors.com/our-authors/soji-shimada/
Review Copy Courtesy: Red Circle Authors
Monday, August 17, 2020
Coming Soon...
Two Blankets, Three Sheets
by Rodaan Al Galidi
by Rodaan Al Galidi
Translated from the Dutch by Jonathan Reeder
Saturday, August 8, 2020
Coming Soon...
Stories for the Years
by Luigi Pirandello
by Luigi Pirandello
Translated from the Italian by Virginia Jewiss
Friday, August 7, 2020
Friday, July 17, 2020
Friday, July 10, 2020
Coming Soon...
I Live in the Slums
by Can Xue
Translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
by Can Xue
Translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Coming Soon...
The Book of Collateral Damage
by Sinan Antoon
Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright
by Sinan Antoon
Translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright
The Storms After
During a celebration of New
Year's Eve at her friend's apartment, the narrator, who is a teacher, meets
Sarah, who is a violinist, for the first time. Very soon, they keep in touch
with each other, start to hang out, go to diners, cinemas and theatres, and it
doesn't take long for Sarah to admit that she's in love with the narrator. Their
intimate relation1 begins to unfold, with burning passion for each
other's presence, company and sensual engagement. They start spending time in
each other's apartment, talk tirelessly and make love. When Sarah is out of
Paris for her concert performances, the separation and longing for them become
unbearable2.
1.
She’s alive. She doesn’t realize that nothing
matters to me now except the time I spend with her, that I’m feeling depressed,
that I don’t like my work anymore, that I’ll get my doctor to give me a
sicknote as soon as I can.
2.
It’s all about Sarah, her mysterious beauty, the
sharp lines of her gentle bird-of-prey nose, her pebble-like eyes, green, but
no, not green, her unusual colored eyes, her snake eyes with their drooping
lids. It’s all about Sarah the impetuous, Sarah the passionate, Sarah the
sulfurous, it’s all about the exact moment when the match flares, the exact
moment when that piece of wood becomes fire, when the spark lights up the
darkness, when burning springs out of nowhere. The exact moment is tiny,
everything turned upside down in barely a second. It’s all about Sarah, symbol:
S.
However, in the period of two
years, the love, obsession and desire for each other become a kind of madness,
such that they're exhausted by each other's company, and want to end3
the relationship, but miserably fail, something always dragging them together. The
narrator becomes excessively sensitive to their relationship, as is evident in her
obsession with the tiniest details about Sarah, even about things, thoughts and
words that defines the relationship – which brings them joy and pleasure, but
also exhaust them, and slowly becomes burden to their own personal freedom and
private life. Latency, Sulfur, Passion, Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet
No. 13 in B-flat major, The Four Seasons by Vivaldi, François Truffaut's Bed
and Board, Hiroshima, My Love – these allegories or interludes that come in
between seem abrupt, but on closer look it is a poetic representation of the
core of the tension; silhouette of the overcasting cloud over their excesses,
over their wavering4, 5 commitments.
3.
Sometimes she goes mad. Mad with fury then mad
with misery. She screams, throws herself at me and scratches my face, with a
monstrous expression on hers. She’s worse than a witch in a fairy tale. She
resents me, for everything, for stealing her time, stealing her youth, stealing
her family’s love, stealing the idea she’s had since childhood of how she
should live her life. She doesn’t say it but I can hear it, it rings in my
ears, thief, thief, thief. She gets angry with me for silly little things, all
sorts of things, but deep down, I can tell, she’s angry with me for existing,
for coming into her life, she’s angry with me for being a woman. She resents me
because she can’t suddenly just love me in peace. She flies into blazing
tempers, unforgettable tempers. Her little body is transformed. She looks like
an animal, a furious animal, she roars, flushed red all over. And in the heat
of the moment she forgets the Venetian love, the hidden kisses, the endless
fondling.
4.
She wants us to go to the cinema, she wants us
to make love, then she wants us to fall asleep in each other’s arms, she wants
us to stop messaging and talking to each other for a few days, she wants us to
eat Japanese, she wants us to go away to the country for a weekend to rest, she
wants me to stop crying, she wants to go to a party without me, she wants to
have no responsibilities, she wants to be footloose, she wants to be free.
5.
It’s all about Sarah, unpredictable,
temperamental, disturbing, changeable and terrifying as a moth.
After knowing about Sarah's
breast cancer, it becomes more of a torment for the narrator to be in her
presence any more. She decides to run away from the city, and ends up in an old
apartment in Trieste, Italy, only to be haunted by the episodes, words, images
and memories of Sarah. Her days in Trieste, told in almost a dreamlike or in a
stream of consciousness like fashion, reads as a chasm of an unfulfilling love
affair brought upon an individual.
This psychological account of a
lesbian love, delves deep into the joys and horror of a love affair, but departs
from traditional romantic–tragic novels in many senses. The story has a poetic
sensibility to it, a rhythm of an unfathomable passion, overturning the lives, and slowly dissolving into
personal crisis – embarrassment and emotional torment of being in such a
fervent love and desire for each other. They Say Sarah is a moving tale of two women, where passion turns nightmarish.
Author: Pauline Delabroy-Allard
Translator: Adriana Hunter
Publisher: Other Press
Author's Photo Source: https://images.randomhouse.com/author/2201244
Review Copy Courtesy: Other Press
Thursday, June 11, 2020
Tuesday, June 2, 2020
The Island of Hope and Tears
The Last Days of Ellis Island is
written as a series of diary entries by the protagonist John Mitchell, the
commissioner of the Ellis Island, who has spent most of his active life on the
island, and is about to leave1 the island finally in a few days. In
his entries, he ruminates on his life and time spent on the island and his
memories, suffused with multitude of experience from all those years when he
saw millions of immigrants – some of whom have left indelible marks in his life
– passing by the island seeking new life in the US.
1. Nine
days and nine nights until I am to be sent back to the mainland, to the life of
men. To a void, as far as I am concerned. What do I know of people’s lives
today? My own life is already hard enough to fathom, like a book you thought
you knew, that you pick up one day and find written in another language. All I
have left now is this surprisingly urgent need to write down my story, I don’t
even know who for, as I sit here in my office that has no purpose anymore,
surrounded by so many binders, pencils, rulers, rubber stamps. It’s a story
that for a few decades has largely been much the same as that of Ellis Island,
but it’s some events specific to me that I wish to tell here, however difficult
it may be. For the rest, I’ll leave it up to the historians… At times it feels
as if the entire world has shrunk to the borders of this island. The island of
hope and tears. The site of the miracle that destroyed and redeemed, that
stripped the Irish peasant, the Calabrian shepherd, the German worker, the
Polish rabbi, the Hungarian pencil pusher, of their original nationalities and
transformed them into American citizens. Here they are still, a crowd of ghosts
floating around me.
Particularly, the arrival of two
ships has changed Mitchell’s personal life. He loses his wife Liz after she
gets a contagion from the immigrants brought by one of the ships. This makes
his life and personality reclusive and withdrawn from the outer world and he decides
to spend most of his time within the confines and hubbub of the island. However,
when an Italian immigrant named Nella Casarini comes to the island among many
and with the same purpose of getting acceptance into the US, she catches his
attention and he feels a little hope taking shape for his sullen life without
love, but she too departs from the island after a tragic episode that happens
with her brother. Mitchell doesn’t get the chance to establish his intention
and motive, and this throws Mitchell again in the gloom of remorse and
reminiscence. In the years that follows, as per his diary entries, he tries to
understand as much about Nella as possible from various sources and
reconstructs her story, which serves as a representative of millions of stories
that pushed the immigrants to take a harsh voyage to take a chance to begin a
new life in the US. Mitchell’s experience is also shaped by his encounter with
the members of the staff at the Ellis Island and with the immigrants for whom
he felt affinity and who’ve left him with questions he’s still trying to answer
and understand at this final hour of leaving.
The novel depicts the struggle of
the immigrants during those decades of the World and American history and thus
has brought back the forgotten faces and stories2 of the
immigrants from the vaults of the past. The story revolves around death, loss,
departure and solitude, and the character of John Mitchell is characterized
with remorse and renunciation for the love he couldn’t attain and the life he
couldn’t accept wholeheartedly except for his duties at the Ellis Island. The
story transports us to the setting of the Ellis Island where the immigrants disembarked
from the barge, hurried on the stairs, waited in the Great Hall their turn to
be inspected and were screened, cross-marked with a chalk, questioned,
disinfected, lodged, fed, admitted to the infirmary… and everything comes to
life such that we feel the anguish, anxiety, hope and doubt of the immigrants,
many of whom were give entry to the US and some were denied. However, the
general atmosphere is filled with the fear of being denied and deported after
the arduous trip they took, mostly on the steerage of the steamships from
faraway lands.
2. For forty-five
years—I’ve had plenty of time to count them—I observed the arrival of all those
men, women, and children, dignified and disoriented, in their best clothes and
bathed in perspiration, exhaustion, and bewilderment, struggling to make sense
of a language of which they knew not a single word. They carried all their
dreams inside their luggage, packed inside the trunks, canteens, baskets, suitcases,
bags, carpets, and blankets that contained everything they had brought with
them from their previous life; and then there was everything they had sealed up
deep inside their hearts to try to keep themselves from caving in to the
anguish of separation, the pain of calling up faces they would never see again.
They had to move on, adapt to another life, another language, different signs
and customs, unfamiliar foods, a new climate. Learn, learn fast and never look
back. I have no idea how many of them fulfilled their dreams, how many found
themselves brutally cast into a daily life that was barely any improvement on
the one they had escaped. It was too late to think about it, theirs was an
exile without return.
From 1892-1954, the Ellis Island
served as the gateway to the US, which saw the arrival of more than twelve
million immigrants. And, John acts as a center and witness to the influx of
immigrants as well as to their experience of crossing, much like the Ellis
Island but gives it the human dimensions. Through his eyes we experience the
struggle of the period and the people. His thoughts and analogies on the
immigrants give voice to the unspeakable tragedy of the dispossessed and exiles
in the light of American history and its social transformation. In this regard,
the story is both historically and emotionally rich, and the sketch of John,
who was touched briefly but for long by the passing ships and immigrants is
left with the burden of memories, can be seen as the man who saw and felt it
all.
Author: Gaëlle
Josse
Translator: Natasha
Lehrer
Publisher:
World Editions
Author's
Photo Source: https://www.worldeditions.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/JOSSE-Gaelle-2-Heloise-Jouanard.jpg
Immigrant Woman Photo Source:
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/e7/e0/b6/e7e0b61b5be94cf2e35680bf128defea--albanian-culture-lewis-hine.jpg
Ellis Island (The Great Hall) Photo Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/archaeologyandhistory/2019/11/ellis-island-reference/ellis-island-reference-01.adapt.1900.1.jpg
Immigrant
Family Photo Source: https://i0.wp.com/marinamaral.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/51073-123.jpg?ssl=1
Review Copy
Courtesy: World Editions
Coming Soon...
The Girl with the Golden Parasol
by Uday Prakash
Translated from the Hindi by Jason Grunebaum
Lifting the Family Shroud
The unnamed narrator retreats to
a coffee house every day to escape from the unsettling atmosphere of crisis at
home. In the Coffee House, the serving waiter Vincent seems to the narrator, a
wise being who knows secrets of his internal chaos and can put them into a
calming virtue of words. The novel opens in one such day, when the narrator
finds himself in the coffee house again, only this time he hasn't returned to
his home for more than thirty hours, where his wife is expected to return but
hasn't. He broods over his failed relationship with a girl at the coffee with
whom he had suddenly cut off his ties, but more than that he's there to tell
all about his family.
In the following chapters he
takes us into the roots of his family, its members and their characters. His
family consists of his parents, Chikkappa (Uncle), Malati (Sister) and Anita
(Wife). They now own a business, and are well enough, such that the narrator
doesn't have to work at all if he wishes to, only that because of his wife he
completes the formality of going to work, where he does almost nothing. Chikkappa
runs the business, suffers the toil and brings the wealth home to everyone's
delight. They weren't always like this; they once had been a family with meager
income, and lived in a poor lower-middle-class quarter in an ant1
infested house, and they'd moved to the present luxury only after new wealth
entered their family.
1. We
had two types of ants at home. One was a small brisk-moving black variety that
appeared only occasionally. But when it did, it came in an army numbering
thousands. These ants wandered everywhere in apparent confusion, always bumping
heads and pausing before realizing something and rushing off in random
directions. They had no discernible purpose in life other than trying our
patience. It didn’t seem like they were here to find food. Nor did they have
the patience to bite anyone. Left to themselves, they’d quickly haul in
particles of mud and built nests here and there in the house. You could try
scuttling them with a broom, but they’d get into a mad frenzy and climb up the
broom and on to your arm. Before you knew it, they’d be all over you, even
under your clothes. For days on end there would be a terrific invasion, and
then one day you’d wake up to find them gone. There was no telling why they
came, where they went. I sometimes saw them racing in lines along the window
sill in the front room, where there was nothing to eat. Perhaps they were on a
mission of some sort, only passing through our house in self-important columns.
But not once did I see the tail of a column, an ant that had no other ants
behind it.
After the marriage, Anita senses
the fault in the family ties and foundation, and therefore there is always a
constant tension between the three women of the house. Now, the nouveau riche
family is concerned about the comfort of Chikkappa, as he is the sole
breadwinner of the family. The narrator himself fears losing his inheritance
from his father, and doesn't want to get apart from the riches2 and
prosperity his uncle has brought in the house, without him doing almost nothing.
A dissent to the family virtues and well-being, Anita uses subtle verbal
insults, undermines, pokes, challenges their way of life or make fun of whomever
she wants and things which she doesn't find agreeable, and as if to rescue the
family the narrator's mother and sister too join the verbal row; this is what
the narrator escapes from often.
2. It’s
true what they say – it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that
controls us. When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it
becomes brash and has its way with us.
The narrator candidly talks about
his thoughts, intentions, dark motives and personal failures, as if he accepts
it all, but is still at loss. It seems the family has accepted the way things
are and doesn't want to change in any way. Meanwhile, Anita resents the family
ways and how things are: an uncle who works day and night to maintain the
family business; a mother who is limited to the kitchen and can become ruthless
if it comes to saving the family values; a father who has less and less say
about anything in the family and whose jokes aren't appreciated by anyone; a
sister who has left her husband, come to live with her parents and has her own
private world, and a husband who is freeloading to the family fortune and
virtually does nothing. Ghachar Gochar, a word created by Anita and her brother
during their childhood, which means entanglement of things, has become a
reality to the narrator, who finds himself in the middle of a war of words ever
present in the household between the three women, family values, fear of losing3
the riches and expectation from his wife for him to be independent. It seems
that not only their freedom, but their fate and shame too are rooted in the
family ties. As if the family has learned to live in harmony amid the
dependence, tension and chaos.
3. A
man in our society is supposed to fulfil his wife’s financial needs, true, but
who knew he was expected to earn the money through his own toil?
In Ghachar Ghochar, we witness
the family and personal secrets being laid bare. We also closely observe the
changes in their way of life, of a family as they leap onto the higher social
status with a bond and understanding – that is reluctant to change – to such an
extent that the whole members are in a sort of symbiosis or have become
parasitic. In doing so, their own personal choices have been defined or are
limited by those unspoken virtues. The story is a dramatic view of a nouveau
riche family, but is not limited to this. It also unveils the dark motives that
run in a family. Here, it is a fear of losing the prosperity – which also has
deformed the personalities of few. To some extent, we can extrapolate the story
to those women who stand against violence and traditional ways, and are under
threat from their own families and sinister ways. Ghachar Gochar takes us into
the core of a family and its crisis that we often know about but we do not
speak of.
Author: Vivek Shanbhag
Translator: Srinath Perur
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers (India)
Author's Photo Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2136315/vivek-shanbhag
Review Copy Courtesy: Personal Copy
Coming Soon...
Gaia, Queen of Ants
by Hamid Ismailov
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
by Hamid Ismailov
Translated from the Uzbek by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Coming Soon...
The Brothers
by Asko Sahlberg
Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah
by Asko Sahlberg
Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah
New Life
The story of Serenity starts in July 1923, when a faction of refugees from
Phocis (who may have origin in the Asia Minor) like many other displaced during
the Great War (1914-1918) or during the population exchange in the aftermath of
Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), is allowed to settle in Anavyssos – a barren,
desolate and rugged, untilled coastal land, close to the salt pans in the
Saronic Gulf. Initially afraid of the wilderness and full of doubts and fear about
their new home, the refugees finally settle with the allotted lands and build
their shacks with the government help. However, the locals from the surrounding
do not favour their presence and are determined to create trouble for them if
necessary.
Among the refugees are Dimitris Venis
and Irini–who once belonged to the nobility, and is unhappy and unsatisfied
with their status, is filled with sullenness all the time and irked with her
husband, a doctor by profession who has chosen to settle here. Another couple
of Fotis and Eleni is close to the Venis family and all of them had lived closely
during their stay on Aegina during the Great War. Soon after they’re allotted lands
for shacks and cultivation, and as the land was famous site of excavation for
buried antiquities and tombs, Fotis and Eleni, with the help of an elderly water
diviner, after arduous digging come upon a buried kouros in their land. Meanwhile Fotis waits for the opportune
moment so that he can bargain a good sum for the antiquity he has found, a
heavy downpour and flood hits the settlement, and brings tragedy to his hopes.
Shortly Anna and Irini’s sister
Maria come from Athens to join them at Anavyssos. Maria is gradually losing her
eye sight and her only hope is to wait for the return of her son Angelos, who
was separated from them during the war and was taken prisoner, like many
relatives of the people from the settlement. Similarly, Anna, the daughter of
Venis couple, is full of hope to reunite with her young lover Andreas, who was
together with Angelos. The first part of the novel ends with the arrival of
Andreas, and sadly with the news that Angelos is no more, but Dimitris asks him
not to reveal it to Maria.
We see many lives connecting in
Anavyssos – some lost family members, some are displaced from their homeland
and are left with nothing but memories and hope to finally find the peace.
Irini is suffused with desperate hopelessness, frustration and humiliation,
making her feel estranged among her own, while Dimitris and Fotis are trying to
find a purpose and riches even if it means following fascination. Dimitirs
seeks the courage, or Serenity as he
tells his daughter, from the
biographies of Napolean and Captain Scott and is hopeful of his rose garden,
and Fotis tries to make a fortune from a fish boat and trade. Andreas is
burdened and traumatized with the memory of hardships and loss he had to
endure, and thinks that his childhood was taken away from him, leaving him with
sad experience, restlesssness and desolation only he can understand. However, Anna
tries to rekindle his failing spirit and hope. They make a trip to Aegina in
Fotis’s boat and find a new meaning to their shared memories and love on the
island. However, with the arrival of some new faces in the settlement, things
take a different turn and the brightness and vigor we feel coming in the lives
of Dimitris, Andreas and Anna is shattered again in brutal and tragic sequence
of events.
Serenity is a novel full of voices. As refugees struggle to
harmonize and find livelihood and peace in their new home, the author carves
out their natural voices from the depths of their past, aspiration and dreams
and makes the texture of this new life so palpable through scenic narration, we
feel the turmoil left by the war, and human sensitivities shaped by this
unprecedented new challenge. The composite nature of the text welcomes humans as
well as the nature as a force in this new life. For instance, even salt
pyramids are free to observe the Phocians and their new rituals. At moments, it
looks like a connection between humans and the Earth is finding a language
through the novel. Also, the author takes the liberty of coming face to face
with the readers – and this makes the work more personal for both him and us – in
an enigmatic1 tone.
1. A
sky-blue line above the dust of the earth, containing trees and tombs, and
flashes of lightning that are drawn, erased and plunged into the sea, and
beyond everything the silence, the final boundary of the world–what, I wonder,
is the fate of the world? Oh reader, I am trying to tell the fate of a few
people; I would like to tell of the bones the sea will cover and whiten after
numberless years. And I know nothing more worthy of ridding man of the
bitterness of uncertainty than the silence and certainty of the stars.
The primordial feelings and faith
surrounding one’s homeland; hope and desire to endure the new existence; characters
trying to give new meaning to their lives since their past aspirations have
been left in disorder and are now just an unrealized dreams: these are some of
the ideas in the novel. And, author is so caring of his characters that he even
takes a step forward to tell their agony, aspirations or mere visions, as if
rescuing their voices, outside the quotations, and in bright pieces in between
the text, and they prove to be burst of sensitive experience and existential
surge of emotions2, 3 with poetic charm and depth.
2. How
fine it would be if everything were so futile that people would not even try to do anything! And so they would
sit plunged in certainty, their limbs at rest, feeling no pain… Many things
seemed beautiful in this world, but how could she know? She and all others of
her position only knew what was useful.
3. You
can get used to anything. You can become used to looking inside yourself and
seeing how naked and desolate it is, as if you are the first on the earth and beginning
the history of mankind, now and alone. You become used to believing in nothing,
not dreaming, denuded of everything that reconciles us with people and life.
You become used to destroying yourself and others, and everything inside you
becoming silent – Fear, imagination, pity. Everything, therefore, is simply a
matter of degree: until you fall. Thus you can grow used to this, too: telling
stories to a mother every day about a child who will not return.
We feel the terrain of the
coastal land and also the terrain of human feelings. Nothing escapes the author’s
vision of accommodating all the elements of survival, interdependence and
interactions between all forces and elements of nature and humans. The monotony
of existence and hope to reconcile to everything to find a new meaning of life;
the melancholy of happiness and anguish to hear a piece of good news; clinging
on the hope and abyss between the old and new lives – these intersperse in the
story.
The central theme of Serenity4 is the force of
aspiration and peace found through fascination, through voyage, accomplishments,
existence and hope.
4. Serenity!
In the calm, the tumult, in the water that relaxes as it forms a cloud, in the
clouds that clash during the storm and try to cast out their water and find
peace, in the passions of people who struggle and fight, in the people who
suffer because they were not destined to do anything, in the bodies that
struggle for love, in the stars that tumble down at night, in the earth that
turns, in dreams and deeds, in everything the search for a lost balance, a
ceaseless recomposition.
Set in the aftermath of
Greco-Turkish War, Serenity is a
representative work dealing with the crisis left in the wake of the war and
displacement. A humane, evocative and sensitive exploration of refugees, the novel
is a classic text to understand and feel closely not only the suffering left by
the war but also the aspiration to new life and adaptation.
Author: Ilias Venezis
Translator: Joshua Barley
Publisher: Aiora Press
Author's Photo Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Venezis
Review Copy Courtesy: Aiora Press
Friday, May 1, 2020
Coming Soon...
The Things of Ramón Lamote
by Paco Martín
Illustrated by Xoán Balboa
Translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne
Monday, April 6, 2020
Story Overlooking a Sea
The story begins when Damaris
picks up a pup from a litter whose mother is found dead by the beach. She
decides to raise it and takes it to her shack, located on a bluff overlooking a
sea and which has a jungle nearby. Her fisherman husband and Damaris had moved
to the place on account of taking care of the estate which belonged to a couple
who lived faraway. It turns out that Damaris had lived there during her
childhood and has a tragic memory associated with the place, all the same she
still loves the place.
Damaris, who couldn’t have any
children despite trying many methods of healing along with her husband, doesn’t
like the way her husband treats the dogs they already have at their home. So,
in the early days of her adoption of a girl dog, she pampers1 it like a mother does to her child, is possessive about it and wants to raise it
without causing it any suffering. In fact, she names her with what she thought
for her unborn child. The trouble starts when one day the pup following other
dogs run away to the jungle and doesn’t return for more than a month only to
suddenly appear. She tries to restrain it from escaping but nothing helps and
it keeps escaping from the home for hours or days until the day when the dog comes
home pregnant. Already irked by the dog by now, who she thinks disregards her
attention and care after all the trouble she took for it, she wants to get rid
of it. However, things escalate to a dreadful episode when one day dog appears
again and destroys something that is sacred to her memory.
1. During
the daytime, Damaris carried the little dog around inside her brassiere,
between her big soft breasts, to keep her nice and warm. At night she put her
in the cardboard box Don Jaime had given her, with a hot-water bottle and the
T-shirt she’d worn that day, so the dog wouldn’t miss her smell.
Set in the Colombia’s Pacific
coast, The Bitch is a novel that holds the controlled and natural perfection in
the narration until the very end. The atmosphere and setting with coves, tides,
sea, rain and storm and the dense jungle is pitch-perfect that captures the
mood and tension of the story. The story is about motherhood and love but also
about guilt and shame. The characters are so raw and genuine, without any
embellishment, though the story revolves around Damaris and her dog, they add
to the internal trouble and change in Damaris’s emotional realm, and everything
that characterizes her motherly nature, her bitter-sweet memories and the guilt
of not having any children.
The story built around a canine
character is so intense, we identify with the psychological tension building up
in Damaris. And, every sentence hits the bull’s-eye; not an extra word is
written. The forte of description is equally brilliant like the plots that make
The Bitch a powerful story that takes
not so many pages. Here, the coastal life comes alive and also the symbols of
decay that overshadow the harshness. This work makes us realize how strong and
feeble at the same time are human thoughts, emotions, relations, expectations
and persona.
Author: Pilar
Quintana
Translator: Lisa
Dillman
Publisher: WorldEditions
Author's
Photo Credit: https://www.worldeditions.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/AP_Quintana_c_DaniloCosta.jpg
Review Copy
Courtesy: World Editions
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