Category: What I’m Reading

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What I’m Reading: THIS LITTLE ART by Kate Briggs

Lucked out by reading a really good book on a really good beach day in Tarragona, Spain.

You GUYS, this book! This book is so good! (It’s so good it made me come back to blogging. Whoops, re: the past however many months I’ve not updated this . . . ) Kate Briggs’s This Little Art is a 365-page essay on translation and the relationships it forges and exposes—and it’s so well-written and thoughtful and engaging that I blasted through it in like three days, snatching moments to read whenever I was sitting still and had it within reach.

My copy is very dog-eared, but here are a couple select excerpts:

“I would argue that this is what reading offers us: occasions for inappropriate, improbable identification. For powerful reality-suspending identification with a character, a writer, an idea, an experience, a fantasy. Fantasies that apparently have nothing to do with me – isn’t this, in its way, the power of a fantasy? – that do not appear to directly concern or pertain to me. But that catch me up nonetheless. Like a complicated miracle. Like the everyday complicated miracle of reading books written by other people – especially, perhaps, books in translation, originally written in languages we will never speak, about places we will never visit and experiences we will never have. Books that, through the work of translators, address us nevertheless, include us in the remit of their address (not by expanding it, necessarily, to some broad and flattened out universal of shared experience but, as in the haiku, but narrowing it and sharpening it to the absolutely local, the absolutely particular).”

And:

“Perhaps you’ll hear me say that there are works in French I haven’t truly? or fully? or properly? read because I have only? read them in translation, but that’s surely premised on the chance, the plausibility, of one day reading the originals. Mann on the other hand? Tolstoy, Ferrante, Kang? All those books? Yes, I’ve read them. Or, let me maintain that I have read them. Let me believe that what I have read in English partakes, in all its difference, of what you have read in German, in Russian, in Italian, in Korean. This, after all, has been the form of my aesthetic experience, my own expansive and authentic aesthetic experience. I notice that the more remote the languages seem from my own capacity to learn them, the more assertive I feel. Why is this? I am more willing to register and be troubled by the close, familiar differences than the more distant ones, I realize, and perhaps this is complicatedly true of all of us: when we are presented with a version of something that we know we can’t know, or not without some great, unlikely effort on our part, we are more prepared to accept how it comes, and to grow attached to the only form in which we are able to receive it.”

There’s so much measured, generous insight in this book. Go to your local independent bookstore and get it!

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What I’m Reading (And Reviewing): EMPTY SET

I should call this blog post “What I Read” because, really, I read this book back in April. But!: At Harvard Review Online, I’ve just published my review of Empty Set, written by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, translated by Christina MacSweeney, and published by the always awesome Coffee House Press.

(Above, the scene: a tasty toast, a pen for note-taking, a delicious coffee, and an ARC of Empty Set. Good company on my conference trip to Spain a few months ago, where I stopped in a bookstore-cafe for breakfast and review writing.)

“There are—I’m certain of this—things that can’t be told in words,” explains the self-described “visual artist who writes” Verónica Gerber Bicecci in her novel Empty Set, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney. Empty Set makes no attempt to tell only with words. Its fragmentary written vignettes are interspersed with sketches and explanatory diagrams that illustrate and, in some cases, build the understandings of its twenty-two-year-old narrator, Verónica. Acutely observant and persistently curious, Verónica’s voice powers the novel, guiding readers to travel its winding route with the same patience and wonder as its protagonist.

[Keep reading my review of Empty Set at Harvard Review Online…]

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What I’m Reading: HER MOTHER’S MOTHER’S MOTHER & HER DAUGHTERS

My latest read—and probably my last one of 2017—is Her Mother’s Mother’s Mother and Her Daughters by Maria José Silveira, translated from Portuguese by Eric M. B. Becker for Open Letter. I got my hands on this review copy at work, one of those few lucky happenings in which a book we assigned for review comes in the mail as a galley a few weeks after it’s already been requested for the reviewer’s purposes. The copy that finds its way to our office is thus free for the taking (and reading), and I was excited to tear into it.

The title of this novel tells you much of what it is; it’s a generational story, following a genealogical and chronological line of women’s lives. Set in Brazil, this novel takes us through 500 years of national history through the lives of its female characters, going from native clashes (and unions) with the first colonizers, to independence, to modernity. But it doesn’t purport to be a history book. What sucks me into this book is the incredible storytelling in each section, and the ease with which we leave one woman’s life for the next. Silveira paints a panorama of Brazilian womanhood, but does it without a single broad stroke; these characters are each given their own nuance and complexity. Though I am unable to read the original Portuguese, as a translator, I find myself stopping on occasion and just admiring what Becker has done with the English language, infusing it with humor and affection and poeticism in just the right balance.

I read the first half of the book in one go while on a plane, which allowed me to keep the constantly moving and growing family tree fairly straight—but when I landed and picked up the book the next night, I had pretty much forgotten whose daughter was whose daughter was whose . . . et cetera. The good news, though, is that it doesn’t really matter if you can’t keep the lineages straight past a few generations. What matters is the simple knowledge that these characters are all related, daughters of daughters of daughters, from the runaway slave to the plantation-owning slaveholder, from the native child stolen from her murdered parents to the revolutionary jailed in a convent in Rio.

This book is an admirable monster of imagination and detail, and still manages to move at a quick pace. A few words from the introductory note to draw you in, before I go back to reading . . .

“All right.

If that’s how you want it, I’ll tell you all the story of the women of the family. But let’s take our time.

It’s a sensitive subject, the family is a difficult one, and not everything in this story is wine and roses.”

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What I’m Reading: AMONG STRANGE VICTIMS

This weekend I finished reading Among Strange Victims, a novel written by Daniel Saldaña París and translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney for Coffee House Press. I picked this up at ALTA a couple months ago for a few reasons: 1) I was volunteering at the conference bookfair and it was hard to spend that much time with so many amazing books without getting at least one to take with me . . . , 2) One of my favorite Mexican writers, Valeria Luiselli, was published by Coffee House in Christina MacSweeney’s translation, so I trusted all the hands involved to impress me once again, and 3) A while back I read a really fantastic essay about writing in Mexico City by Daniel Saldaña París, so I was more than ready to hear his writing voice again!

The book didn’t disappoint. It’s funny and profound full of clever one-liners and sharp digressions. The story starts with Rodrigo, a loner who is content in his strange and mundane routines until the day he accidentally gets engaged to a coworker—named Cecilia, incidentally—and never really bothers to correct the mistake. Rodrigo marries Cecilia, loses many of his sacred routines, and finds himself part of a strange, eventually surreal mystery. The story moves from Mexico City to a dusty, tired town called Los Girasoles, and wraps in several more fun and bizarre characters and perspectives before its bizarre ending (resolution?). It’s a fun ride all the way through, with some lovely moments of deep meaning that are never lingered upon for too long.

When I finished the book, I closed it and stared at the ceiling, not  sure if I was happy with the ending—and I’m still not sure that I am. But “happy” is a silly thing to ask for from a book, right? And I sure did enjoy reading this book, all the way through, so I definitely recommend this read.

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What I’m Reading: “Colin Kaepernick Has a Job”

Once the semester started I lost all hope of reading books outside of my studies, but I still manage to get in a few good essays/pieces of literary journalism every week. One I’d like to recommend is this profile on Colin Kaepernick and his activism, written by Rembert Browne for Bleacher Report.

Rembert Browne is an amazing writer—I’ve been a fan of him for a couple years now after one fated evening-into-night session of reading everything he ever wrote for Grantland.

Nearly every paragraph of this profile packs a punch, but here’s a taste:

“When you are a minority and refute the notion that you were charitably allowed into a club—that you were being done a favor, not that you earned it—you will be punished, until it has been determined that you have learned your lesson. This has long been sport for white America, long before football. Slavery was for sport. Laws laced in hatred and hypocrisy were for sport. The invisible ceilings and roadblocks and hurdles—sport. The real tradition of this country is a testing of the limits of people of color, to see how far we can be pushed until we either give up (and give in) or fight back (and die).

The remaining option—to persist—is the one that has always been inconvenient for white America. Colin Kaepernick is inconvenient. To persist is to show strength, but also to be unpredictable, hard to define, impossible to control. And to grow stronger with every lash is to become dangerous—a threat not only to power, but to inspire others to follow suit. Leaders of color in this country have long been mythologized by white America when they teach their own to thrive within the confines of current rules, not when they demand that every rule be called into question.”

Read the full essay here.

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What I’m Reading: LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

Love in the Time of Cholera

I’m nearly finished with Love in the Time of Cholera, written by Gabriel García Márquez and translated (wonderfully) to English by Edith Grossman. I’ve been ten pages from finishing for a couple weeks now—gotta love that start-of-semester madness! (But I plan to finish the book tonight.)

What is there to say about this book?

Like all other García Márquez books, its engagement with language is absolutely masterful. (And major props to Edith Grossman for bringing that state of wonder into English.) García Márquez could have written engrossing toaster oven manuals if he’d tried. While the story is interesting in its own right, I’m really sticking around for the words—for the ways he surprises me, makes me smile with a turn of phrase, knocks my breath away with a simple description.

Enough of me, though. For a taste of what I’m talking about, here’s the master himself. This is just a short little excerpt to exemplify how downright pleasant this reading experience can be. (And again, let’s stress that this is in translation! Love to all the world’s translators.)

” . . . Then she urged him to say what he meant to say, because she knew that he, or any other man, would not have awakened her at three o’clock in the morning after so many years after not seeing her just to drink port and eat country bread with pickles. She said: ‘You do that only when you are looking for someone to cry with.'”

And here’s one more fun little moment:

“Once he tasted some chamomile tea and sent it back, saying only: ‘This stuff tastes of window.’ Both she and the servants were surprised because they had never heard of anyone who had drunk boiled window, but when they tried the tea in an effort to understand, they understood: it did taste of window.”