Literature in Translation
1. Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, Trans. by Jennifer Croft
10 Rave • 9 Positive
“It’s a busy, beautiful vexation, this novel, a quiver full of fables of pilgrims and pilgrimages … The narrator, coolly evasive in the way of Rachel Cusk’s heroine in the Outline trilogy, relishes how travel and growing older allow her to become invisible … Interspersed with the narrator’s journey is a constellation of discrete stories that share rhyming motifs and certain turns of phrase. These vignettes often have the flavor of case studies … Shaggy maximalism is the ethic and aesthetic of Flights. It is thronged with plots and subplots … it feels impossible to connect to characters no sooner conjured than whisked away and replaced. Monotony settles in; we read at a remove, which feels cruel given that Tokarczuk’s aim is so clearly to train the eye to see more deeply … Still, as plots ramify and the cast grows, the individual vignettes are themselves sculpted, and anchoring. In Jennifer Croft’s assured translation, each self-enclosed account is tightly conceived and elegantly modulated, the language balletic, unforced. And Tokarczuk has a canny knack for reading the reader, for anticipating your criticisms.”
–Parul Sehgal (The New York Times)
*
2. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, Trans. by Ginny Tapley Takemori
9 Rave • 10 Positive
“You can add to this list…of…first-rate new novels … one pleasure of this book is her detailed portrait of how such a place [a convenience store] actually works. Yet the book’s true brilliance lies in Murata’s way of subverting our expectations. It’s not simply that Keiko finds liberation, even happiness, by becoming a cog in the capitalist machine, an unsettling idea when you think about it. Murata also makes us see how the family members who find her love of the store’s rituals strange are themselves trapped within a set of rules – dress this way, don’t talk like that, get married and have kids. But unlike her, they—and maybe we—don’t know it.”
–John Powers (NPR)
*
3. A Girl in Exile by Ismail Kadare, Trans. by John Hodgson
10 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed
“A Girl in Exile is the work of a historic talent who is still at the peak of his power. It confirms Kadare to be the best writer at work today who remembers—almost aggressively so, refusing to forget—European totalitarianism. Kadare tackles Albania’s specific strangeness with a ferocious rigor that would feel scientific if it were not for the haunted, haunting humans he writes into being. Albania is a different country now, but the way it exists for Kadare will continue to exist as long as he writes. Ghosts do not die.”
–Josephine Livingstone (The New Republic)
*
4. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, Trans. by Michael Hofmann
9 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed
“The scandalous, almost futurist velocity of Berlin Alexanderplatzundoubtedly contributes to its appeal. But while the book is funny, shockingly violent, absurd, strangely tender and memorably peopled, its lasting resonance lies not in its hulking antihero or picaresque narrative beats but rather in its collage-like depiction of the city … Luckily for readers, new and returning, Hofmann’s rhythmically pliable language renders a Berlin no less operatic for all its sordidness … For the contemporary reader, alert to the churning of Trump-stoked resentment and the rising of the far right worldwide, Berlin Alexanderplatz may prove a kind of cracked mirror. Döblin acts as both poet and prophet, though one wishes him only the well-deserved stature of the former.”
–Dustin Illingsworth (The Paris Review)
*
5. Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors, Trans. by Misha Hoekstra
8 Rave • 4 Positive • 2 Mixed
“In Mirror, Shoulder, Signal…she mixes both the comic and the melancholic mode found in her earlier work … Nors skillfully enacts the way most of us think: choppily and with frequent interruptions … From the reflective to the comic to the portentous in a matter of seconds, Sonja’s thoughts contain worlds … In the case of the driving scenes in Mirror, it is largely Nors’s light touch that ensures the symbolism goes down easy. In this way, the author distracts from the metaphorical implications of the lessons while still reaping the benefits of that metaphor. In the end, it’s Nors’s willingness to trade in the gently comedic, while still taking Sonja’s larger questing seriously, that makes Mirror, Shoulder, Signal such a complicated, and ultimately successful, balancing act.”
–Andrew Schenkel (Bookforum)
*
6. History of Violence by Édouard Louis, Trans. by Lorin Stein
6 Rave • 8 Positive
“Thanks to translator Lorin Stein [the translation of History of Violence] has retained its complexity, its startling physicality and its moral subtlety in English … Louis’s greatest strength as a writer is that he feels things so passionately, sometimes to the point of obsession, but that he also has a philosophical turn of mind that explores, rather than neutralises, his feelings…. The novel is superb at vividly recording the post-traumatic repercussions of rape.”
–Edmund White (The Guardian)
7. Aetherial Worlds by Tatyana Tolstaya, Trans. by Anya Migdal
8 Rave • 4 Positive
“Tolstaya is divinely quotable—slangy, indignant, lyrical, crude. She picks you up—you’re light as a feather—and carries you along. You’re blown this way and that, cuddled and cast down, mocked and treasured. You don’t know where you’re going. None of it makes a lick of sense. It’s all detritus. It’s all sublime. The important becomes unimportant … It is difficult to convey the gaiety and breadth of Tolstaya’s witchy craft.”
–Joy Williams (Bookforum)
*
8. Love by Hanne Ørstavik, Trans. by Martin Aitken
7 Rave • 4 Positive
“Love, a trim and electrifying novel … is undergirded by the present tense and made incandescent by Orstavik’s seemingly effortless omniscient perspective, sometimes switching between Jon’s mind and Vibeke’s from sentence to sentence … Orstavik’s mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality or sensationalism from trailing this story of a woman and her accidentally untended child … The primeval darkness of the forest looms, biting as the cold that seems a character throughout this excellent novel of near misses.”
–Claire Vaye Watkins (The New York Times Book Review)
*
9. Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Ingvild Burkey
7 Rave • 4 Positive • 3 Mixed • 1 Pan
“Knausgaard wrote these essays, he said in an interview, ‘for fun.’ And they are fun…and stunning and glorious. But Knausgaard is not funny. He’s perhaps wry … These essays will not intimidate anybody by their length; most are two to four pages … Yet even in the small space of these works, Knausgaard is able to ask intelligent ‘naive’ questions in the midst of discoveries, observations, and contemplations. It’s not agreeing or disagreeing with his opinions or being intimately connected to his experiences that is so gripping; it’s the seemingly endless stirring of his thoughts about the wide world out there that helps to stir ours.”
–Bob Blaisdell (The Christian Science Monitor)
*
10. Yellow Negroes and Other Magical Creatures by Yvan Alagbé, Trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith
8 Rave • 1 Positive
“…a must-read comic … Alagbé plays with expressive lines, with race, with the hint of love and sex, and the way that love and sex and race intersect in France … What appears on its face to be a story about the experience of African migrants trying to subsist in ’90s Paris quickly becomes about the mores surrounding interracial romance in France, race and class in France, France’s colonial history in Algeria, and the tensions that these forces exert on the individual. Illustrated in a style that oscillates between intensely worked-over figuration, where the hairs and skin textures of characters is visible, and simple, expressive sketches of urban life, Alagbé offers readers something poetic and moving. The story is messy and uncomfortable, but it is striking and moving in equal measure.”
–Shea Hennum (The AV Club)
***
Our System: RAVE = 5 points, POSITIVE = 3 points, MIXED = 1 point, PAN = -5 points
