Four Crimes Retold Alia Trabucco Zerán Translated by Sophie Hughes Coffee House Press ($16.95)
by Henry Hietala
Alia Trabucco Zerán’s latest book is not about femicide. This is a necessary disclaimer: many recent Latin American books about crime, both fiction and nonfiction, feature women as victims, including Selva Almada’s Dead Girls, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, and Roberto Bolano’s 2666. Trabucco Zerán, on the other hand, has written about gender violence from another angle, with women as the perpetrators.
When Women Kill focuses on four murderers from Chilean history. These aren’t likable femme fatales: they kill their husbands, poison innocent children, and engage in SVU-style dismemberment. Drawing on these cases, Trabucco Zerán makes an unconventional argument, that “remembering ‘bad’ women is also a task of feminism.” The author isn’t exonerating these women; she is reclaiming them, a hazardous task she performs with rigor. Trabucco Zerán isn’t interested in motive so much as the public reactions to the murders, which follow similar patterns. Faced with “feminine violence,” the media and legal system turn to gender stereotypes, arguing that women only kill out of jealousy or hysteria. Reporters dissect the killers’ sex lives and frame an interaction with an Indigenous woman as witchcraft. One lawyer even mentions menopause as a likely motive.
As the trials drag on, the killers and their defense teams exploit these sexist stereotypes to their own advantage. If violent women are hysterical, then how can they be held responsible for their actions? The media and courts almost uniformly buy these informal insanity pleas. The women receive little prison time, or none at all. Trabucco Zerán doesn’t frame these light sentences as a victory for homicidal girl bosses, but as a consequence of patriarchy. If violence is the province of men, then how can you explain a killer woman? The only sensible response is labeling her “crazy.”
In propulsive prose impeccably translated by Sophie Hughes, Trabucco Zerán recounts each case in the present tense. At crucial points in the narrative, she integrates diaristic asides about her research process, which reveal the Chilean government’s efforts to hide the existence of these violent femmes. There are echoes here of other buried histories, other disappearances.
Trabucco Zerán also brings in other works of art related to the crimes. The strangest is an exhibition involving photographs of a victim’s limbs; in a brilliant piece of analysis, the author writes, “And what better than an unidentifiable, mutilated body as the metaphor for the dismembered patria of the early 1990s.” Not every observation is a win, like a meandering passage about the French surrealists, yet even when Trabucco Zerán overstretches her argument, readers can still appreciate the experiment.
Like other great books of crime writing, When Women Kill is more about society’s response to violence than the violence itself. Trabucco Zerán doesn’t excuse her killer women, nor does she condemn them. Instead, she explores how, in a sexist society, the reaction to their crimes is all too predictable. As one mid-century Chilean magazine wrote, “Gone are the days when women would drink vinegar in order to faint like damsels before their cheating partners. No, now they wield automatic pistols and settle hateful betrayals with bullets.”
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Sean Thor Conroe’s provocative debut novel Fuccboi opens with a brief and oddly charming vignette: the narrator has a dispute with the cashier at his local Fresh Grocer about whether coffee filters are on sale. “She was like This muhfucker. What aisle.” After an exchange marked by vague antagonism, the narrator states: “It connected us. It marked the start of a long, fruitful, and strictly nocturnal friendship.” Antagonism, in this refreshing and hard-hitting passage, ultimately gives way to a kind of familiarity, a bond.
Fuccboi has been called a work of autofiction, though neither the similarity between the novel and the author’s life nor the gesture of naming his narrator Sean Thor Conroe are definitive proof of this, and there are places where the narrative clearly diverges from Conroe’s biography. But undue attention to such fidelities or divergences obfuscates the possibility that all fiction, at bottom, is autofiction. As Roland Barthes states in The Rustle of Language with reference to Proust: “‘I’ is not the one who remembers, confides, confesses, he is the one who discourses; the person this ‘I’ brings on stage is a writing self whose links with the self of civil life are uncertain, displaced.” This speaks to the provocation offered by Fuccboi not only because, like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the narrator shares undeniable similarities with the author, but also (and more importantly) because of the true autonomy of literature: its resistance to unambiguous determination.
In a recent interview with Alec Gewirtz, Conroe refers to the book’s “narrative voice.” Whether intentional or not, the resonance with Maurice Blanchot’s essay “The Narrative Voice” should not be missed. Here, Blanchot considers a mode of writing that does not afford any distance. He has in mind writers like Beckett and Duras whose writing, in his words, “allows the neutral to speak” through an alienating proximity. This relies on a certain aesthetic flattening, with “characters” no longer fleshed out portraits, but merely voices, figures. In this kind of writing, language itself shines forth in all of its neutrality, disrupting the theater-like distance imagined by writers like Flaubert.
At the beginning of his essay, Blanchot evokes fatigue: “the experience of weariness that constantly makes us feel a limited life.” The twists and turns of Conroe’s novel recall both of Blanchot’s points here (alienating proximity and fatigue), but perhaps inversely: the unrelenting style of Fuccboi—which is consistent to the point of flattening everything out—means that the same weight is given to an account of an event as to an account of a thought. Though it may seem abstract, this introduces an ambiguity into the text, the very title of which seems to invite controversy. On the narrative level, this flattening makes it difficult not only to interpret the events in the novel, but also to evaluate the narrator’s own interpretations.
This brings us to the problem of fatigue. Because the earlier sections are so vital and fresh, they end up being more gripping and effective than later portions; once the narrative style is established—a style that relies heavily on slang, contemporary references, and a text- or tweet-like cadence—its novelty wanes, which ultimately has a deleterious effect. To be sure, there are instances of beautiful poetry throughout, but for the reader approaching the end of the novel, fatigue sets in.
This readerly fatigue coincides with increasing self-reflection on the narrator’s part. Whereas the opening is thematically light and stylistically refreshing, those same qualities might mask the gravity of the latter portions. As Jay McInerny nicely summed up this tension in his review at TheWall Street Journal, “Fuccboi is long on style and short on incident.” Nearing the end, the narrator’s increasingly frequent self-reflection paradoxically results in the reader’s growing confusion as to the narrative’s stakes, precisely because this self-reflection is given the same brisk treatment as the concurrent narrative events.
At the center of the novel is Sean’s intense skin condition, which becomes a major obstacle to his ability to function, both within the narrative and perhaps even as a narrator. However, as McInerny notes, this “may or may not have a spiritual corollary—the author doesn’t seem to invite this kind of analysis.” McInerny is right, and this is an irony for a novel so focused on self-examination: Sean’s condition welcomes a reading in which his physical condition would correspond to his moral character, or at least to his reflections on it. This is perhaps the most apt opportunity for the text to clarify the relative importance of event and interpretation. But it ultimately ends up as one of what the narrator calls “moments of illumination that faded into disorientation before I could even identify, let alone capture them.” Again, if we entertain the parallel between narrator and author, this particular reflection is doubled, to the detriment of both.
These critiques should not be understood as being in service of a value judgment, but rather, perhaps, suggest that Fuccboi demands to be read at least twice: once straight through, and then again from the ending backwards. Only in this way does its social or political timeliness resonate, and the complex relation between its style and its form become clear.
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In the annals of travel and travel writing, few adventurers have been as intrepid as Lucy Atkinson—yet she has been largely forgotten. Her book, Recollections of Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants, was originally published in 1863 in an edition of 900 and quickly slipped into oblivion, perhaps because it did not mesh with then-current conceptions of Victorian womanhood. Thankfully, a new edition just published by Signal Books restores this lost classic to print, capably edited by Nick Fielding and Marianne Simpson and with a comprehensive introduction.
In the winter of 1848, Lucy Atkinson set out from Moscow with her new husband, Thomas, on an epic journey through remote areas of Siberia, the Altai Mountains, and what is now eastern Kazakhstan. Traveling on horseback with a pair of pistols in her saddle, Lucy spent the next six years exploring this largely unknown region where “an Englishwoman was an object they had no conception of.”
The expedition’s purpose was for Thomas, an artist, to sketch and paint the wild and beautiful landscapes as they went. During the course of their journey, Lucy gave birth to their son, Alatau, during a bleak winter in the remote mountains after which he is named. As they traveled, they often stayed with nomadic Kazakhs, who moved their auls with the season, as well as with the indigenous Kalmyk and Buryat people. Her husband wrote two well-received books about their journeys, which made him something of a celebrity. Back in London, two years after her husband’s death in 1861, Lucy was persuaded by publisher John Murray to write her own memoir of those years.
Throughout Recollections of Tartar Steppes, Atkinson’s appealing personality and sharp wit shine through. Her style is vivid and engaging, her careful description often laced with ironic overtones and wry asides. She also provides a running commentary on the lamentable strictures on women in Western society as well as among the nomadic Kazakhs. The book is structured as a series of letters to an unnamed friend, a common convention of the time, which allows Atkinson to adopt a familiar, confiding tone peppered with acerbic, often humorous comments on a wide range of topics, from the comforts of sleeping in bearskins to the stultifying lives of officers’ wives in far-off outposts. The epistolary structure also allows Atkinson to skip around quite a bit and vary her focus so that, for example, an episode where she bargains with a Buryat family for a reindeer for her son to ride leads directly into a discussion of the excellence of picnics in Siberia.
Whether describing her technique for fashioning hats or the proper way to ford a raging river on horseback, Atkinson is refreshingly modest even as the reader grows ever more astounded by her resourcefulness and courage. Atkinson is also particularly observant of the customs and dress of the women she meets. Here she is describing a young Kazakh woman:
The younger one was a very pretty girl, with large black eyes; she excited both my interest and curiosity. Her dress was composed of striped silk of various colours, in form like a dressing-gown, and tied round the waist with a magnificent shawl; she had on black velvet trousers and boots, her hair was braided into a multitude of plaits, each one of which was ornamented with coins of various kinds, silver and copper, some even of gold: thus the young lady carried her fortune about with her.
For the first hundred pages or so, as she recounts a journey of thousands of miles on horseback, Atkinson gives no hint that she was, in fact, pregnant. It is only after the harrowing premature birth of her son that she coyly mentions his arrival:
Here I have a little family history to relate. You must understand that I was in expectation of a little stranger, whom I thought might arrive about the end of December or the beginning of January; expecting to return to civilisation, I had not thought of preparing anything for him, when, lo! and behold, on the 4th November, at twenty minutes past four pm, he made his appearance.
Besides being a stirring adventure story, Atkinson’s memoir is also a rare firsthand chronicle of a time when the Russian Empire was in the process of constructing forts ever-farther southward in the early stages of the “Great Game” that was to accelerate later in the nineteenth century. Atkinson also extensively chronicles the ways of the Kazakh people at a time when their nomadic lifestyle was just beginning to be threatened by the incursions of the Russian Empire (and which would be outlawed under the Soviet Union, leading to mass starvation in the 1930s). As the Atkinsons travel through remote areas of Siberia, Lucy also recounts their many visits with the famous Decembrist exiles, banished by the Czar in 1826 when their plans for a coup were revealed.
This new edition of Atkinson’s memoir includes a comprehensive introduction that greatly extends our knowledge of Lucy and Thomas, both before and after their travels—not long ago, not even Lucy’s maiden name was known. Excellent as the introduction is, there is one problematic editorial decision: Throughout her memoir, Atkinson refers to the “Kirghis steppe” or a “Kirghis yurt” or a group of “Kirghis riders” when, in fact, she is referring to Kazakhs. This was a universal usage (and mistake) in the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, when Westerners made no distinction between the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz who lived farther south in what is now Kyrgyzstan (and also because “Kazakh” was too easily confused with “Cossack,” two very different groups whose names derive from the same etymological root). The editors briefly explain this, but then go on to “correct” all of Atkinson’s references to “Kirghis,” substituting “Kazakh” instead within Atkinson’s memoir. This is a dubious decision at best. Atkinson never once used the term “Kazakh” in her memoir, and it would have been an alien term to her when writing in 1863.
The fact is that Lucy and Thomas traveled with and lived among the Kazakhs for years—but always referred to them as Kirghis, as did all their contemporaries. This kind of misappelation, universal as it was for well over a century, is significant in itself and should not have been “corrected” in an historical text. While the editors’ emendation might lessen a general readers’ confusion, it also conceals a very suggestive and significant fact. The inaccurate use of “Kirghis” says a lot about the knowledge, attitudes, and preconceptions of Westerners exploring Central Asia in those times. A more detailed note about this was called for from the editors, but the text itself should not have been altered.
This caveat aside, the editors do provide a richly detailed account of Lucy’s early life and her struggles after the death of Thomas. Atkinson’s ensuing legal battle with her husband’s first wife has enough plot twists and skullduggery to be worthy of a Dickensian novel and makes for absorbing reading. The introduction weighs in at seventy pages, though, so first-time readers of Atkinson’s memoir—nearly all readers—would be well advised to read just the jacket flap copy and the first three pages of the introduction before diving into the memoir itself. Only then will the reader be prepared to appreciate the many revelations in the introduction, including the strange circumstances that lead to Thomas not being able to even mention Lucy and their son in his two books about their travels.
Much of the material in the introduction is based on new discoveries in archives and on Thomas Atkinson’s extensive journals, which became available only recently. The editors of this new edition go well beyond John Massey Stewart’s useful but flawed book on the Atkinsons, Thomas, Lucy & Alatau (Unicorn, 2018). Whereas Massey Stewart is too often given to unfounded speculation based on inadequate research, Fielding and Simpson present a balanced and detailed portrait of one of the most interesting and daring couples of the nineteenth century. This new introduction, together with the material on Fielding’s website dedicated to the Atkinsons (siberiansteppes.com) and his previous book on the Atkinsons, South to the Great Steppe (First, 2015), now comprise a firm foundation for all future research on this historically significant couple. For the general reader, though, it is Atkinson’s engaging and effervescent memoir itself that will be of primary interest.
When you read Latin American literature in English, there’s a good chance you’re reading a translation by Suzanne Jill Levine, who has been plying her craft since the early 1970s. Her versions of books by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, and Manuel Puig (to name but a few) have enriched the lives of English-speaking readers, and her work has had an impact comparable to that of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s Proust or Constance Garnett’s Dostoevsky—not only literary but cultural. Levine also has had the vision and bravado to become a protagonist in the story of Latin American literature in English translation, and to change it in the process, not only publishing biographies and translations, but also creating a mashup of autobiography and scholarship that’s totally original.
I met Levine several years ago when we were both on a panel organized by the filmmaker, translator, and scholar Magdalena Edwards. We’ve kept in touch, and when she invited me to interview the Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel to help promote her book Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (Seven Stories Press, 2020), I agreed and sent a few questions for the translator as well. This interview is the result.
Erik Noonan: In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival, a professor is conscripted to translate communications from an alien life form that has come to Earth to deliver a message. The pictographic script they use to try to communicate with humankind turns out to be the very thing they traveled here to bring us, because when you learn to use it, your perception of time changes and you become clairvoyant. The aliens are warning us, the translator learns, so that we can avert catastrophe, a message complicated by the fact that she can now foresee her abandonment by her lover and the terminal illness of their child. So: If you were an alien from the future of outer space, landing on the Earth of today, what new language would you bring to us humans?
Suzanne Jill Levine:Arrival was a very intriguing film, and it was stimulating to see translation represented so creatively. I can imagine a couple of steps relevant to the film’s “message” to avert catastrophe. First, SILENCE would be a good beginning to reduce the mindless noise signifying nothing, i.e., the utterings of Trump, Trumpites, and all the violent political noise from both left and right that followed as an aftermath. Second, eliminate the underlying and increasingly insidious censorship in public discourse. Third, language aside, the whole world, no group excluded, should work toward zero population, a vital movement that got shoved onto the back burner and then fried to oblivion. Also, could we save the Amazon (the region not the company) while we’re at it?
EN: The National Book Award for Translated Literature was discontinued for many years, but happily was revived a few years ago. I covered the 2019 prize and noted the books that made it to the short list all shared a certain sort of sentence, which one might say was balanced, neutral, tasteful—with one exception, Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (New Directions, 2019), translated by Ottilie Mulzet. And that book won. I drew some conclusions from this outcome as to what the prize says about the supposed market for literature and an industry in which many hands are on a piece of writing before it’s published. Do you pay attention to prizes and awards?
SJL: Well, I am a judge for the National Translation Award this year, an activity I have avoided for years. I was invited to be an NBA judge when I was quite young, in 1978, and even before, on the translation prize committee at Columbia University. And of course, I myself have received numerous prizes and awards over the years, but still, I would agree with you about the constraints of committee work. When I was on NEA and NEH committees (decades ago), there was more elbow room, and better choices could sometimes win out. I would say that at least half the time, prizes and awards are determined by cliques, identity politics, and/or what’s “trendy.” Every once in a while, a miracle happens—or used to happen, especially with the more significant prizes—but I have very little faith right now in these precariously chaotic times. Nowadays the danger is not only “neutral” sentences as you say but also alternative trends that confuse illiteracy with creativity. It seems to me that dogma, political agendas, or an impoverished sense of aesthetics have come to dominate the world of culture.
EN: In your biography Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), you ask, “Are we fascinated by the lives of writers because we want to be writers?” Am I fascinated by the life of a translator because I want to be a translator? What kind of writer is a translator?
SJL: As we know, there are all manner of writers great, good, and bad—and the same goes for translators. I think there are fewer great translators than “original” writers, though. This sounds a bit cranky, I admit, but perhaps the main point is that a true translator is (i.e., should be) a writer. When I wrote the question above, I was speaking about my own “(w)rite of passage” as it were.
EN: In The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Dalkey Archive, 2009), you anticipate the claim of a hypothetical reader that your translation of male writers recapitulates, symbolically and actually, the servile position of women vis-à-vis men in a misogynist society, and that it therefore furthers the oppression of women. You reply that our concepts of authorship and originality are inadequate to grasp what a translator does. You were on a mission to promulgate the work of outsiders back then, and now I think you’re translating more women than men. If that’s right, is this change programmatic, or is it just happening that way?
SJL: The context of my era was the discovery of a treasure trove of writers in Latin America, what was called the “Boom,” and I was translating some of the more original and non-mainstream authors at that time. Thankfully I continue, here and there, to discover new artists (which includes, from Puerto Rico, Eduardo Lalo and queer writer Luis Negrón) and I am glad to be working with such fabulous women writers as Cristina Rivera Garza, Guadalupe Nettel, and of course Silvina Ocampo, who I began to translate in the 1970s as an early U.S. fan of hers. I’m also glad to be working with poets like Marjorie Agosín, Alejandra Pizarnik and others, including outsider men as well as women. I have been drawn to outsiders always, maybe because in some ways I am an outsider. We definitely continue to live in a misogynist society, as the Supreme Court has unfortunately confirmed, and among the vast numbers of misogynists are, alas, some women. (Hence instead of Hillary we elected a madman named Trump.) Misogyny doubtlessly has plagued my life and career as it has so many hardworking women in the arts and various professions. Feminism, like the movements that protest all forms of racism, is about respecting and accepting women and otherness. My work as a translator has been very much about respect for difference. And exploring difference as an aesthetic path as well.
EN: Mario Vargas Llosa’s review of your biography of Manuel Puig is fascinating; he compliments your skillful portraiture and slights your subject at the same time. Was a certain snobbism at play there, perhaps? Or did he envy Puig? What can a writer even do with a reaction like that? Do you read reviews of your books?
SJL: I greatly admire Mario who is brilliant, prolific, brave and hugely accomplished, but, as you say, it might have been a mixture of envy (even though, of the two, Mario is the Nobel Prize winner!) and patriarchal “snobbism” or perhaps an incapacity to “get” the aesthetics and ethics of Puig’s works. It was a strong reaction, for sure, and I think Mario probably did the review in two minds, wishing to give me the credit he felt I was due, for which I am grateful, but at the same time defending the kind of writer he is as opposed to the kind of writer Puig was, even though, like others, Vargas Llosa has even been influenced by Manuel Puig.
EN:TheSubversive Scribe can be read as the forerunner of a literary subgenre that should exist but doesn’t—books by translators that are equal parts autobiography and aesthetics. Jennifer Croft’s recent Homesick (Unnamed Press, 2019) comes close perhaps, but your book seems to be totally sui generis. Why aren’t there more like it?
SJL: An avalanche of books about translation by translators has followed mine, and even Gregory Rabassa finally wrote, toward the end of his career, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents (New Directions, 2005). Of more recent books, I think Mark Polizzotti’s Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto (MIT Press, 2019) is quite perceptive, but to answer your question: Why my book is sui generis is because I undertook a laborious task. That is, no other writer on the topic had taken the time or the trouble to reenact or to retrace prose translation in motion, highlighting detail in a readable way. I showed both broad strokes and elusive details—a poetics of the particular, as it were—while distinguishing what effects in the original that translation was trying to bring to life.
EN: Your reminiscences of friends, scattered throughout your critical and theoretical work, are really striking. There are those of us who wonder if we have any right to expect a memoir or a novel from you—an abstraction or distillation of that world. Is there something in the works?
SJL: Yes---I have been working on it for some time, and have finally written a kind of “translator’s memoir” although it is really both more and less than that. Now all we need is a publisher with the ingenuity to bring it to press.
Harry Potter fans’ initial interest in The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting may be to dive into the story of the actress behind one of the franchise’s most delightful and curious characters. Surely a character as carefree and unapologetically herself as Luna Lovegood must be played by someone just as delightful and whimsical. But from the start (as cued by the subtitle), readers are instead drawn into the world of a charming but complex girl becoming a woman, and the book will impress readers with its witty but tender commentary far beyond any behind-the-scenes secrets.
Evanna Lynch offers here a very personal account of becoming aware of herself as a human in a body and the subsequent journey she took to avoid adulthood at all costs. She carries readers with her through her war with perfectionism and profound sense of unworthiness during her years-long battle with anorexia, an illness around which she forms not only an identity, but a sense of security. Her candid account of the mind of a person with anorexia is both brutal and insightful, told with equal parts sarcastic wit and profound empathy. She recounts with almost jarring clarity stories of her medical treatment, family dynamics, and return to creative exploration as she bounced between the poles of existence and uncertainty.
Lynch does spend time telling the Harry Potter portions of her story, but she doesn’t become the Luna that fans came to know and love until nearly two thirds of the way through. She never, in fact, becomes the tidily recovered former anorexic the media portrayed her to be either. To paint her this way was a profound injustice to her journey and the complicated woman that she is. The length and wordiness of her memoir may seem intimidating initially, but Lynch makes no mistake in her choice of language as she tells her story on her terms. Every word, every aside, every snarky observation and gut-wrenching moment of vulnerability is worth it.
A significant amount of criticism of the treatment of eating disorders, and mental health treatment in general, makes it clear from the first pages that this book is not a “how-to” guide to recovery from disordered eating. The author’s careful description of her struggles, and her intentional lack of detail around weight, measurement, and behaviors, are all purposeful attempts to make this book about her journey and not about becoming a “better anorexic” (a phrase that can mean very different things). Lynch’s insight into the needs of a person struggling with disordered eating to feel connected to presence, purpose, and a more creative sense of the world is much more valuable.
Whether eliciting loud cackles, grief-filled groans, or hopeful tears, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting makes readers keenly aware of the power of our own inner voice to control the war between contempt and celebration of the body and all its creative, embodied expressions. The final pages of Lynch’s memoir describe the glory of her journey perfectly: “My negative thoughts interrupt my practice rudely, telling me it’s impossible, that it was pathetic to imagine my woefully ordinary body could ever manage such impressive feats, but I no longer indiscriminately believe this voice . . . I know something I didn’t before: that secretly, though we may never discover them all, the body contains miracles.”
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María José Ferrada’s debut novel, How to Order the Universe, unfolds like a litany of palpable sonnets. Ferrada organizes her work in short, breathable chapters, each of which is constructed like a poem without ever feeling pretentious. Each chapter retains a quality of self-consciousness, however, reminiscent of a clean one-liner or that tone-shifting couplet at the end of a sonnet.
Eight-year-old protagonist M and her father, D, have teamed up as traveling salespeople in 1970’s Chile. They sell hardware under the brand name Kramp, and the Kramp catalog quickly becomes M’s bible. D teaches M about salesmanship, the value of self-presentation, quid pro quo, and the necessity of pragmatism in all things. M, meanwhile, learns about silence: the effect of a child’s gaze on a business transaction, the power of feigning innocence or ignorance, and the ease of wordlessly agreeing with her father—including about the fact that it would be best that they keep her recurrent truancy from her mother.
Much of the book follows the trajectory of M and D’s relationship from father-daughter to employer-employee. She negotiates herself a going rate, and he uses the presence of his daughter to soften potential buyers and frustrated customers. Despite the quiet self-interest that D studiously passes on to his daughter, the heart of this story is the unspoken loveliness of their partnership. She draws him pictures of flowers and beetles. He draws her fish and whales. Over their travels, she slips into his sample case “letters of this kind: ‘I like being your assistant’” and D responds “with phrases like: ‘I’m pleased!’” Ferrada recreates that joyful moment when you, a child, are treated like an adult and a person by someone who is already both of those things. D lets her drink coffee in the evening, smoke cigarettes, skip school, and spend time with other salesmen who say things like “sonofabitch” and “fucking whore.” But he also tries to build her up with warm tea, compensatory gifts, and the respect of abstaining from sentimentalities.
Ferrada’s book is one of those that offers itself as part of a grey area verging on YA. She trusts her young narrator with the hard edges of reality while still maintaining the authorial distance to convey that quintessential coming-of-age disorientation as a young person tries to figure out how to order their universe. In Ferrada’s hands, one of the limitations of the genre becomes its greatest tool: the shrouding of the reader from the climactic moment—whether it be sex, violence, or violation—parallels the phenomenon of los desaparecidos taking place silently in the background of D and M’s story. So many people disappeared. In Argentina at the time, the military junta was flying planes out over the Atlantic and dropping live bodies. In Chile, M’s countrymen were quietly sent to the mass graves and political prisons that gave Pinochet his infamy. People ceased to exist, and anyone, including some of M’s fellow professionals, who sought to uncover anything about the disappeared would soon disappear themselves.
In the sparse, poetic style of contemporaries like Jenny Offill, Ferrada captures the sleight of hand that was civil society in Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship, the disappearing act of M’s childhood, and the uncanny reality where everyone knows something is wrong all along.
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Daisy Fried’s The Year the City Emptied presents her take on bringing the poems of Baudelaire into the contemporary North American tongue. At once boisterous and witty, there’s also more than a fair bit of gloominess cast over the project, as Fried was writing during short breaks from caring for her husband, poet Jim Quinn, as he lay “slowly dying of a cruel disease that attacked his body and mind” in their Philadelphia rowhouse throughout the beginning of the Covid shutdown. In some poems she throws shade on unhelpful bureaucratic healthcare officials and reflects upon anti-police protests rocking the city. Rising above the gloom, however, is the work’s overall vibrancy, making it not only an engaging read but also a first-class practicum in poetic assimilation from one language and time into another.
Any sense of pretentious drollery regarding her own bona fides is immediately dispensed with: “I don’t know French well and I don’t like Baudelaire much.” Yet Fried is drawn to the work because, as she says in the introduction, “his disgust is glorious, and diagnostic,” and notably worth our while: “We in America could use more romantic self-disgust.” Baudelaire’s malaise—much like that of Poe, who he translated and heralded—provides a kind of countering to Whitman’s celebratory self-prophesizing, an Americanism mirrored by the self-congratulatory nature of much of today’s social media. Fried likewise revels in the morose monotony of living:
The limping days are so fucking long Snowed under by years and years and years and years. Say it: Boredom born of apathy Achieves immortality. Body, you’re nothing: Bag of dread and granite crag, magma cooked, Old sphinx in a fog, mumbling to self, Forgotten by the whole giddy world, Haranguing in the dwindling light.
from “Temper” [2] [after Baudelaire’s “Spleen 2”]
What more perfect company could have been asked for during the stress of the pandemic and the beloved’s slow death? To immerse herself in poems calling on her to bring them into her own tongue creates a kind of escape:
Immense abyss, Lull and lullaby me. Doldrums, Mirror my despair!
from “Music” [after Baudelaire’s “La Musique”]
This is how a poet lives and works with language, both her own and foreign: thinking through its ebbs and flows, interacting in concurrent fashion with past and future ranges discovered across the scope of its possibilities in the present. And there are no rules, only markers for what needs be moved beyond: “I’m sure—no, I hope—I got many things wrong about the French. I take that as an achievement.” When the poem has all that is required, accuracy takes a backseat. With The Year the City Emptied, Fried has given the poem Everything.
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How do we comprehend life, especially when faced with death? What does it mean to be empowered while being pulled into a place where unknown forces reign supreme? How do we describe the ineffable in mere words? Laraine Herring’s treatise on life and death, A Constellation of Ghosts, begins with a diagnosis (cancer) and a recollection of a father’s heart attack at age seven. The world for the narrator changes in an instant, and a new trajectory of life immediately begins:
A raven appears between the panes, right leg shorter than the left, a lit Pall Mall cigarette clipped in its beak. . . . The raven cocks its head, its right eye finding yours, and winks as it steps through the keyhole, turns back for the dead cigarette, and then hops to your bare feet. You reach your hand through the hole and touch the exterior pane, the world on the other side of it increasingly unfamiliar. You retreat and the raven fans its wings and leaps to your shoulder and its cool breath raises the hair on your still-naked flesh. You have no words for this.
Thus begins the narrator’s relationship with the raven, a symbol for and mirror to the narrator’s existential searching.
When faced with death, or near-death, most people ask the same question: Why? But others, like this narrator, decide to learn from the opportunity and see the light through the darkness. There is power in words, and Herring taps into that power to choose how her life’s trajectory will go. She begins a dialogue with her deceased father, whom she comes to believe has taken the form of a raven to interface with her on the physical plane through this challenge in her life:
“Tell me, daughter, are you so attached to me that you will die as well or now that you are at your crossroads will you reconsider what you’ve held and toss it up and down and out so you can see from sea to shining sea what still can be? Are you ready? Shall we write a script?” His unpunctuated speech unspools your throat. All you’d ever wanted was one more chance to talk with him and so you whisper, while Shadow-you is filling out forms and calling your mother and researching words, while her cells are eating themselves, you whisper old-new words, “Daddy! Yes, let’s make a play!” “It will be a cast of only four: you and me and my mother and my father, and we will speak until there are no more words between us,” says Raven. “And then you can decide the ending.”
In alternating chapters, Raven and the narrator together weave a dream-like story, a form that feels appropriate for the topic of life and death as well as proportionate to the emotional magnitude of the narrator’s experience. Herring uses this weaving technique to display a return to an almost shamanic state of consciousness.
With existential realization comes a kind of primal recognition—a stripping down of sensory experiences, values, and beliefs, to determine what is at the core of importance. This is what Raven asks of the narrator, and what the narrator asks of herself in these dire circumstances. Herring makes clear that the narratives we form to create stories are not so different than the narratives we each form about the self, and that both are more fluid that she once believed:
I would traverse the obstacles, nearly losing everything only to find what I was seeking was within me all along and the closing credits would roll. But there’s no brass-laden soaring score to redeem me now. No a-ha moment when the audience magically understands the meaning behind the struggles and can relax, at ease knowing the heroine has suffered bravely and justifiably and has been redeemed through that suffering. Now, the audience understands, now we can love her freely. She has suffered for her wisdom. This narrative is false. This structure is a lie.
Beneath these narratives, the answers to her existential questions lie—figuratively and literally. In searching for self, the narrator also begins to come to terms with the grief she holds for her departed father. In a meandering way, she moves through surgery, hospitalization, dreams, and her interactions with Raven to find answers to big questions: What is time? What is a ghost? How does a ghost move through physical space? What is grief? In what ways does grief haunt? What does it mean to be alive? What meaning does life have when faced with the prospect of death?
A journey of mythical, shamanic proportions, A Constellation of Ghosts reminds readers that words do have power, that personal transformation is possible, and that sometimes an encounter with death is exactly the thing one needs to fully confront life.
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Often the most memorable depictions of the world’s end—Michael Haneke’s film Time of the Wolf, Cormac McCarthy’s survivalist novel The Road, the surreal apocalyptic futures of Brian Evenson—offer no easy explanation of how things have come undone. More important is the mythmaking involved in filling in the blanks and what that might say about the stories themselves. Lately, it seems as if each day catalogs new catastrophes both natural and man-made. When apocalypse does arrive, many of us likely won’t recognize it for what it is. Perhaps it’s already here.
Joy Williams’s fifth novel, Harrow, begins with Lamb, a teenager whose mother believes she died as an infant and saw a realm beyond—“some frightful chaos of non-being that nevertheless contained an observable yet incomprehensible future to which we would all be subjected”—and that her experience of the afterlife has given her a unique vision that could benefit others. Hoping to nurture this gift, she enrolls Lamb in a boarding school for special students, “an old sanatorium surrounded by beetle-ravaged pines and staffed with nervous self-regard by arguably the cleverest minds in the country.”
From there, the plot points don’t matter as much as the way the story moves: in leaps and bounds, littering a trail of sparkling, wondrous detail in its wake. Lamb’s mother disappears while seeking spiritual awareness. In searching for her, Lamb finds her way to a motel in Florida, where a group of elderly extremists hatch plots, speak in cryptic dialogue, and ultimately seek to punish those responsible for the end of the world. “They did not consider themselves ‘terrorists,’ reserving that word for the bankers and builders, the industrial engineers, purveyors of war and the market, it goes without saying, the exterminators and excavators, the breeders and consumers of every stripe, those locusts of clattering, clacking hunger.”
With its erratic pacing, fractured narrative, and shifting point of view, Harrow demands close reading, and it thoroughly rewards those who put in the work. Williams expertly constructs vivid scenes rendered in rich, prismatic language. One particularly memorable moment involves a birthday party at a bowling alley, aptly named “Paradise Lanes,” where endless pitchers of martinis result in crackling, frenetic dialogue. When it comes to characters, Williams has a gift for distilling an entire novel’s worth of ideas into a handful of pages. Several seemingly minor characters are given rich and intriguing backstories.
In his essay “He Stuttered,” Gilles Deleuze wrote, “A great writer is always like a foreigner in the language which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue.” This principle can be seen perfectly in Williams, whose writing is frequently electric on the sentence level; language itself is often the object of focus in Harrow. There’s much talk of words and names, whether they’re the right ones or the wrong ones, whether things will be remembered as they were or as they could have been. It isn’t immediately clear that the titular word refers to the tool that breaks up the surface of soil; considering that characters often speak of purgatory and judgment, it could refer to the Harrowing of Hell, the time between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. Within the world of the book, however, it’s obvious that the symbolism goes beyond what a literal reader may assume: “Representations of the harrow are in all government facilities that remain and homes are encouraged to display the image as well. It started out as a bit of nostalgia but devolved into a sign of respect, of self-acknowledgment. No one gives thanks to it of course, just respect. It’s a unifying symbol. Says, We will not be overcome.”
In Harrow, it’s possible that the societal symbols and signs that replace reality, as Jean Baudrillard theorized, have paved the way to a new human experience, one that is still grasping for the language to explain itself. We know the words are out there to explain what is happening to us, if only we could find them and put them in the right order.
Perhaps the broken narratives and fever dreams that form so much of communication today truly do reflect the world we find ourselves in. They might even come to resemble a wildlife crossing beneath a highway, a place not fit for humans, and one whose purpose has been forever lost in Harrow. As Williams writes, “The tunnel had been part of an old mitigation effort. Mitigation. No one knew the meaning of the word now. Words died like everything else.”
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Check back as we add more features and reviews in the next months!
Features:
Kenward Elmslie Kenward Elmslie was a lyricist, librettist, poet, novelist, playwright, composer, performer, collage artist, and publisher. He left us more than forty books, chapbooks, and sheet music publications. He also left behind countless long-time readers, admirers, and friends—we at Rain Taxi among them. In this memorial essay, one of his stalwart publishers offers a personal history and this advice: Seek out his work. By W. C. Bamberger
Translation in Motion: A Conversation with Suzanne Jill Levine Suzanne Jill Levine has had the vision and bravado to become a protagonist in the story of Latin American literature in English translation, and to change it in the process—not only publishing biographies and translations, but also creating a mashup of autobiography and scholarship that’s totally original. Interviewed by Erik Noonan
Fiction Reviews:
The Child Kjersti A. Skomsvold In The Child, Kjersti A. Skomsvold exposes us to a luminous, impassioned chronicle in which the tragedies and ecstasies of motherhood will trample and simultaneously renew the heart of the reader with unbridled force. Reviewed by J. Ahana-Laba
My Days of Dark Green Euphoria A.E. Copenhaver With humor, a sharp voice, and a cutting empathy, A.E. Copenhaver’s Siskiyou Prize-winning novel follows an environmentalist as she comes to terms with being alive in an increasingly broken world. Reviewed by Garin Cycholl
Fuccboi Sean Thor Conroe The unrelenting style of Sean Thor Conroe’s provocative debut novel, which relies heavily on slang, contemporary references, and a text- or tweet-like cadence, can be both tiring and refreshing—and introduces an ambiguity into the text, the very title of which seems to invite controversy. Reviewed by Bryan Counter
How to Order the Universe María José Ferrada, trans. Elizabeth Bryer María José Ferrada’s debut novel unfolds like a litany of palpable sonnets as it follows eight-year-old protagonist M and her father, D, who have teamed up as traveling salespeople in 1970s Chile. Reviewed by Bethany Catlin
Harrow Joy Williams Joy Williams’s writing is famed for being electric on the sentence level, and language itself is often the object of focus in her new novel Harrow, the tale of a lost Lamb in a ravaged country. Reviewed by David Peak
Poetry Reviews:
Refugee Pamela Uschuk The poems in Refugee, the latest book by Pamela Uschuk, render a world where individual action holds value and every life matters, with the stakes high on all fronts: “The mountains are burning and we cannot sleep.” Reviewed by Tara Ballard
Concrete Poetry: A 21st Century Anthology Edited by Nancy Perloff Concrete Poetry has been getting critical attention since the appearance of several anthologies some sixty years ago, but Nancy Perloff examines its stars more closely in her new anthology. Reviewed by Richard Kostelanetz
The Year the City Emptied Daisy Fried Baudelaire’s poems call on Daisy Fried to bring them into her own tongue in The Year the City Emptied, a first-class practicum in poetic assimilation from one language and time into another. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan
I Hope This Finds You Well Kate Baer In response to ugly responses to her Instagram blog, Kate Baer turned them into poems, erasing the negativity until hope bloomed on the page. Reviewed by Nancy Beauregard
Nonfiction Reviews:
The Bloomsbury Group Revisited Frances Spalding; Wendy Hitchmough Two recent books rejuvenate the legacy of the Bloomsbury Group men and women who, even though they did not consider themselves an official organization, ushered in new waves of artistic expression. Reviewed by Rasoul Sorkhabi
Refuse to Be Done Matt Bell All writers, whether first-time or experienced, will benefit from reading Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done, a novel-writing guide destined to join the upper echelons of the pantheon of craft books. Reviewed by Matthew Duffus
Witchcraft. The Library of Esoterica Edited by Jessica Hundley and Pam Grossman What makes a witch a witch, and what is witchcraft for? These are among the central questions explored in the lavishly illustrated Witchcraft, the latest release in Taschen’s Library of Esoterica series. Reviewed by Patrick James Dunagan
When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold Alia Trabucco Zerán In propulsive prose impeccably translated by Sophie Hughes, Alia Trabucco Zerán focuses on four murderers from Chilean history and makes an unconventional argument: that “remembering ‘bad’ women is also a task of feminism.” Reviewed by Henry Hietala
Recollections of Tartar Steppes and Their Inhabitants Lucy Atkinson In the annals of travel and travel writing, few adventurers have been as intrepid as Lucy Atkinson—yet she has been largely forgotten. Thankfully, a new edition of her engaging and effervescent 1863 memoir provides a richly detailed account of her life and travels. Reviewed by Timothy Walsh
The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting Evanna Lynch The former “Harry Potter” actor tells her story on her own terms, and in describing her struggles with disordered eating, displays how one's inner voice can control both contempt and celebration of the body. Reviewed by Lindsey Jodts
A Constellation of Ghosts Laraine Herring Depicting a journey of mythical, shamanic proportions, Laraine Herring's A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens poses a key question: How do we comprehend life when faced with death? Reviewed by Kelly Lydick
Young Adult Fiction Reviews:
How Do You Live? Genzaburō Yoshino, trans. Bruno Navasky Originally published in Japan in 1937, How Do You Live? was part of a conscious effort to steer children toward a more humanistic way of thinking and away from propaganda. One of the many students who read How Do You Live? was now-revered anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki, who has come out of retirement at age 81 to create a new film based on the book. Reviewed by John Colburn and Aki Shibata
Multi-Genre Reviews:
damn near might still be is what it is marcus scott williams Often reading like a gifted bohemian’s travel diary, the sparkling, near-poetic prose in this collection comes across as the result of happy accidents instead of deliberate intention. Reviewed by Steve Roberts
Her Read: A Graphic Poem Jennifer Sperry Steinorth In her book-length erasure of Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth tropes the very idea of “erasure” in reclaiming womxn’s representation and participation in art, clearing spaces for hope, joy, and the real work of living in and with pain. Reviewed by Joel Turnipseed
