Looking Ahead in 2012
2012 is upon us and I am finally settling into it. As the 2011 reading list trails off, I am already piling up what to read in 2012. Again, it is that time of year were last year's translated novels are being bandied about, each one being sized up as a potential long-lister for the Best Translated Book Awards. This is an arduous process that ultimately boils down to passion and plain, good writing. With that in mind, the anticipation for what will make next year's list is simmering with each new publisher catalog I receive.
I can't possibly list everyone novel that I want to read, I can only go through some of my favorite publishers' offerings and give you a heads up on what to look out for when you're meandering the aisles of your local indie or loading up your online shopping carts. Let's take a look:
Archipelago
You knew I was going to bring them up, didn't you? They're that good. So let me run down some of their new titles for the first half of the year...
As Though She Were Sleeping
Chevillard’s characters in Prehistoric Times remind us of the inhabitants of Beckett’s world: dreamers who in their savage and deductive folly try to modify reality. The writing, with its reservations, its burlesque variations, its accelerations and ruptures, takes us into a frightening and jubilatory delirium, where the beginning of the story is forever deferred. With an entirely original voice and mind, Chevillard asks looming, luminous, and very funny questions about who we are, where we come from, and where we might be going.
Reminiscent of Cortázar's Cronopios and Famas, this incandescent collection of lyrical and often nightmarish visions—now in English for the first time—is a feast for the senses and mind. At once raw, chiaroscuro, unearthly, and musical, these dreamscapes shed light on the human condition, history, isolation and connection, death and rebirth. Warning: these bite-sized pieces may detonate within.
September 2012
The Croatian writer Miljenko Jergovic, whose remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro – winner of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize – was published by Archipelago, has masterfully created a novel which draws the reader into an episodic, profoundly personal recounting of a childhood destroyed by war. Narrated from one boy's perspective, Mama Leone’s episodic events are held together by several recurring motifs rather than a historical or narrative chronology. Dazzling, rhapsodic, and above all humane, Jergovic has created a novel that is simultaneously ultra-modern, grotesque, and suspenseful.
Open Letter Books
With their colorful, distinct cover designs and their superb choices, it looks like Open Letter is really hitting their stride this year. Eccentric, quirky and necessary, the books they've chosen to publish all look like they're worth reading.
The Smoke of Distant Fires
By Eduardo Chirinos
Translated from the Spanish
by G. J. Racz
January 2012
The Smoke of Distant Fires contains thirteen new poems from the contemporary Peruvian poet, essayist, critic, translator, and children’s book author, Eduardo Chirinos. Precisely organized and formally inventive, each poem in the collection is itself a collection of ten numbered stanzas, and each of the stanzas themselves are fully formed poems, a series of rhythmic, elliptical fables from a fully recognizable, yet wholly original, world.
The third collection of Chirinos’s poetry to appear in English, The Smoke of Distant Fires signals an exciting new direction in Chirinos’s poetics—its multivocal stanzas, evocative intertextuality, and enigmatic transparency join forces to perform a poignant interrogation of what it means to write poetry in the early twenty-first century.
The Cyclist Conspiracy
By Svetislav Basara
Translated from the Serbian
by Randall A. Major
March 2012
The Cyclist Conspiracy tells the tale of a secret Brotherhood who meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from contemplation of the bicycle, and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events; the Brothers are part of a conspiracy so vast and so secret that, in many cases, the conspirators themselves are unaware of their participation in it. Told through a series of “historical documents”—memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, and maps—the novel details the story of these interventions and the historical moments where the Brotherhood has made their influence felt, from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to a lost story of Sherlock Holmes.
Masterfully intertwining the threads of waking and dreams into the fabric of the present, the past, and the future, Svetislav Basara’s Pynchon-esque The Cyclist Conspiracy is a bold, funny, and imaginative romp.
Children in Reindeer Woods
By Kristin Omarsdottir
Translated from the Icelandic
by Lytton Smith
April 2012
Eleven-year-old Billie lives at a ‘temporary home for children’ called Children in Reindeer Woods, which she discovers one afternoon, to her surprise, is in the middle of a war zone. When a small group of paratroopers kill everyone who lives there with her,and then turn on each other, Billie is forced to learn to live with the violent, innocent, and troubled Rafael, who decides to abandon the soldier’s life and become a farmer, no matter what it takes.
A lyrical and continually surprising take on the absurdity of war and the mysteries of childhood, Children in Reindeer Woods is a moving modern fable.
My First Suicide
By Jerzy Pilch
Translated from the Polish
by David Frick
May 2012
Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddle the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. These stories reveal a nostalgic and poetic Pilch, one who can pen a character’s lyrical ode to the fate of his father’s perfect chess table in one story, examine a teacher’s desperate and dangerous infatuation with a student in the next, and then, always true to his obsessions, tell a remarkably touching story that begins by describing his narrator’s excitement at the possibility of a three-way with the seductive soccer-fan, Anka Chow Chow.
The stories of My First Suicide combine irony and humor, anecdote and gossip, love and desire with an irresistibly readable style that is vintage Pilch.
The Planets
By Sergio Chejfec
Translated from the Spanish
by Heather Cleary
June 2012
When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator’s thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago, during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes, hoping in this way to reanimate his friend and relive the time they spent together wandering the streets of Buenos Aires.
Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets is an affecting and innovative exploration of mourning, remembrance, and friendship by one of Argentina’s modern masters.
Dalkey Archive
Dalkey keeps growing and offering the high quality novels and translations that we have come to expect form them. They hold a special place in my Oulipian heart.
The Book of Emotions
By Joao Almino
Translated by Elizabeth Jackson
January 2012
Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions “a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera.” Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. João Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.
Mathematique
By Jacques Roubaud
Translated by Ian Monk
January 2012
The third “branch” of Jacques Roubaud’s epic, Proustian Great Fire of London, Mathématique: is also an excellent entrance into the series. Adopting math as a career relatively late in his studies, Roubaud here narrates his difficulties both personal and pedagogical, while also investigating the role of mathematics in his life as a remedy to all the messiness of lived experience. “I sought out arithmetic,” he writes, “to protect myself. But from what? At the time, I would probably have replied: from vagueness, from a lack of rigor, from ‘literature.’” But mathematics also provide a refuge from human fears, and from coping, eventually, with tragedies like the death of his wife Alix. As with the previous volumes of The Great Fire of London, Mathématique: is a riveting and humorous anecdotal memoir as well as a fiendishly digressive fiction about the functions of memory and the written word.
Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta
By Aglaja Veteranyi
Translated by Vincent Kling
January 2012
A nomadic family of circus performers, refugees from Romania, travels through Europe and Africa by caravan. The mother’s death-defying act causes constant anxiety for her two daughters, who voice their fears through a grisly communal fairy tale about a child being cooked alive in polenta—but their real life is no less of a dark fable, and one that seems just as unlikely to have a happy ending. An actor and performance artist as well as a poet and novelist, Veteranyi was acclaimed for her seemingly “artless” narrative voice, in which pain and hilarity always vie for the upper hand—a voice at once lyrical and jaded, prurient and spiritual, comical and horrifying.
Autoportrait
By Edouard Leve
Translated by Lorin Stein
February 2012
In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond “sincerity,” Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé’s prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine —until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author’s dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction . . . made entirely of facts.
The Family of Pascual Duarte
By Camilo Jose Cela
Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Back in action and sooo good! (Okay, I am pushing a little backlist. Sue me.)
New York Review Books
The tortured sophisticate of the bunch, NYRB consistently puts out delicious new titles and fantastic reprints of classics. It's difficult to ignore their discerning taste. Zweig, anyone?
Amsterdam Stories
By Nescio
Translated by Damion Searls
March 2012
Confusion
By Stefan Zweig
Translated by Anthea Bell
April 2012
In Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, a venerable privy councilor approaching the end of his career adds a “secret page” to the public record of his accomplishments, confessing the true story of his youthful initiation into the delights and perils of intense scholarship. After a first semester in Berlin more devoted to amorous adventures with local shop girls than books, he makes a fresh start in a small university town in central Germany where a professor’s brilliant lecturing style sparks a new all-consuming passion for learning and reading. He takes lodgings above the apartment of the professor and his wife and is soon a regular visitor there, dining with them on a daily basis and successfully inspiring the older man to make a fresh attempt to complete his magnum opus. And yet the professor’s enthusiasm for his devoted protégé alternates with cold scorn and sudden dismissals, leaving the perplexed student crippled by feelings of inadequacy and rejection, feelings only the professor’s frustrated young wife seems to understand. But the secret anguish behind the older man’s apparently irrational cruelty will not so easily out…
Laying bare the fraught relationship between human instincts and higher callings, physical longing and the desire for knowledge, muddled emotions and the quest for intellectual clarity, Zweig’s intoxicating novella probes the mysteries of the creative process and the limits of sublimation.
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
By Victor Serge
Translated by Peter Sedgwick
April 2012
Victor Serge is one of the great men of the twentieth century, anarchist, revolutionary, agitator, theoretician, historian of his times, and a fearless truthteller. Here Serge describes his upbringing in Belgium, the child of a family of exiled Russian revolutionary intellectuals, his early life as an activist, his time in a French prison, the active role he played in the Russian Revolution, as well his growing dismay at the Revolutionary regime’s ever more repressive and murderous character. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, and barely escaped the Nazis to find a final refuge in Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary describes a thrilling life on the frontlines of history and includes brilliant portraits of politicians from Trotsky and Lenin to Stalin and of major writers like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely. Above all, it captures the sensibility of Serge himself, that of a courageous and singularly appealing advocate of human liberation who remained undaunted in the most trying of times.
Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary was cut by a fifth when it was first published in 1963. This new edition is the first in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.
Dead Souls
By Nicolai Gogol
Translated by Donald Rayfield
May 2012
Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is an undisputed masterpiece of world literature. The tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con who establishes a thriving trade in “dead souls”—serfs who though no longer alive can still, he finds, be profitably sold—is at the same time a brilliant spoof of a corrupt society, full of the living dead. Most important, however, Gogol’s great novel is a sheer delight, a book spilling over with humor and passion and absurdity, and fed by an unflagging stream of stylistic invention. At once a phantasmagoria and a work of careful, if not a little mind-boggling, realism, Dead Souls is a supremely living work of art.
Donald Rayfield’s new translation at last provides English readers with a version of this great novel that does justice to the wonderful richness of the original. Noting the theatrical nature of Gogol’s inspiration and style, Rayfield has given his English sentences a pitch and presence that allows them to be spoken aloud throughout. He also presents a much fuller text than has previously been available to English readers of the controversial second part of the book, which Gogol sought to destroy.
Rayfield’s synoptic text draws on remaining sections of both the first and second drafts of this second part, revealing it as a major literary achievement in its own right.
Tyrant Banderas
By Ramon de Valle-Inclan
Translated by Peter Bush
May 2012
The first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the avowed inspiration for García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, Tyrant Banderas is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American Republic in the grip of a monster. Valle-Inclán, one of the masters of Spanish modernism, combines the splintered points of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19thcentury serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless tyrant facing armed revolt.
It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating mayhem from Baby Roach’s Cathouse to the Harris Circus to the deep jungle of Tico Maipú. The tyrant steps forth, assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and democratic opposition. Meanwhile, his secret police lock up, torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister castle by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They besiege the dictator’s citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden, starving populace.
Peter Bush’s new translation of Valle-Inclán’s seminal novel, the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing as Goya’s in his The Disasters of War.
Selected Essays
By Jean-Paul Sartre
Edited by Ronald Abronson and Adrian Van Den Hoven
May 2012
Philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, journalist, and
activist, Jean-Paul Sartre was also—and perhaps above all—a great
essayist. The essay was uniquely suited to Sartre because of its
intrinsically provisional and open-ended character. It is the perfect
form in which to dramatize the existential character of our deepest
intellectual, artistic, and political commitments. This new selection
of Sartre’s essays, the first in English to draw on the entire ten
volumes of his collected essays as well as previously unpublished work,
includes extraordinarily searching appreciations of such writers and
artists as Faulkner, Bataille, and Giacometti; Sartre’s great address
to the French people at the end of the occupation, “The Republic of
Silence”; sketches of the United States from his visit in the 1940s;
reflections on politics that are both incisive and incendiary;
portraits of Camus and Merleau-Ponty; and a candid reckoning with his
own career from one of the interviews that ill-health made his prime
mode of communication late in life. Together they add up to an
unequaled portrait of a revolutionary and sometimes reckless thinker
and writer and his contentious, difficult but never less than
interesting times. The essays have been translated by several
translators.
Other Notables
Perlmann's Silence
By Pascal Mercier
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
January 2012
Philipp Perlmann, prominent linguist and speaker at a gathering of renowned international academics in a picturesque seaside town near Genoa, is struggling to maintain his grip on reality. Derailed by grief and no longer confident of his professional standing, writing his keynote address seems like an insurmountable task and, as the deadline approaches, Perlmann realizes that he will have nothing to present to his expectant colleagues. Terrorstricken, he decides to plagiarize the work of Leskov, a Russian colleague, and breathes a sigh of short-lived relief once the text has been submitted. But when Leskov’s imminent arrival is announced and threatens to expose Perlmann as a fraud, Perlmann’s mounting desperation leads him to contemplate drastic measures.
An exquisite, captivating portrait of a mind slowly unraveling, Perlmann’s Silence is a brilliant, textured meditation on the complex interplay between language and memory, and the depths of the human psyche.
Epistolophilia
Writing the Life of Ona Simaite
By Julija Sukys
March 2012
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats
By Jan-Philipp Sendker
Translated by Kevin Willarty
January 2012
A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present. When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.
Me and You
By Niccolo Ammaniti
Translated by Kylee Doust
February 2012
From internationally best-selling author Niccolò Ammaniti, comes a funny, tragic, gut-punch of a novel, charting how an unlikely alliance between two outsiders blows open one family’s secrets. Lorenzo Cumi is a fourteen-year-old misfit. To quell the anxiety of his concerned, socially conscious parents, he tells them he’s been invited on an exclusive ski vacation with the popular kids. On the morning of the trip, Lorenzo demands that his mother drop him off before they arrive at the train station, insisting that his status will be compromised if he shows up accompanied by his mother. Reluctantly, she agrees, and as soon as she is safely out of the vicinity, he turns around and makes his way back to his neighborhood, to put his real plan in motion: for one blessed week, Lorenzo will retreat to a forgotten cellar in his family’s apartment building, where he will live in perfect isolation, keeping the adult world at bay.
But when his estranged half-sister, Olivia, shows up in the cellar unexpectedly, his idyll is shattered, and the two become locked in a battle of wills—forced to confront the very demons they are each struggling to escape.
Evoking the fierce intensity and the pulse-quickening creepiness of I’m Not Scared, Ammaniti’s best-selling first novel, Me and You is a breathtaking tale of alienation, acceptance, and wanting to be loved by “a fearsomely gifted writer” (The Independent).
When the Night
By Cristina Comencini
Translated by Marina Harss
April 2012
Manfred, a surly mountaineer recently abandoned by his wife, rents the upstairs apartment in his home in the Dolomites to Marina, a woman from the city, and her difficult young son. Deeply suspicious by nature, especially of women, Manfred spies obsessively on Marina, in whose shortcomings as a mother he finds resonances of his own mother’s desertion of him in childhood. When Marina’s frustration over her son’s refusal to eat or sleep leads her to harm the child, Manfred steps in, and the silent power struggle between them escalates. Yet Manfred’s attraction to Marina is as powerful as his distrust. In this alternately shocking and moving novel, Cristina Comencini has created a complex, psychologically profound portrait of two damaged, vulnerable people and the painful bond that develops between them as they are drawn into each other’s worlds.
True
By Riikka Pulkkinen
Translated by Lola M. Rogers
March 2012
Elsa is dying. Her husband, Martti, and daughter Eleonoora are struggling to accept the crushing thought that they are soon to lose her. As Elsa becomes ever more fragile, Eleonoora’s childhood memories are slipping away. Meanwhile, Eleonoora’s daughter Anna spends her time pondering the fates of passersby. For her the world is full of stories. But the story that will change her forever is the one about Eeva, her mother’s nanny, whom her grandparents have been silent about for years. Eeva’s forgotten story, which Anna first learns of when she discovers an old dress of Eeva’s, is finally revealed layer by layer. The tale that unfolds is about a mother and daughter, about how memory can deceive us—and sometimes that is the most merciful thing that can happen.
That's it for now, readers. I am sure there are more great books to come and many that I have left out, but these are gems to be sure. Drop me a line with you thoughts.
I can't possibly list everyone novel that I want to read, I can only go through some of my favorite publishers' offerings and give you a heads up on what to look out for when you're meandering the aisles of your local indie or loading up your online shopping carts. Let's take a look:
Archipelago
You knew I was going to bring them up, didn't you? They're that good. So let me run down some of their new titles for the first half of the year...
As Though She Were Sleeping
by Elias Khoury
As Though She Were Sleeping is an homage to dreaming, "the only way of escaping oppression, be it familial, religious, or political." Milia's response to her new husband and to the Middle East of 1947 is to close her eyes and float into parallel worlds where identities and faces shift, and where she can converse with the dead and foresee the future. As the novel progresses, Milia's dreams become more navigable than the strange and obstinate "reality" she finds herself in.
translated from the French by Alyson Waters
April 2012Chevillard’s characters in Prehistoric Times remind us of the inhabitants of Beckett’s world: dreamers who in their savage and deductive folly try to modify reality. The writing, with its reservations, its burlesque variations, its accelerations and ruptures, takes us into a frightening and jubilatory delirium, where the beginning of the story is forever deferred. With an entirely original voice and mind, Chevillard asks looming, luminous, and very funny questions about who we are, where we come from, and where we might be going.
translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
May 2012Winner of the Brage Award, the Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, the P2 Listeners' Prize, and the Norwegian Critics' Prize
Nominated for the Nordic Council Literary Prize
A Norwegian Marcel Proust. This nerve-striking, addictive piece of hyper-realism, by the Norwegian Critics' Prize-winning author of A Time For Everything, has created a phenomenon throughout Scandinavia. Written as though his very life were at stake.
Almost ten years have passed since Karl O. Knausgaard's father drank himself to death. He is now embarking on his third novel while haunted by self-doubt. Knausgaard breaks his own life story down to its elementary particles, often recreating memories in real time, blending recollections of images and conversation with profound questions in a remarkable way. Knausgaard probes into his past, dissecting struggles--great and small--with great candor and vitality. Articulating universal dilemmas, this masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today.
by Albert Cohen
translated from the French by Bella Cohen
May 2012A moving memorial to the author's mother and, in the words of Paris-Match, "one of the most beautiful love stories ever written." Shortly after Albert Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis, he received news of his mother’s death in Marseille. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of moving pieces for La France libre, which later grew into Book of My Mother. Achingly honest, intimate, and moving, this memoir-in-glimpses is a tribute to all mothers.
translated from the Afrikaans by Breyten Breytenbach
August 2012Reminiscent of Cortázar's Cronopios and Famas, this incandescent collection of lyrical and often nightmarish visions—now in English for the first time—is a feast for the senses and mind. At once raw, chiaroscuro, unearthly, and musical, these dreamscapes shed light on the human condition, history, isolation and connection, death and rebirth. Warning: these bite-sized pieces may detonate within.
September 2012
The Croatian writer Miljenko Jergovic, whose remarkable debut collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro – winner of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize – was published by Archipelago, has masterfully created a novel which draws the reader into an episodic, profoundly personal recounting of a childhood destroyed by war. Narrated from one boy's perspective, Mama Leone’s episodic events are held together by several recurring motifs rather than a historical or narrative chronology. Dazzling, rhapsodic, and above all humane, Jergovic has created a novel that is simultaneously ultra-modern, grotesque, and suspenseful.
Open Letter Books
With their colorful, distinct cover designs and their superb choices, it looks like Open Letter is really hitting their stride this year. Eccentric, quirky and necessary, the books they've chosen to publish all look like they're worth reading.
The Smoke of Distant Fires
By Eduardo Chirinos
Translated from the Spanish
by G. J. Racz
January 2012
The Smoke of Distant Fires contains thirteen new poems from the contemporary Peruvian poet, essayist, critic, translator, and children’s book author, Eduardo Chirinos. Precisely organized and formally inventive, each poem in the collection is itself a collection of ten numbered stanzas, and each of the stanzas themselves are fully formed poems, a series of rhythmic, elliptical fables from a fully recognizable, yet wholly original, world.
The third collection of Chirinos’s poetry to appear in English, The Smoke of Distant Fires signals an exciting new direction in Chirinos’s poetics—its multivocal stanzas, evocative intertextuality, and enigmatic transparency join forces to perform a poignant interrogation of what it means to write poetry in the early twenty-first century.
The Cyclist Conspiracy
By Svetislav Basara
Translated from the Serbian
by Randall A. Major
March 2012
The Cyclist Conspiracy tells the tale of a secret Brotherhood who meet in dreams, gain esoteric knowledge from contemplation of the bicycle, and seek to move in and out of history, manipulating events; the Brothers are part of a conspiracy so vast and so secret that, in many cases, the conspirators themselves are unaware of their participation in it. Told through a series of “historical documents”—memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, and maps—the novel details the story of these interventions and the historical moments where the Brotherhood has made their influence felt, from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to a lost story of Sherlock Holmes.
Masterfully intertwining the threads of waking and dreams into the fabric of the present, the past, and the future, Svetislav Basara’s Pynchon-esque The Cyclist Conspiracy is a bold, funny, and imaginative romp.
Children in Reindeer Woods
By Kristin Omarsdottir
Translated from the Icelandic
by Lytton Smith
April 2012
Eleven-year-old Billie lives at a ‘temporary home for children’ called Children in Reindeer Woods, which she discovers one afternoon, to her surprise, is in the middle of a war zone. When a small group of paratroopers kill everyone who lives there with her,and then turn on each other, Billie is forced to learn to live with the violent, innocent, and troubled Rafael, who decides to abandon the soldier’s life and become a farmer, no matter what it takes.
A lyrical and continually surprising take on the absurdity of war and the mysteries of childhood, Children in Reindeer Woods is a moving modern fable.
My First Suicide
By Jerzy Pilch
Translated from the Polish
by David Frick
May 2012
Neither strictly a collection of stories nor a novel, the ten pieces that comprise My First Suicide straddle the line between intimate revelation and drunken confession. These stories reveal a nostalgic and poetic Pilch, one who can pen a character’s lyrical ode to the fate of his father’s perfect chess table in one story, examine a teacher’s desperate and dangerous infatuation with a student in the next, and then, always true to his obsessions, tell a remarkably touching story that begins by describing his narrator’s excitement at the possibility of a three-way with the seductive soccer-fan, Anka Chow Chow.
The stories of My First Suicide combine irony and humor, anecdote and gossip, love and desire with an irresistibly readable style that is vintage Pilch.
The Planets
By Sergio Chejfec
Translated from the Spanish
by Heather Cleary
June 2012
When he reads about a mysterious explosion in the distant countryside, the narrator’s thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted from his home years ago, during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes, hoping in this way to reanimate his friend and relive the time they spent together wandering the streets of Buenos Aires.
Sergio Chejfec’s The Planets is an affecting and innovative exploration of mourning, remembrance, and friendship by one of Argentina’s modern masters.
Dalkey Archive
Dalkey keeps growing and offering the high quality novels and translations that we have come to expect form them. They hold a special place in my Oulipian heart.
The Book of Emotions
By Joao Almino
Translated by Elizabeth Jackson
January 2012
Isolating these moments in his memory and attempting to analyze them much like a lens, he envisions “a haiku stripped of rhetoric that captures only what is in front of the camera.” Yet, deprived of his sight, the photographer now must reconstruct his experiences as a series of affective snapshots, a diary of his emotions as they were frozen on this or that day. The result, then, is not the description of a remembered image, but of the emotional memory the image evokes. João Almino here gives us a trenchant portrait of an artist trying to close the gap between objective vision and sentimental memory, leafing through a catalog of his accomplishments and failures in a violent, artificial, universal city, and trying to reassemble the puzzle that was his life.
Mathematique
By Jacques Roubaud
Translated by Ian Monk
January 2012
The third “branch” of Jacques Roubaud’s epic, Proustian Great Fire of London, Mathématique: is also an excellent entrance into the series. Adopting math as a career relatively late in his studies, Roubaud here narrates his difficulties both personal and pedagogical, while also investigating the role of mathematics in his life as a remedy to all the messiness of lived experience. “I sought out arithmetic,” he writes, “to protect myself. But from what? At the time, I would probably have replied: from vagueness, from a lack of rigor, from ‘literature.’” But mathematics also provide a refuge from human fears, and from coping, eventually, with tragedies like the death of his wife Alix. As with the previous volumes of The Great Fire of London, Mathématique: is a riveting and humorous anecdotal memoir as well as a fiendishly digressive fiction about the functions of memory and the written word.
Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta
By Aglaja Veteranyi
Translated by Vincent Kling
January 2012
A nomadic family of circus performers, refugees from Romania, travels through Europe and Africa by caravan. The mother’s death-defying act causes constant anxiety for her two daughters, who voice their fears through a grisly communal fairy tale about a child being cooked alive in polenta—but their real life is no less of a dark fable, and one that seems just as unlikely to have a happy ending. An actor and performance artist as well as a poet and novelist, Veteranyi was acclaimed for her seemingly “artless” narrative voice, in which pain and hilarity always vie for the upper hand—a voice at once lyrical and jaded, prurient and spiritual, comical and horrifying.
Autoportrait
By Edouard Leve
Translated by Lorin Stein
February 2012
In this brilliant and sobering self-portrait, Edouard Levé hides nothing from his readers, setting out his entire life, more or less at random, in a string of declarative sentences. Autoportrait is a physical, psychological, sexual, political, and philosophical triumph. Beyond “sincerity,” Levé works toward an objectivity so radical it could pass for crudeness, triviality, even banality: the author has stripped himself bare. With the force of a set of maxims or morals, Levé’s prose seems at first to be an autobiography without sentiment, as though written by a machine —until, through the accumulation of detail, and the author’s dry, quizzical tone, we find ourselves disarmed, enthralled, and enraptured by nothing less than the perfect fiction . . . made entirely of facts.
The Family of Pascual Duarte
By Camilo Jose Cela
Translated by Anthony Kerrigan
Back in action and sooo good! (Okay, I am pushing a little backlist. Sue me.)
New York Review Books
The tortured sophisticate of the bunch, NYRB consistently puts out delicious new titles and fantastic reprints of classics. It's difficult to ignore their discerning taste. Zweig, anyone?
Amsterdam Stories
By Nescio
Translated by Damion Searls
March 2012
The first English-language collection of stories by the great Dutch writer, Nescio.
J. H. F. Grönloh was a successful Dutch
businessman, executive of the Holland-Bombay Trading Company and father
of four, with a secret life: under the pseudonym Nescio (Latin for “I
don’t know”), he wrote a series of short stories that went unrecognized
at the time but that are now widely considered the best prose ever
written in Dutch.
Nescio’s stories look back on the enthusiasms
of youth with an achingly beautiful melancholy comparable to the work of
Alain-Fournier and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He writes of young dreams from
the perspective of adult resignation, but reinhabits youthful ambition
and adventure so fully that the later perspective is the one thrown into
doubt—and with language as fresh as when it was written a century ago.
His last long story, written and set during World War II, is a remarkable evocation of the Netherlands in wartime and a hymn to our capacity to take refuge in memory and imagination.
This
is great literature—capturing the Dutch landscape and scenes of
Amsterdam with a remarkable poetry, and expressing the spirit of the
country of businessmen and van Gogh, merchants and visionaries. This
first translation of Nescio into English—all the major works and a broad
selection of his shorter stories—is a literary event.
Confusion
By Stefan Zweig
Translated by Anthea Bell
April 2012
In Stefan Zweig’s Confusion, a venerable privy councilor approaching the end of his career adds a “secret page” to the public record of his accomplishments, confessing the true story of his youthful initiation into the delights and perils of intense scholarship. After a first semester in Berlin more devoted to amorous adventures with local shop girls than books, he makes a fresh start in a small university town in central Germany where a professor’s brilliant lecturing style sparks a new all-consuming passion for learning and reading. He takes lodgings above the apartment of the professor and his wife and is soon a regular visitor there, dining with them on a daily basis and successfully inspiring the older man to make a fresh attempt to complete his magnum opus. And yet the professor’s enthusiasm for his devoted protégé alternates with cold scorn and sudden dismissals, leaving the perplexed student crippled by feelings of inadequacy and rejection, feelings only the professor’s frustrated young wife seems to understand. But the secret anguish behind the older man’s apparently irrational cruelty will not so easily out…
Laying bare the fraught relationship between human instincts and higher callings, physical longing and the desire for knowledge, muddled emotions and the quest for intellectual clarity, Zweig’s intoxicating novella probes the mysteries of the creative process and the limits of sublimation.
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
By Victor Serge
Translated by Peter Sedgwick
April 2012
Victor Serge is one of the great men of the twentieth century, anarchist, revolutionary, agitator, theoretician, historian of his times, and a fearless truthteller. Here Serge describes his upbringing in Belgium, the child of a family of exiled Russian revolutionary intellectuals, his early life as an activist, his time in a French prison, the active role he played in the Russian Revolution, as well his growing dismay at the Revolutionary regime’s ever more repressive and murderous character. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, and barely escaped the Nazis to find a final refuge in Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary describes a thrilling life on the frontlines of history and includes brilliant portraits of politicians from Trotsky and Lenin to Stalin and of major writers like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely. Above all, it captures the sensibility of Serge himself, that of a courageous and singularly appealing advocate of human liberation who remained undaunted in the most trying of times.
Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary was cut by a fifth when it was first published in 1963. This new edition is the first in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.
Dead Souls
By Nicolai Gogol
Translated by Donald Rayfield
May 2012
Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is an undisputed masterpiece of world literature. The tale of Chichikov, an affably cunning con who establishes a thriving trade in “dead souls”—serfs who though no longer alive can still, he finds, be profitably sold—is at the same time a brilliant spoof of a corrupt society, full of the living dead. Most important, however, Gogol’s great novel is a sheer delight, a book spilling over with humor and passion and absurdity, and fed by an unflagging stream of stylistic invention. At once a phantasmagoria and a work of careful, if not a little mind-boggling, realism, Dead Souls is a supremely living work of art.
Donald Rayfield’s new translation at last provides English readers with a version of this great novel that does justice to the wonderful richness of the original. Noting the theatrical nature of Gogol’s inspiration and style, Rayfield has given his English sentences a pitch and presence that allows them to be spoken aloud throughout. He also presents a much fuller text than has previously been available to English readers of the controversial second part of the book, which Gogol sought to destroy.
Rayfield’s synoptic text draws on remaining sections of both the first and second drafts of this second part, revealing it as a major literary achievement in its own right.
Tyrant Banderas
By Ramon de Valle-Inclan
Translated by Peter Bush
May 2012
The first great twentieth-century novel of dictatorship, and the avowed inspiration for García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch and Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme, Tyrant Banderas is a dark and dazzling portrayal of a mythical Latin American Republic in the grip of a monster. Valle-Inclán, one of the masters of Spanish modernism, combines the splintered points of view of a cubist painting with the campy excesses of 19thcentury serial fiction to paint an astonishing picture of a ruthless tyrant facing armed revolt.
It is the Day of the Dead, and revolution has broken out, creating mayhem from Baby Roach’s Cathouse to the Harris Circus to the deep jungle of Tico Maipú. The tyrant steps forth, assuring all that he is in favor of freedom of assembly and democratic opposition. Meanwhile, his secret police lock up, torture, and execute students and Indian peasants in a sinister castle by the sea where even the sharks have tired of a diet of revolutionary flesh. Then the opposition strikes back. They besiege the dictator’s citadel, hoping to bring justice to a downtrodden, starving populace.
Peter Bush’s new translation of Valle-Inclán’s seminal novel, the first into English since 1929, reveals a writer whose tragic sense of humor is as memorably grotesque and disturbing as Goya’s in his The Disasters of War.
Selected Essays
By Jean-Paul Sartre
Edited by Ronald Abronson and Adrian Van Den Hoven
May 2012
Other Notables
Perlmann's Silence
By Pascal Mercier
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
January 2012
Philipp Perlmann, prominent linguist and speaker at a gathering of renowned international academics in a picturesque seaside town near Genoa, is struggling to maintain his grip on reality. Derailed by grief and no longer confident of his professional standing, writing his keynote address seems like an insurmountable task and, as the deadline approaches, Perlmann realizes that he will have nothing to present to his expectant colleagues. Terrorstricken, he decides to plagiarize the work of Leskov, a Russian colleague, and breathes a sigh of short-lived relief once the text has been submitted. But when Leskov’s imminent arrival is announced and threatens to expose Perlmann as a fraud, Perlmann’s mounting desperation leads him to contemplate drastic measures.
An exquisite, captivating portrait of a mind slowly unraveling, Perlmann’s Silence is a brilliant, textured meditation on the complex interplay between language and memory, and the depths of the human psyche.
Epistolophilia
Writing the Life of Ona Simaite
By Julija Sukys
March 2012
The librarian walks the streets of her beloved Paris. An old lady
with a limp and an accent, she is invisible to most. Certainly no one
recognizes her as the warrior and revolutionary she was, when again and
again she slipped into the Jewish ghetto of German-occupied Vilnius to
carry food, clothes, medicine, money, and counterfeit documents to its
prisoners. Often she left with letters to deliver, manuscripts to hide,
and even sedated children swathed in sacks. In 1944 she was captured by
the Gestapo, tortured for twelve days, and deported to Dachau.
Through Epistolophilia,
Julija Šukys follows the letters and journals—the “life-writing”—of
this woman, Ona Šimaitė (1894–1970). A treasurer of words, Šimaitė
carefully collected, preserved, and archived the written record of her
life, including thousands of letters, scores of diaries, articles, and
press clippings. Journeying through these words, Šukys negotiates with
the ghost of Šimaitė, beckoning back to life this quiet and worldly
heroine—a giant of Holocaust history (one of Yad Vashem’s honored
“Righteous Among the Nations”) and yet so little known. The result is at
once a mediated self-portrait and a measured perspective on a
remarkable life. It reveals the meaning of life-writing, how women write
their lives publicly and privately, and how their words attach them—and
us—to life.
The Art of Hearing Heartbeats
By Jan-Philipp Sendker
Translated by Kevin Willarty
January 2012
A poignant and inspirational love story set in Burma, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats spans the decades between the 1950s and the present. When a successful New York lawyer suddenly disappears without a trace, neither his wife nor his daughter Julia has any idea where he might be…until they find a love letter he wrote many years ago, to a Burmese woman they have never heard of. Intent on solving the mystery and coming to terms with her father’s past, Julia decides to travel to the village where the woman lived. There she uncovers a tale of unimaginable hardship, resilience, and passion that will reaffirm the reader’s belief in the power of love to move mountains.
Me and You
By Niccolo Ammaniti
Translated by Kylee Doust
February 2012
From internationally best-selling author Niccolò Ammaniti, comes a funny, tragic, gut-punch of a novel, charting how an unlikely alliance between two outsiders blows open one family’s secrets. Lorenzo Cumi is a fourteen-year-old misfit. To quell the anxiety of his concerned, socially conscious parents, he tells them he’s been invited on an exclusive ski vacation with the popular kids. On the morning of the trip, Lorenzo demands that his mother drop him off before they arrive at the train station, insisting that his status will be compromised if he shows up accompanied by his mother. Reluctantly, she agrees, and as soon as she is safely out of the vicinity, he turns around and makes his way back to his neighborhood, to put his real plan in motion: for one blessed week, Lorenzo will retreat to a forgotten cellar in his family’s apartment building, where he will live in perfect isolation, keeping the adult world at bay.
But when his estranged half-sister, Olivia, shows up in the cellar unexpectedly, his idyll is shattered, and the two become locked in a battle of wills—forced to confront the very demons they are each struggling to escape.
Evoking the fierce intensity and the pulse-quickening creepiness of I’m Not Scared, Ammaniti’s best-selling first novel, Me and You is a breathtaking tale of alienation, acceptance, and wanting to be loved by “a fearsomely gifted writer” (The Independent).
When the Night
By Cristina Comencini
Translated by Marina Harss
April 2012
Manfred, a surly mountaineer recently abandoned by his wife, rents the upstairs apartment in his home in the Dolomites to Marina, a woman from the city, and her difficult young son. Deeply suspicious by nature, especially of women, Manfred spies obsessively on Marina, in whose shortcomings as a mother he finds resonances of his own mother’s desertion of him in childhood. When Marina’s frustration over her son’s refusal to eat or sleep leads her to harm the child, Manfred steps in, and the silent power struggle between them escalates. Yet Manfred’s attraction to Marina is as powerful as his distrust. In this alternately shocking and moving novel, Cristina Comencini has created a complex, psychologically profound portrait of two damaged, vulnerable people and the painful bond that develops between them as they are drawn into each other’s worlds.
True
By Riikka Pulkkinen
Translated by Lola M. Rogers
March 2012
Elsa is dying. Her husband, Martti, and daughter Eleonoora are struggling to accept the crushing thought that they are soon to lose her. As Elsa becomes ever more fragile, Eleonoora’s childhood memories are slipping away. Meanwhile, Eleonoora’s daughter Anna spends her time pondering the fates of passersby. For her the world is full of stories. But the story that will change her forever is the one about Eeva, her mother’s nanny, whom her grandparents have been silent about for years. Eeva’s forgotten story, which Anna first learns of when she discovers an old dress of Eeva’s, is finally revealed layer by layer. The tale that unfolds is about a mother and daughter, about how memory can deceive us—and sometimes that is the most merciful thing that can happen.
That's it for now, readers. I am sure there are more great books to come and many that I have left out, but these are gems to be sure. Drop me a line with you thoughts.
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