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Dear Yan Ge, Your Strange Beasts of China (2020, tr. Jeremy Tiang. Original: 异兽志, 2006) reads like a collection of entries from a bestiary: the city of…… Read more “It takes destiny for a human to tame a beast”
Tag: Contemporary
You created me in the abyss of nonexistence
Dear Carmen, The Book of Anna (2020, tr. Samantha Schnee. Original: El libro de Ana, 2016) takes off a couple of years after Tolstoy had left us…… Read more “You created me in the abyss of nonexistence”
Madness has turned to logic
Dear Gine, In Zero (2018, tr. Rosie Hedger. Original: Null, 2013), we follow a middle-class Norwegian girl from age ten to twenty-one, as she comes full circle…… Read more “Madness has turned to logic”
Such shifting winds in life
Dear Ida, A Change of Time (2019, tr. Martin Aitken. Original: En ny tid, 2015) is the record of a woman’s passage through grief. Told through diary entries…… Read more “Such shifting winds in life”
Happiness is so elusive it may as well be supernatural
Dear Marie-Helene, Much of the disturbing, off-kilter sense of humour in Parakeet: A Novel (2020) comes from a finely-drawn contrast between the strong sense of reality in…… Read more “Happiness is so elusive it may as well be supernatural”
It was under the sway of that force that I began to feel,
Dear Gabriela, A coming-of-age story, a road novel, a picaresque adventure, a piece of nature and travel writing, an epic, and a reinterpretation of Martín Fierro through a…… Read more “It was under the sway of that force that I began to feel,”
The truth is a kind of regardless
Dear Ali, Spring (2019) begins with chorus of angry voices, a collage of social media rants and headlines, disrupted in the end by a voice that seems…… Read more “The truth is a kind of regardless”
Things can be going on inside you without you even knowing
Dear Hanne, Love (2018, tr. Martin Aitken. Original: Kjærlighet, 1997), or the absence of it, unfolds on a single day in the lives of Vibeke and her eight-year…… Read more “Things can be going on inside you without you even knowing”
The world has dropped its petals
Dear Olga, Reading Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead (2018, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Original: Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych, 2009) is all about…… Read more “The world has dropped its petals”
There was no new order
Dear Natália, Controle (2019, ‘Control’, not translated yet) is a novel centred on an absence. Our protagonist, she’s lost control, and she’s clinging to the nearest passer-by:…… Read more “There was no new order”
Just a desire, begun
Dear Natália, Amora: Stories (2020, tr. Julia Sanches. Original: Amora, 2015) begins with ‘First Times’ and ends with ‘Profanation’ – and, for that alone, I knew this collection…… Read more “Just a desire, begun”
Their movement through life is invisible
Dear Jokha, Celestial Bodies (2018, tr. Marilyn Booth. Original: Sayyidat al-Qamar, 2010) revolves around a family and their household members, in an Omani village, in the late 20th…… Read more “Their movement through life is invisible”
Oh, stag of mine, darling stag, my one and only
Dear Ariana, Die, My Love (2017, tr. Sarah Moses & Carolina Orloff. Original: Matate, Amor, 2012) is all about voice: a short musical piece of sustained rage,…… Read more “Oh, stag of mine, darling stag, my one and only”
A woman caught in a finely interwoven pattern of feelings and time
Dear Auður, In Butterflies in November, tr. Brian FitzGibbon (2013. Original: Rigning í nóvember, 2004), you play with our sense of reality, bringing into light what is fundamentally odd…… Read more “A woman caught in a finely interwoven pattern of feelings and time”
The all-seeing eye
Dear Claire, In Bitter Orange (2018), we are made accomplices of the main character’s voyeurism, caught in a claustrophobic atmosphere that grows ever more disturbing as we…… Read more “The all-seeing eye”
The view and the woods opening to a light that’s itself untrodden
Dear Ali, Winter (2017) is a novel full of the ambivalence embodied in this season: the dying of light that is also a promise of new light.…… Read more “The view and the woods opening to a light that’s itself untrodden”
Standing at this border where land and water meet
Dear Han Kang, The White Book, tr. Deborah Smith (2017. Original: 흰, 2016) is a meditation on colour. We start with a list of white things –…… Read more “Standing at this border where land and water meet”
My past life would be but a dream,
Dear Ottessa, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) seems to be a novel suffering from split personality: on the one hand, it is a book about…… Read more “My past life would be but a dream,”
