The She-Devil in the Mirror, by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Horacio Castellanos Moya's The Dream of My Return was one of my two favorite books of the year when I read it a couple years ago and I've been wanting to read more of his work ever since. So, I was thrilled when I found two of his books at Dog Eared Books in San Francisco last month. (Then less thrilled when I realized, after buying it, that one of them - Senselessness - was actually all marked up, but oh well.)

I strongly identified with the narrator in The Dream of My Return, something I can't say (thankfully!) of the narrator in The She-Devil in the Mirror. She narrates the whole book in the second person, and as the reader you get to listen in on her intimate and occasionally unhinged prattle as she gossips and theorizes about who was behind her best friend's murder. It's an incredible portrait of wealth, privilege, corruption, and hypocrisy, and it's told so brilliantly.

Distant Star, by Roberto Bolaño

Even though I had only read 4 of his books (now 5), I thought of myself as someone who had read "a lot" of Bolaño, so I was a little alarmed yesterday -- after I finished Distant Star -- to find that I had 7 books of his on my shelves that I have not read, and these don't include his latest book that just came out in February and at least a couple others. I read his two big books first, The Savage Detectives in 2009 and 2666 a couple years later. I adored them both. I guess because so many of the others are slim volumes, I thought what I had read was the bulk of it and what remained were minor works. (Yes, I am aware of my own bias toward tomes thank you.) Later, when I was in a short-story-reading phase, I read Last Evenings on Earth. Later still, immediately after finishing José Donoso's Curfew, I read By Night in Chile, which absolutely stunned me (definitely not a minor work!), but which melds a bit with Curfew in my memory. The books are actually good complements: the main events in By Night in Chile take place roughly a decade before the main events of Curfew, and there is a sort of salon of intellectuals in the former who could easily be characters in the latter (assuming they survived the first decade of the Pinochet regime), but having read them in quick succession occasionally makes it hard for me to distinguish them.

Distant Star too reminded me of these books, though it also reminded me a little of Donoso's The Garden Next Door, about a Chilean ex-pat who lives outside Barcelona. The Garden Next Door was the book that really opened my eyes to the Latin American diaspora in Europe, people who fled the totalitarian regimes in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, among others. If I had been a closer reader of Savage Detectives, I would have seen it there too; it's just more explicitly explained in The Garden Next Door. When I was in Barcelona in 2014, I stopped for a glass of wine at a small bar in El Born and met a woman there from Argentina, who told me the whole neighborhood used to be full of Argentinians. It was a whole wave of migration that I'd never been aware of. (And I find it very interesting that so many people left the dictatorships of Latin America to settle in Franco's Spain, though I guess he died right around that time.)

But the book Distant Star reminded me of most was Savage Detectives. The young people mixing poetry and revolution. (Or the idea of revolution.) The beautiful sisters. The idea of a new poetry for the future. The events (and locations) of the books are different, but the themes overlap quite a bit. Of course, I haven't yet read Nazi Literature in the Americas, which is explicitly referenced in Distant Star. Reading Bolaño can feel like piecing together a story the way his characters often do.

In translation

Some of this will retread what I covered in my post about Tristana, but that's my own fault for not getting around to finishing this sooner.

I read a lot of books in translation. My world books project necessitates it, and I suspect the proportion of books written in English that I read versus those not has gotten smaller since I started the project, but even before I started the project it's fair to say I read a lot in translation. Of the books I've read so far this year, half were written in English, and exactly half of the 34 books I read in 2018 were written in English.

Though I read a lot in translation, what that meant or how it affected my experience of the books I read wasn't something I gave much thought to probably until I read The Count of Monte Cristo in an edition whose translator is not even listed on the publisher's website. (If this Amazon reviewer is to be trusted, I should have read the version translated by Robin Buss.) Reading this edition of The Count of Monte Cristo was the first time I recall where the writing really got in the way of my enjoyment of the book. The story was still exciting, I still wanted to know what would happen, but the language was so stilted. It read like it was a literal, word-for-word translation from the French (perhaps it was) and it kept dragging me back to the act of reading (which is something an author might do intentionally with language, but was certainly not the case here).

Around the same time that I read The Count of Monte Cristo, the new translations of Proust started coming out, beginning with Lydia Davis' rendition of Swann's Way and followed up by the more-correctly-translated second volume title, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (which was previously translated as Within a Budding Grove), translated by James Grieve. I had recently finished the Moncrieff-revised-by-Kilmartin translations of In Search of Lost Time and I had the idea that I had to start reading the books all over again in the "right" translations. (Big thanks to Margaret Jull Costa for letting me off the hook on that one!) A couple years after that, Pevear and Volokhonsky's new translation of War and Peace was getting all sorts of media attention and it seemed like maybe translation was having a moment. (I eventually read their War and Peace and also their translation of The Idiot. Now when I search for them it sounds as though there has been a Pevear and Volokhonsky backlash, and perhaps a backlash to the backlash, but in 2007 they were all the rage.)

Of course, the big news translations are always the new translations of old classics; the translations that render old books in modern vernacular; those that reinstate the sex and other taboo subjects excised in older translations. I was working in a bookstore when the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey was released to much acclaim. (Here Penguin Random House doesn't fail to mention the translator on the book's webpage.) Maybe if that had been the version I'd been given in school when I was assigned The Odyssey a few years earlier, I would have actually read it. Then again, maybe not. But the translation of contemporary authors rarely gets so much attention. It's simply viewed as part of the publishing process. I was in Buenos Aires a couple years ago and saw a Javier Marías book on the new release table at a bookstore. I hadn't heard he had a new book, but I knew I could look forward to an English edition in the not-too-distant future. (Meanwhile, on the same trip, but in Santiago, I came across some José Donoso books that I'm not sure have been translated into English; or if they have, are not widely available.)

Recently, I was reading something about José Saramago that mentioned his English translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I knew I knew that name, but I didn't think it was from Saramago's books, so I googled her and realized she's also Javier Marías' translator. I've read thousands of pages of her work. She has a part - and not a small one! - in making some of my favorite books accessible to me. I loved this interview with her from 2011 that I found when I tried to learn more about her. Now I want to read more of her translations. So in February, I picked up Tristana, a book I knew nothing about, simply because it was translated by Margaret Jull Costa. She didn't translate either of the Saramago books I've already read, but I have some that she did and I'll get around to them soon.

Learning about the translator's process and relation to the work they translate has become a new fascination of mine. Just a couple weeks prior to reading the Margaret Jull Costa interview I mentionend above, I heard an interview, this one with Roberto Bolaño's English translator, Natasha Wimmer. And also this interview with Megan McDowell is full of interesting insights.

Missing Person, by Patrick Modiano

After  a very busy April, I took a much-needed day off work yesterday. It was a perfect kind of day to read a book cover to cover. I did't actually read Missing Person in one sitting. I read it in bits, in bed in the morning, after my coffee, on the subway when I went downtown to run errands, on the subway back home, on the couch for an hour, on the subway on my way to the gym (which was seriously delayed and gave me more than an hour of reading time!), and I finished it while walking down Nostrand Avenue from the subway to my home.

I was reading while standing on the platform at Union Square waiting for the 4 train at around 7:15 last night when I had a profound sense of deja vu. The book mentioned a woman in the Place Malesherbes who might buy jewels from the narrator and I was sure I knew this street from something else. Earlier, the book mentioned the Parc Monceau, which I knew I had visited in Paris, and it came up in this passage again. I pulled up my map of Paris and suddenly I could picture it all. The park I remember clearly -- it was an unseasonably warm March day and the park was full of people. Apparently I only took one photo in the park.

After visiting the Parc Monceau, I also remember walking around the block of what had been Place Malesherbes (it is no longer called by that name), looking for a particular building only to find it was completely covered in scaffolding and tarp. The building I was looking for was built for the banker and art collector Émile Gaillard by the architect Jules Février. My whole excursion to this section of Paris was apparently inspired by an article on Émile Zola’s Paris.

Missing Person gives off the most intense sense of nostalgia. Not only because it is set a decade or so after WWII, but certainly that is a factor, it reminded me frequently of French new wave films. The French have again and again borrowed American noir story tropes and complicated them, and this book is an excellent example of that. The book takes place some 10 years after the end of the war and the narrator, who has been employed by a private detective, suffers from amnesia and doesn't know who he is. After the retirement of his employer, he decides to use the tools he has learned through his trade to try and discover his own past. The mystery unfolds in a beautiful and wholly unexpected way.

Beauty Is A Wound, by Eka Kurniawan

I finished Beauty Is A Wound this afternoon, and I have to say I'm relieved. I've spent the last three weeks with this book, and it has occasionally felt like a burden. It's a beautifully-written and engaging book... but it's so incredibly violent. There is every type of violence. Really gratuitous violence. Quite a lot of sexual violence. And violence towards animals, which is one of my personal triggers. And other types of violence. When I was about 2 weeks, and 250 pages into the book, I told a friend I wasn't sure I could read another 200 pages of it. The violence was hard, but the writing style makes it almost bearable. The story told in a matter-of-fact and occasionally funny voice, and it has a fairy tale aspect that I suppose lends a touch of unreality to the violence. I'm almost surprised at myself that I mostly liked this book, but there were a few days in the last three weeks when I had to mete it out in little doses, or when I couldn't bear to read it on my commute at all.

Beauty Is A Wound was my book for Indonesia, and as the representative book, it felt relevant. The story spans the period from the end of Dutch colonization to almost present day and the history and events in the country (of which I have very limited knowledge) inserted themselves frequently in the story.