Author Archives: Helen Vassallo

Review: SIMPLE PASSION by Annie Ernaux

Leave a reply

Translated from French by Tanya Leslie (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021)

Simple Passion is the story of an all-consuming love affair: in it, Ernaux details the way in which her obsession with her lover takes over every aspect of her life, so that both daily events and more significant ones become no more than moments that punctuate the rhythm of this obsession. The original French (Passion Simple) was the first book by Ernaux I ever read, during my first years working at university twenty years ago. I remember finding it challenging to present the story in a class: its focus on the (willing) near-enslavement to a man’s availability (“I would have liked to have done nothing else but wait for him”) seemed to run counter to every feminist awakening I was undergoing, and I felt then that it was in danger of falling into a cliché Ernaux herself points out (“I couldn’t watch television or leaf through magazines; all the advertisements, whether for perfumes or microwaves, show the same thing: a woman waiting for a man”). Many years later, I approached the newly-released English translation with more nuance, and certainly with more empathy and compassion. Part of this comes from being more familiar with Ernaux’s oeuvre as a whole: her exposure of what it is to be a woman from a particular background at a particular time in history (A Girl’s Story), her chronicling of the twentieth century in The Years, her intimate portraits of her family (A Man’s Place) and her own experience of illegal abortion (Happening), calling attention to the experience of so many women who suffered in the same way because of a lack of autonomy over their own bodies. Like these other texts, Simple Passion is, quite simply, an account of a certain recognisable personal or collective experience.

Part of the reason I struggled with this two decades ago is that Ernaux and others of her generation suffered from a lack of control over their reproductive bodies, and fought to gain this control – and it seemed to me that Ernaux did this only to then submit control of her emotions to a man (a married man at that, and who had no intention of leaving his wife). But emotions, by definition, defy logic or ideology. This is not necessarily an un-feminist story, but rather an excruciatingly honest one that admits human fallibility and complexity, qualities that Ernaux fears will be judged when exposed. This fear illustrates a vulnerability in her writing that I now find extremely moving, particularly in reflections such as this one: “Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal.”

There are certain aspects of this story that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced strong emotions (which, I would think, means everyone): songs taking on new meaning because the lyrics seem to articulate the experience of the listener, being caught between the conflicting emotions of wanting to escape a difficult situation and the reality that living without it is unthinkable (“I longed to end the affair, so as not to be at the mercy of a phone call, so as not to suffer, and then realising at once what this would entail, seconds after the separation: a succession of days with nothing to hope for”), and elaborate plans are laid just to have the objective of finding some kind of connection to the lover (“On the plane, on the way back, I reflected that I had travelled to Denmark simply to send a postcard to a man”). It is not only clichéd representations of women that Ernaux feels herself reflected in, but also “the outcasts lying on benches, the clients of prostitutes, or a passenger engrossed in her Mills & Boon romance”: this is not a passive role that she has accepted, but something stronger than her and which leaves her adrift from “normal” everyday experiences.

Simple Passion is also a very engaging story: though it’s not an intricate or plot-twisting narrative, it’s a compelling and intimate revelation of human emotion and passion. For the time that she and A. are lovers, there is simply nothing else of consequence, and her obsession becomes potentially destructive: pastimes are “a means of filling in time between two meetings”, the all-too-brief encounters mean that “I experienced pleasure like a future pain,” and she even wonders fleetingly whether A. might have given her AIDS because “at least he would have left me that.” Tanya Leslie’s translation is, as usual, extremely accomplished. Ernaux has a very distinctive style: if I had to sum it up, I’d go for the seemingly oxymoronic term “expressive objectivity”. By this I mean that Ernaux writes deep and intense emotions with an observational composure that borders on detachment; both Leslie and Ernaux’s other regular translator into English, Alison L. Strayer, are delicately attuned to this, and both render it very well in English. Indeed, Ernaux likens the way she approached this love affair to the way she approaches writing: “the same determination to get every single scene right, the same minute attention to detail.” Such minute attention to detail is evident in the translation, which clearly and carefully conveys the core of the original: Simple Passion is not about A., who in fact seems entirely generic and unremarkable from the little we discover about him. Rather, it is about the feelings he awakens, the power he exerts, and the impossibility – at least for a time – of imagining life without his touch. A. is the part that Ernaux keeps to herself, but she gives her passion in both its senses – her desire and her suffering – in this brief, raw “offering, of a sort”.

Review copy of Simple Passion provided by Fitzcarraldo Editions

Review: THE PEACOCK by Isabel Bogdan

Leave a reply

Translated from German by Annie Rutherford (V&Q Books, 2021)

A funny, feel-good comedy of errors featuring characters ranging from the eccentric to the neurotic, a rambling castle in the Scottish Highlands, and a peacock gone rogue? Yes please. The Peacock felt like the book I’ve been waiting for – something to lift me out of the difficulties of the year, and into a hilarious world of well-meaning duplicity, guilty consciences aplenty, and team-building gone awry.

Lord and Lady McIntosh live in a remote and dilapidated castle, making their living from the Laird’s academic work (though, as Bogdan gleefully reminds us on several occasions, his Classics specialism is no match for the Lady’s engineering background when it comes to dealing with the pragmatic reality of a house crumbling around them) and the rental of holiday cottages on their estate. When a group of bankers from London want to rent out a larger space for a weekend of team-building, the McIntoshes’ housekeeper dusts off a ramshackle wing of the castle, but inadvertently breaks her ankle while dancing to ABBA with her Henry vacuum cleaner, rendering her incapable of finishing the extensive cleaning operation. This is the kind of slapstick that abounds in The Peacock, and with the housekeeper incapacitated, the Laird and Lady must prepare for their guests from the Big Smoke alone, with hilarious consequences.

So the housekeeper needs help tying her shoelaces, the shower in the guest wing emits the barest trickle of water, the goose leaves her droppings everywhere, and one of the peacocks sees anything blue and shiny as a rival that must be attacked instantly. The uptight bank boss arrives in an immaculately polished blue car (you can see the imminent peril) and promptly steps in goose poop. Her team are dismayed to find they are sharing not only the inadequate shower but also bedrooms (and must navigate – with varying success – the hazards of bunk beds: “Lying on the floor in his pyjamas in front of the boss and blubbering because he’d fallen out of a bunk bed and couldn’t get up. It didn’t get much more mortifying than that”), but at least the cook they brought with them provides a steady stream of comforting food. Just don’t ask too many questions about the plucked bird hanging in the larder. The young psychiatrist charged with leading the team-building exercises has a tough task ahead of her, and it’s about to get even tougher when there is a mutiny, the discovery of a hastily-concealed shotgun, a murdered bird and a snowfall so severe that they are stranded in the castle. With a power cut. Thank goodness for the al fresco hot tub, where new complicities will be formed…

The atmosphere is one of wild abandonment, but it is carefully constructed, full of ironic one-liners and to-the-point character sketches (“the boss had a particular knack for making her opinion extremely clear”; “Andrew didn’t speak about his inner conflicts. Jim didn’t have any”) and well thought through to make the improbable and the absurd entirely believable. Annie Rutherford’s translation is spot-on: it has meticulous attention to language in context (I was particularly delighted to see the phrase “a lick and a promise”, an expression I remember so vividly from childhood), yet maintains the glorious mayhem that characterises the story. I also really enjoyed the translator’s note at the end: this is a feature of V&Q Books, and a very welcome one, offering insight into the challenges and resolutions of the translation process. The Peacock is a best-selling, blockbusting book that sits well within the V&Q catalogue and is translated with humour and versatility. If you’re looking for some escapist enjoyment, then look no further.

Review copy of The Peacock provided by V&Q Books

Review: NIGHT AS IT FALLS, Jakuta Alikavazovic

Leave a reply

Translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman (Faber & Faber, 2021)

Night as it Falls is the debut novel by French-born Bosnian-Montenegrin writer Jakuta Alikavazovic, and follows its main characters Paul and Amelia through a passionate relationship, an abandonment, a reunion, and a final separation. Amelia is the “official” mystery of the novel – a woman so remarkable as to be almost mythical, but whose personal struggles and destructive tendencies render her incapable of fully experiencing contentment. Amelia is an almost unremittingly selfish character; I didn’t warm to the description of her given in the blurb (“one of those people who destroy everything and call it art”), instead preferring later descriptions of Amelia (“the woman who had grown up too fast”; “caught in the walls like a bullet shot many decades ago, a bullet which still pressed on, imperceptibly”).

If Amelia is a mystery, there are also plenty of silences with respect to Paul’s past: we learn that his father had given him this name so that it would sound completely French, a camouflage to go unnoticed, and that Paul knows little about where he comes from other than that it is “a place that he both was and wasn’t surprised to hear regularly invoked as an example of an urban disaster.” There is also an incident later on, when Paul overhears a conversation between his daughter and his father that at first he thinks is baby talk, and then realises is his father’s first language, a language he never passed on to Paul, a language he deems safe for his granddaughter, a generation later.

The blanks in Amelia’s past are, however, more explicit: her mother was more committed to her resistance poetry than to parenthood, leaving as legacy a box of documents that is Pandora-like in its housing of “every horror, every injustice”, and which Amelia refuses to open. The blanks are also the impetus for Amelia’s flight to Sarajevo, as she goes in search of a history that belongs to her and from which she is distanced; yet we do not learn much about this time or her discoveries. Much in Night as it Falls is about what’s not said, and this left me feeling shamefully ignorant: overall, the novel is not as instructive about Bosnia’s recent history as I was expecting, but perhaps that’s my failing for unconsciously expecting that. Just because a woman goes chasing her ghosts in Sarajevo, it doesn’t mean that the book should be about the war those ghosts inhabit. I did, however, really appreciate occasional insights such as this one: “A city shelled for nearly four years, snipers on the roofs, blood in the streets, and, ten years later, cemeteries everywhere, in the stadiums, in the parks; cemeteries and oddly healed wounds; children who would become adults unable to sleep with windows open, or with windows shut.”

Much is left unsaid between the characters too: silence generates some fundamental misunderstandings that are painfully believable. This is also true of the characterisation more generally, which is extremely consistent: all of the characters behave believably, however disappointing that might be to the others. Landscapes throb with a pain that mirrors the internal struggles of the characters, and if Paul and Amelia are closely tied to the cities they inhabit, then it is appropriate that another fascinating character, Albers, makes her living (and her notoriety) studying the notion of the city. Indeed, the supporting characters are easily as fascinating as the protagonists: the other character I really warmed to was Louise, the daughter of Paul and Amelia, whose transition into adulthood is intimately connected with Albers’ fate.

Amelia’s end is announced in the early pages of the book (indeed, the opening line is “Paul was in bed with Sylvia when he found out what happened to Amelia Dehr”), with the means revealed in the early chapters and so it’s no spoiler to mention it here: she jumps out of a window. Despite knowing this from the outset, the development of how she came to that point is full of tension, and is mirrored by a mid-novel announcement of Albers’ fate, the details of which shift into sharper focus later on. I enjoyed this storytelling technique, but the thing I found most interesting while reading Night as it Falls was the slippage between the novel itself and my own expectations. In the end, it wasn’t quite what I’d anticipated: it was very western European in its focus and form, whereas I had assumed it would be more about Bosnia; despite living through historical atrocity, the characters are mostly introspective, whereas I had expected them to be more outward-facing. But why shouldn’t Alikavazovic write about a privileged woman having an internal crisis? It was my own expectation that this novel would be about historical tragedy, and if I experienced some disappointment in the divergence between my expectations and the reality, this is not a criticism of the book itself. The wars in the former Yugoslavia remain a blurred backdrop to the narrative, yet someone who is better informed about them than I am might find more of a connection between the circumstances and the characters. Night as it Falls is a formally exquisite book, each word carefully balanced and with many echoes throughout the narrative, and Jeffrey Zuckerman’s sensitivity to this in the translation makes it worth reading for its formal properties alone. It is also well worth reading for the psychological portrait of its characters, the relationships between them, and the ability to maintain tension when the dénouement has been announced at the start. This is a book to be read for what it can offer in terms of human portraits rather than geographical or historical insights, but no less impressive for that.

Review copy of Night as it falls provided by Faber & Faber

Choose to Challenge: International Women’s Day 2021

Leave a reply

***Don’t miss an exciting Women in Translation giveaway to celebrate International Women’s Day!
Details at the end of the post, or directly in this tweet***

Translating Women: challenging an “invisible mechanism”

The challenge for this year’s International Women’s Day, “How will you help forge a gender equal world?” foregrounds a simple, brutal reality: we do not currently live in an equal world. Women have legal equality in many cultures, but all too often legal and theoretical equality do not map onto real equality of opportunity and experience. This is magnified for women in non-dominant world cultures, as well as for women of colour, working class women, non-cis women, and those embodying other non-normative or non-privileged characteristics – such as sexuality, age and health – that intersect with gender. This social inequality is the fundamental root of the gender imbalance in translated literature: it is widely acknowledged that less than one-third of literature published in translation in English is by women, and this mirrors a more pervasive gender imbalance that has become so normalised that most people no longer even notice it. In an excellent Guardian long read a few years ago, Charlotte Higgins exposed how patriarchy thrives on this normalisation of social hierarchies, functioning as “the invisible mechanism that connects a host of seemingly isolated and disparate events, intertwining the experience of women of vastly different backgrounds, race and culture, and ranging in force from the trivial and personal to the serious and geopolitical”.

Watch my 3-minute International Women’s Day video here!

A key component of this inequality, or of the invisible mechanism of patriarchy, is what Caroline Criado Perez describes in her award-winning Invisible Women: Exposing Gender Bias in a World Made for Men as the “default male”, a way of viewing the world that always uses men as the baseline indicator, the universal “norm”, and which is harmful to women (not only socially and psychologically, but also in some cases physically). There are also less quantifiable characteristics, such as class, and simply less quantified characteristics, such as race or sexuality, that intersect with gender and are further marginalised. Women writers – particularly non-white, non-middle-class women writers – face hurdles in their own country, and these are amplified when it comes to translation. It is more likely that publishers will promote their more successful authors to English-language publishers, and with the invisible mechanisms of patriarchy at work across the globe, the chances are that these prize-winning or best-selling writers will be men. It is, therefore, crucial, that we challenge this system instead of passively allowing it to perpetuate itself for, as the organisers of International Women’s Day remind us, “a challenged world is an alert world”. By not questioning existing structures, we both perpetuate and normalise the inherent bias they carry; if we stop at an argument about the inequality being in the country of origin, then we can only ever reproduce and enable structures that represent only half a world.

From challenge comes change

Translation by its very nature invites communication and understanding between peoples and cultures. At a time when “culture” is too often reduced to nationalism and stereotype, it is essential to advocate for greater diversity and inclusivity: when women are left out of “culture”, the notion of culture itself is impoverished. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie states in her brilliant manifesto We Should All Be Feminists, “Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.” If culture preserves a people or nation and ensures the continuity of civilisation or nationhood, then any culture that does not offer true equality to women, or that does not actively seek to achieve diversity and inclusivity, can only ever perpetuate harmful notions of what humanity is. Ngozi Adichie’s insistence on “the full humanity of women” is also key here: “women” cannot only be understood as heterosexual women, cis women, white women, straight women, or any other dominant characteristic that can be conflated with “womanhood”. Rather, the “full humanity of women” must include minority groups that stretch beyond gender – while women are not a minority, they are still secondary, but we must also remember that within this secondary group are minorities that are often overlooked in feminism and gender politics. What is published in translation, and which books into translation make it onto literary prize lists, is a means for writers from other cultures to enter the Anglophone literary ecosystem, influencing English-language readers and writers and enriching our cultures. So it is vital that there is diversity of representation in what makes it through in translation, otherwise we allow the inequality to persist.

Choose to Challenge: we can all make a difference

You don’t have to wait for amazing books by women from other cultures to come to you; why not actively seek them out? As And Other Stories’ Nicky Smalley reminds us, after all the hurdles they’ve had to overcome to make it into English, the chances are you’ll be rewarded with an amazing read. You can read about my favourite books of 2020, or check out the reviews section. If you’ve enjoyed a book by a woman writer in translation, talk to people about it: pass on your recommendations whether it’s to one friend or to hundreds or thousands of social media followers. And when you ask others – friends, family, teachers, booksellers, social media contacts – for recommendations, if no women are suggested then ask explicitly for them. The more we gently challenge perceptions of “normality”, the more these perceptions are likely to shift towards greater inclusivity, and the more these books appear on bookshelves, the more normal it will be for them to have their place there. If we all make active and conscious changes in our own small corner, then we might get closer to an equal world.

Twitter women in translation giveaway!

I have teamed up with my friends at Europa Editions to offer a FREE bundle of FIVE books (hand-picked by me!) by women in translation to one lucky winner!  You can head over to my Twitter account to enter.

Review: SELF-PORTRAIT IN GREEN by Marie NDiaye

Leave a reply

Translated from French by Jordan Stump (Influx Press, 2021)

I’ve been reading and enjoying Marie NDiaye’s work for twenty years, and for me Self-Portrait in Green is something of a landmark: the first time I’ve read her in English. The style is very recognisably NDiaye (a testament to Jordan Stump’s careful translation), and many of the themes and leitmotifs also resonate with much of NDiaye’s œuvre. The surreal encounters echo uses of the fantastic elsewhere in her work, and both the absent, thoroughly disappointing father and the disintegration or dissolution of the female subject, sometimes unconvinced of the material substance of her own existence, will be familiar to those who’ve read NDiaye before. Yet NDiaye is clear that in her fiction she does not write about herself, and so the resemblances between her “self-portrait” and her fiction indicate that however close we might think we’re getting with this “memoir”, we’re only seeing a small part of a much bigger picture. Indeed, Influx’s press release describes Self-Portrait in Green as “a subversion of the memoir”, and this blurring of genres is particularly interesting. Even the title is evocative in this respect: the French “autoportrait” (“self-portrait”) is a more obvious twist on “autobiographie”/”autobiography”, but even if this subtlety doesn’t translate linguistically, we are still prompted to consider the difference between an autobiography, or assumption of a “truthful” developed and chronological account of the author’s experience, and a self-portrait, which captures only a moment or a stage of life.

The narrator goes about her daily life – dropping her children at school, visiting relatives – though this life seems anything but ordinary. It is on the school run that we witness her first encounter with a woman in green, who is standing in a garden beneath a banana tree: in this banal-turns-supernatural encounter, the woman seems visible only to the narrator. The second woman in green is a cruel schoolteacher from the narrator’s childhood who comes to her in memory, and the third is the woman she mistakes for her friend Cristina, an encounter you can read in last week’s post. This extract was particularly interesting to me, as its overlap between the quietly mundane and the asphyxiatingly surreal is reminiscent of other works by NDiaye, a  nightmarish quality of being in a perfectly normal situation and yet everything seeming wrong, off-kilter (at one point the narrator even wonders to herself “is this all really real?”) The sense of being out of focus, or the focus being in an unexpected place, or one person seeing what another does not, is also a clever play with the genre of a written “self-portrait”, the contours shifting according to who is viewing. Neat answers are not given, with the narrator herself often uncertain about what she has seen and how to interpret it: this is a book that pulls its reader into a universe that, if not exactly parallel, is both familiar and destabilising – one that, like a portrait, needs to be viewed from both up close and at a distance in order to come into focus.

Other women in green include the narrator’s rapidly ballooning stepmother, who was once her close friend, a suicidal wife, or the projection of a child twenty years from now – and sometimes (or rather, just once) they may not even be dressed in green… Relationships in Self-Portrait in Green vary from the apathetic and the pitiful to the vampiric and hypnotic, and if the women serve as some kind of mirror for the narrator, then perhaps they are at once the conflicting desires inside her own heart and a projection of the lives she could have lived. They are certainly ubiquitous, and despite their unsettling effect on the narrator, they are necessary to her: “they decorate my thoughts, my invisible life, I need to remember they’re there, at once real beings and literary figures, without which, it seems to me, the harshness of existence scours skin and flesh down to the bone.”

The translation is attentive to NDiaye’s style, even if it lacks a little of her trademark concision, the economical lyricism that characterises so much of her work. The vocabulary is rich, though occasionally a little more formal in the English than in the French equivalent, owing to different fields of vocabulary usage between the two languages. Nonetheless, this is a careful translation that is respectful of the author and shows a deep acquaintance with her œuvre, and it deals particularly well with the surreal aspects of the text (as you can see from last week’s feature). In particular, the black thing that moves too quickly to grasp features both in this early section and in a chilling final scene: it comes from (or may be) the Garonne river, a pulsing presence that runs ominously through the fragments of narrative. Early on the river is described as “brown tonight, heavy, almost bulging”, and the town waits nervously but passively for the banks to break and the flood to come: if there is something inexorable about the swelling and pull of the river, so too the novella wields a destabilising and hypnotic power, hinting at dark things beneath the surface.

Review copy of Self-Portrait in Green provided by Influx Press

Editorial and extract: SELF-PORTRAIT IN GREEN by Marie NDiaye

Leave a reply


I’m very excited to bring you a piece by Sanya Semakula, Assistant Editor at Influx Press, about bringing Marie NDiaye’s work to the UK with the publication of Self-Portrait in Green (translated by Jordan Stump), released TODAY by Influx Press. Sanya writes passionately and insightfully about her discovery of NDiaye and the importance of this publication, and her piece is followed by an exclusive extract from Self-Portrait in Green.

Sanya Semakula is Assistant Editor at Influx Press. She is a short story writer and editor based in East London, her work can be found online at LossLit or in print anthology Flamingo Land and Other Stories.

My first introduction to Marie NDiaye was All My friends (translated by Jordan Stump). Surprised I’d never read Marie, I read up about her (she published her first novel at 17, is a winner of the Prix Goncourt, was longlisted for the Booker prize and her play Papa Doit Manger is the sole play by a living female writer to be part of the repertoire of the Comédie française).

At the time, we were publishing Percival Everett’s I am not Sidney Poitier as a way of introducing him to a UK audience and I felt Marie was similar in that she had an impressive oeuvre but was relatively lesser known in the UK. I then came to Self-Portrait in Green (translated by Jordan Stump), read it in one sitting and was sold.

In this subversion of the memoir, Marie plays with notions of identity, memory, and paranoia. Set in La Roele, Paris, Marseille, and Ouagadougou, the narrator obsesses over the Garonne and the mysterious women in green she encounters who occupy the binaries between seductive/repulsive  real/imagined, dead/alive. Lynchian in its odd, atmospheric, fragmented imagery and scenes, the novella is told through short dairy entries. There isn’t a traditional story arch, as it moves back and forth through genres.

Self-Portrait in Green sits between The Malady of Death (Marguerite Duras), Julia and the Bazooka (Anna Kavan) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neele Hurston) in its lyrical prose, symbolical use of the river and evocation of place and fragmented structure but it is also interlaced with entries which could read as traditional memoir. The Garonne acts as a bridge between the different scenes and snippets of the women, and the novella’s ambiguities (of plot and genre) make it all the more an exciting read and is why I thought it would make a great addition to the Influx Press list.

The narrative voice is underlined with humour which compliments the tonal shifts as the novella moves from the macabre, through absurd horror, to eerie spectres, to family dramas in provincial France and Burkina Faso and always at the centre of the narrative is the fear of flooding and the appearance and reappearance of the mysterious women in green who can be read to mean a number of things.

The novella provokes more questions than it answers, encouraging the reader to focus on something else in re-reading and its fragmentation works as a strength as you never stay long enough with the women to get to the root of their appearance.

***

Extract from Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green, translated from French by Jordan Stump (Influx Press, 2021)

All the young women were in shorts, that dazzling morning. Leaving the town hall, I walked with long strides in my army-style khaki shorts, perfectly pleased to be who was in that place – the main street of a humdrum little town – and at that time, and this contentment was crowned by a vague surprise at the very existence of such a plenitude, the conceivability of such a pleasure. That’s when I run into Cristina, but as soon as I see her I’m not sure it’s her rather than Marie-Gabrielle or Alison. Not that her name escapes me: it’s just that, among those three women, I no longer know which this one is. Deep in my pocket, my fingers squeeze and shred the little lilac leaves. This person who might be Cristina is a young woman, so she’s wearing shorts, elastic and clinging, with a print of green flowers against a green background. My elation dwindles a little. It occurs to me that wariness might be called for. And yet I like the idea that soon I’ll be driving once more past the house of the woman in green, and she’ll be standing there, knowing I’m going to stop. But Cristina’s shorts are something else altogether, because I hadn’t expected them, and because green isn’t the usual colour for women’s shorts, in the first days of spring, is it? Cristina keeps her hands behind her, pressed flat against her powerful hindquarters to display her shorts’ exuberant colour as flagrantly as she can. She stands with her legs commandingly spread, blocking the entire width of the pavement. As luck would have it, she keeps her sunglasses on, and I’ve forgotten what her eyes look like, or Marie-Gabrielle’s, or Alison’s. Her blond hair is pulled into a ponytail so severe that the skin on her temples seems stretched to the splitting point. If this woman really is Cristina, I remember that she’s my friend. Cristina has a stronger claim to that title than Marie-Gabrielle or Alison, who are, as best I can recall, nothing more than cheerful companions, in whom one would never think of confiding, because any admission of weakness, of any tiny private anxiety, would be met with frosty disapproval and nothing more. Have I ever revealed anything at all to Cristina? Certainly not, it’s not in my nature. But her entire person is awash with sympathy, with understanding just waiting to be called on. I then thought, in a surge of abandon, that the woman in green beside her banana tree might have been waiting for just that: for me to unburden my heart to her.

‘Oh, this has never happened to me before,’ says Cristina in her hoarse, muffled voice. ‘There are two things, and they’re both different from each other… The first… you already know… I, you know, I left the kids… for two days, I think… two or three days… with my parents, yes, for a holiday… just a little holiday…at grandma and grandpa’s… and… you know my kids, you know them… are they… how can I put this… are they intolerable… coarse… completely disobedient?’

‘Not at all,’ I say, taken aback.

As I remember, my friend Cristina has no children. In which case, who is this woman?

‘No one could say that… call my kids that,’ she goes on. ‘Oh, they like to run around… they… they’re full of energy… like all children… children today… vigorous, healthy… . Anyway, they’re out at grandma and grandpa’s… at my parents, I mean, and yesterday, Sunday, I go… you understand… I go… get them… pick them up, and I drive up to the house… grandma and grandpa’s house… my parents’ house… and it was… oh, absolutely silent… just… just the insects cheeping… maybe… absolutely silent… and I tell myself… they’re… they’re all taking a nap… I don’t want to bother them… so… I don’t jiggle the bell… the big metal bell on the gate… so I… I climb over the hedge… a hole… a sort of hole, a low spot… in the hedge… and I climb over it, without making a sound… and I come to… the terrace… and there… I hear… my God, I hear… someone crying… a man crying and I… I look… I look through the glass door and I see… I see my father, grandpa… papa, quietly crying… in front of grandma, my mother… she’s standing there, helpless… her arms hanging limp… head down… pitiful, miserable… oh, that’s the first time… my father crying… first time I’ve seen him… anyway… and he’s talking… no, he’s almost shouting… and my God, he says… he says… and he’s talking about my kids, I can tell… his grandchildren… who really aren’t all that… right?… About my kids on holiday with them… he says… to my mother… “I can’t take them anymore, I can’t take them anymore”… and he also… also says… “I’m leaving, I can’t stay here, I can’t stay in this house with them here”… and he’s talking, you understand, about my… about my kids… and I… I left… discreetly… I climbed over the hedge the other way and then… I… I came back… later… and everything was… everything seemed… normal… just two kids on holiday at grandma and grandpa’s… and I knew.. I knew… that wasn’t how it was… wasn’t how it really was at all!’

Two tears rolled out from under Cristina’s (?) tinted lenses. I wasn’t sure what to say. What bond was there between us? And was she not guilty of having such children? Who was she? I really couldn’t think what to say. I was looking down at Cristina’s thick brown sandals. I took the little bits of lilac leaves from my pocket and carefully crumbled them over her feet.

‘The other thing,’ says Cristina, ‘maybe you’ve already heard…’

No, I answer playfully, I never hear anything. And since, for anyone who knows me, that’s an obvious, barefaced lie, I tell myself that if this woman really is my friend Cristina she’ll protest, give me a little swat on the shoulder – but no, she goes on, grim-faced, standing perfectly still.

‘A bunch of us saw it, in our yards, on the riverbank, in… Apparently there were even people who saw it in the schoolyard. The mayor… the mayor knows all about it. He saw it too. Something black, and quick. Oh, there were plenty of people who saw it.’

Cristina’s words are coming faster now. Her voice is sharper than usual. With a little hop she pulls her legs together and keeps them that way, squeezed tight. I ask:

‘What is it? What did it turn out to be?’

‘You haven’t seen anything?’ Cristina asks.

‘But what is it?’

‘You haven’t seen anything?’

All at once she pulls off her sunglasses. And then it’s clear, I don’t know that face. On the opposite pavement a young woman waves in my direction. It’s Cristina, wearing little pink shorts.

‘You haven’t seen anything?’ the first woman says again, and her tone is at once urgent, suspicious, and frightened.

I resolve not to keep this conversation up one moment longer. She vigorously wriggles her right foot, without looking at it or lowering her eyes, to shake off the shredded lilac leaves. Then she shoots me a glance full of unspoken anguish, whirls around, and hurries off, raising little clouds of dust under her sandals.

I’m so rattled I hardly notice Cristina crossing the street in her tiny pink shorts, with her graceful, jaunty gait. She kissed me twice on each cheek and I inhaled her flowery scent. Cristina smelled like a spring flower, a simple white flower. What she then said I‘m not sure I can believe myself. Still, I know I didn’t imagine it. She really did say it, however unlikely it seems. In a whisper, she said to me:

‘A bunch of us saw it, in our yards, on the riverbank, in… Apparently there were even people who saw it in the schoolyard. The mayor… the mayor knows all about it. He saw it too. Something black, and quick. Oh, there were plenty of people who saw it. What could I have answered, if not:

‘But what is it?’

Cristina shrugs, vaguely spreading her arms. Her chin tenses, quivers. Cristina is usually such an impetuous woman that at first I don’t grasp the depth of her distress.

‘No one knows,’ she murmurs.

Cristina is very pretty. Little girls turn and stare when she walks by. I’m proud to have such a charming, vivacious woman as my friend, a woman who can wear a pair of tiny pink shorts with credibility and good humor. I’m grateful to her, because now I recognise her so perfectly. I put one arm around her shoulder to reassure her, I’m not sure about what. Her shoulders sag. She’s completely disarmed. Seeing that, I don’t press her to tell me anything more.

‘The town’s sent some workers to go search the school grounds,’ Cristina continues. I’m on my way there myself. I’m worried.’

Why so worried, I ask myself, since she doesn’t have any children? And consequently, I ask myself: did I recognise her as perfectly as I thought?

Once the schoolyard and the little adjoining woods have been fruitlessly searched, I get back in my car and head for our house, a few kilometres from town. It’s already near noon. Three hours have gone by since I set off for the school, and I never noticed. Could it be that the woman in green shorts, that stranger I took for Cristina, who must herself have confused me with someone she knew, could that woman really have kept me there talking for two full hours? It doesn’t seem likely. Also, I think about that scene she described for me, the weeping father revealing his hatred for his grandchildren, and it seems naggingly close to something I’ve heard or read before. Either someone once told me about it or it comes from a novel that woman and I both happen to have read. And then she acted it out, while I listened – and I wonder: was I acting too? And did she realise I wasn’t? But was she acting herself? There, then, are all the things I don’t know. Now I’m in a hurry to get home so I can look through my books and find the one where she might have found that story. For that matter, I could well be mistaken, and that scene is reminding me of another, almost identical, and in that case fictional, while the first is simply drawn from the false Cristina’s existence. I know I can’t go straight home, and that makes me a little impatient, or maybe apprehensive. It’s noon, and the sun is beating down starkly on the water-willow fields. This hot day has left us all a little downhearted, I think, anticipating the summer that’s still to come, exhausted in advance.

I park in front of the house with the banana tree. The woman in green is gone now. A shiver of relief, almost triumph, quickly mutes my surprise and disappointment. I tell myself: my children had it exactly right, there never was a…

I get out of the car all the same. I push open the gate and start down the walk. I look up towards the second-floor balcony. The sunlight is dazzling. I shade my eyes with one hand, and that’s when I see her, up on the balcony. Then she straddles the railing and throws herself off. I’m very aware of my little smile. Because I’m saying to myself: is all this really real?

A little later I’m sitting in the kitchen of that house I so often passed by, never dreaming I might one day go inside.

 

 

 

 

Review: HAVANA YEAR ZERO by Karla Suárez

Leave a reply

Translated from Spanish (Cuba) by Christina MacSweeney (Charco Press, 2021)

I’m always excited to receive a new book from Charco Press, and they kick off 2021 with a Cuban detective story brimming with lost fame, plot twists, basic mathematics and romantic entanglements.

Havana, 1993: Cuba’s Year Zero. It is “the year of interminable power cuts, when bicycles filled the streets and the shops were empty”, and our narrator (who gives herself the pseudonym Julia) describes her life and the narrative intrigue as follows: “I was thirty and had thousands of problems. That’s why I got involved, although in the beginning I didn’t even suspect that for the others things had started much earlier, in April 1989, when the newspaper Granma published an article about an Italian man called Antonio Meucci under the headline ‘The Telephone Was Invented in Cuba’.” Julia is enlisted by her former professor (and former lover) Euclid to help track down an original document that will prove Meucci, and not Alexander Graham Bell, to have been the inventor of the telephone. The catch: everyone who knows about the document has a vested interest in concealing its whereabouts, and each person suspects another of foul play. Thus begins a science- and rum-fuelled bounty hunt, in which friends will turn out to be foes and rivals might just be allies. Julia’s allegiance shifts variously between Euclid, her lover Ángel (whose true connection to Euclid will be revealed later in the narrative), and a garage-dwelling author named Leonardo – but each of these decidedly unreliable men also has a weakness for both Barbara, the overly friendly Italian researcher and Margarita, the spectre who haunts Julia’s happiness “like a hand moving things around beneath the Ouija board”.

Confused? Don’t be. Suárez will guide you through this labyrinth with mathematical precision and a whole lot of heart. The novel is instructive and meticulously researched, yet the sections in which we learn about Meucci’s life, his ambitions and his ignominy, never feel shoe-horned in; rather, his story is woven into Julia’s, as she gets closer to the man each time the elusive document is pulled from her reach. There is also a lot to learn here about Cuba’s “special period” and the daily deprivations that became commonplace, as well as the black hole of global aid (“the friends from overseas, the Soviet Union and almost the whole socialist bloc, had disappeared off the map, leaving us practically alone, floating in mid-ocean, and with the United States just ninety miles away”). But most of all this is the story of a woman fighting to survive, and of the people who elevate and devastate her along the way.

The style is interesting and engaging: Julia combines her scientific obsession with her social observation (“There’s a mathematical rule: your students’ stupidity is directly proportional to your mood; the worse you feel, the denser they become”; “like fractals, we reproduce the worst of ourselves and aren’t even aware of it”) and frequently uses second-person address, including regular direct questions that create intimacy (“without warning, everything had changed. Absolutely everything. Get it?”; “We were living in chaos. Right?”). There were a couple of details that interrupted the narrative flow a little, whether a syntactical slip (“Why was I at there?”) or a section of switching between formal and informal second-person address that I found confusing on first read, but overall MacSweeney’s translation is a patient and humorous rendering of Suárez’s precise yet emotional style. Character descriptions are amusingly succinct (“Leonardo was one of those people who need no encouragement to talk; in fact his words seemed to be permanently stationed just outside the door, waiting for a moment of carelessness to barge in”), and Julia’s comments on her own lifestyle are as wry as her observations of Cuba, men, her students, and human nature more generally (“I make it a rule never to go to bed with two men on the same day. Unless it’s at the same time, but that’s another matter. The thing is that I hadn’t planned for the night to end that way. It’s infuriating.”)

As usual I’ll avoid spoilers, but I must just say this: the ending of Havana Year Zero is GENIUS. It makes the frustration of all the twists and turns entirely worthwhile, and gave me a feeling of immense satisfaction as I turned the final page. This is an interesting and innovative debut novel, combining scientific research and detective fiction with a generous dose of humour and warmth.

Review copy of Havana Year Zero provided by Charco Press

REVIEW: Cécile Coulon, A Beast in Paradise

Leave a reply

Translated from French by Tina Kover (Europa Editions, 2021)

A Beast in Paradise is the English-language debut of Cécile Coulon, and deals with the tragedy and determination of a farming family in rural France. The opening is a scene of bucolic tranquillity: “On either side of the narrow road snaking through rich green field, the green of storms and of gras, flowers – enormous, pale-hued, fragile-stemmed flowers – bloom all year round. They run alongside this ribbon of asphalt until it joins up with a path marked by a wooden stake, capped by a sign reading:

YOU HAVE REACHED PARADISE”

We are invited into Paradise, a sprawling farm whose topography is mapped out for us in the first two pages, until we encounter an elderly lady with a long memory standing in the empty pigpen. The idyll is broken in the final line of this first chapter, in a style that will come to be recognisable as one of the contrasts that characterise Coulon’s storytelling: “one beast comes here each morning, to mourn.
Blanche.”

Then a flashback begins, first to a key episode in Blanche’s adolescence and then to her childhood. Presiding over Paradise is Blanche’s grandmother Émilienne, whose dedication to the farm and its occupants – both human and animal – holds the family together and gives them a purpose: in Paradise, “everything began and ended with her.” When her daughter and son-in-law are killed in a car accident on the perilous hairpin bend leading to the farm, Émilienne is left to raise their infant children Blanche and Gabriel. Her own devastation is rarely mentioned: Émilienne is a woman who raises herself up and marches on.

In addition to her grandchildren, Émilienne takes in a young man named Louis who starts to work on the farm after the death of Blanche’s parents. Louis is systematically beaten by his father and one evening flees to Paradise in search of a refuge that he assumed would be only temporary, but which Émilienne calmly makes permanent. Louis becomes her trusted farmhand, as devoted to Paradise as Émilienne is. Paradise is a haven, but also a succubus, a place that lives inside its inhabitants as much as they dwell within it: Émilienne is part of the herd; Louis’ greatest connection to Blanche is their shared attachment to Paradise, “consuming, voracious, untameable”; even Gabriel, the only one who eventually summons up the strength to leave, is cursed with a black tree that had “taken root inside him in early childhood, a tree watered with fury by his parents’ deaths.”

Headstrong Blanche and sickly Gabriel are marked out as different because of their family tragedy, and have few friends at school. Though Gabriel has an interesting story arc in his own right, the focus is on Blanche: this is a girl who circumstances have “turned into a warrior at five years old.” As the children stumble into adolescence, Blanche’s proximity awakens feelings in Louis that she recognises but can never reciprocate – she only has eyes for Alexandre, the golden boy of the class. This is the love story that will raise Blanche up and then knock her down, and which forms the majority of the novel’s intrigue. Alexandre is wholly undeserving of Blanche, an unremarkable man with “big ideas, big dreams and little words” who has erected around himself a hubris of brilliance that fools everyone but Louis. Yet Louis, whose feelings for Blanche are widely known, is assumed to be simply jealous of Alexandre, and all his warnings go unheeded.

The great strength of the narrative is the way in which it builds up the tension towards the dénouement: in reality, years pass with very little happening, yet there is something compulsive about the awareness that something dramatic is looming. The balance between bucolic idyll and emotional and physical ferocity is also a key feature, and one that is particularly well rendered in Kover’s translation. Deep emotions burst out of careful restraint, and in these moments the expression is exquisite (“Her body remained upright through pure reflex, but inside, her whole soul, the soul made up of all the ages she had been, all the experiences she had had, caved in”). Indeed, the entire novel is sensitively translated, particularly the shifts in tone but also the smaller details of vocabulary: the path to Paradise is “pocked with brown puddles”, tiny insects go “skittering” up Blanche’s arms, one character “soils another with shame.”

The feature I most enjoyed about A Beast in Paradise, however, was the question over who the beast is – and what we understand by “beast”. The word appears in various contexts, and the perspectives on monstrosity are extremely clever: I got entirely the wrong idea about who was going to do what to whom, and so as the events developed I found myself spellbound by a story I hadn’t anticipated at all. Most of all, each time I put this book down I really looked forward to getting back to it. A Beast in Paradise is one of those books that reminds you that you don’t have to “relate” to characters – they can be completely different from you, and still draw you in. In particular, the build-up to the final revelation is outstanding, and after I’d finished reading I was left thinking about it for days. This is a story of ordinary lives and extraordinary pain, and a superb English-language debut.

Review: THE ART OF LOSING, Alice Zeniter

Leave a reply

Translated from French by Frank Wynne (Picador Books, 2021)

Alice Zeniter’s multi-generational narrative The Art of Losing deals with the troubled legacy of the Algerian War of Independence, focusing on one family’s difficulties in coming to terms with the unnamed experience and unresolved traumas that are handed down through generations. Multiple historians have noted that this is an impossible-to-summarise period, and so there is a certain amount of necessary generalisation in the interests of maintaining momentum in plot and narration; this is, however, deftly executed, such as in this section from the opening pages: “The plural history of Algeria does not have the heft of the Official History, the one that unites. And so, French writers pen books that absorb Algeria and its histories, transforming them into a few brief pages in their histories … a history in which progress is made flesh, takes shape and shines forth.”

The Art of Losing sweeps through colonised rural Algeria, French immigrant camps, and contemporary Paris, its protagonists dislocated from every “home” they try to inhabit. The narrative opens in the present day: Naïma works in a Parisian art gallery, and carries an unspoken family legacy that gnaws away at her, and which she longs to understand. To do this, she has to go back to her origins, and this is where the flashback that makes up most of the novel begins. Naïma’s grandfather, Ali, owns an olive grove in Algeria. He fought for France in the Second World War, frequents a veteran’s club, and has a successful life until the arrival of FLN (National Liberation Front) in the village turns their lives upside down. Uncertain about the promises of the FLN, Ali prefers to observe from the sidelines, but his inaction rapidly marks him out as an enemy, until he is left with no choice but to protect himself by becoming one.

Under threat in Algeria for real or perceived collaborations with the colonisers, Ali must escape with his family on a boat to France, where he is promised he will be looked after. Once there, “France” amounts to a resettlement camp, cold and inhuman, offering no possibility of integration into the country that is supposed to be their home, because “for these people to forget an entire country, they would have had to be offered a new one. But the doors of France were not thrown open to them, only the gates of a camp.” Declared an enemy of the homeland they will never see again, Ali and his family are emotionally anchored to Algeria and administratively adrift in France: even when they leave the resettlement camp and have a home of their own, their world is restricted to the apartment, the factory where Ali works, and the supermarket. France is for them a France of the periphery, a France of utility, a “trap in which he [Ali] has lost himself”.

In the next generation, the focus is on Ali’s son Hamid, forced to grow up too soon, and to help his parents navigate life in France. Language creates a gulf between the generations, Hamid rejecting his native Arabic as he associates it with the family’s inability to integrate. As Hamid grows further away from his parents, so the gulf between his past and present increases, until his memories become “twisted shards … refashioned by years of silence.” Aware that neither the Algeria of his childhood nor the France of settlement camps and “relocations” represent any kind of promised land, Hamid carves out his own path and rejects his heritage, not passing on his language to his children. This leaves his daughter Naïma unable to communicate with her grandmother; reluctantly, she decides to rebuild the stories of her family’s past, fearing that the absence might turn out to be more comfortable than what she might uncover. Naïma embarks on a return to her origins that she hopes will reassemble the shards of memory and legacy passed down to her, and fill the silences that she has inherited: “between these slivers – like caulk, like plaster oozing between the cracks … there is Naïma’s research, begun sixty years after they have left Algeria.”

As you can probably tell from the extracts I’ve included here, Frank Wynne’s translation is excellent: there is a lot of drama in this novel, and it could easily have turned to melodrama with overly literal translation. Wynne’s attention to understatement is admirable (“Ali dreams of all the things his son might be. Suddenly, a white-hot blast filled with shards of glass sends him sprawling”); the dialogues flow smoothly and believably, and the descriptions are lavish but never over-the-top. There are comic backhanders (“This union brings him two daughters – a terrible disappointment, the family mutters by the bedside of the mother, who promptly dies of shame”) and many examples of impeccable lexical choices (“It is like the shriek of nails on a blackboard”, “They use words that wound and seethe”, “war cleaves [the family] like a ploughshare splitting a mound of earth, scattering it in little divots of farewell”).

There’s only one thing I didn’t much like in The Art of Losing: the title. It comes, of course, from the poem by Elizabeth Bishop; it certainly is appropriate to the subject matter, but the moment when the poem itself makes its appearance felt a little contrived. Overall, though, The Art of Losing represents an important contribution to the legacy of the Algerian war, a meditation on a cultural divide that persists today, and an embodiment of the claim within its own pages that fiction and research are equally necessary to shed light on this, because “they are all that remains to fill the silences handed on with the vignettes from one generation to the next.”

Review copy of The Art of Losing provided by Picador Books

Review: COCKFIGHT, María Fernanda Ampuero

Leave a reply

Translated from Spanish (Ecuador) by Frances Riddle (Influx Press, 2021)

Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero, and comprises thirteen brutal and brilliant short stories in a superb translation by Frances Riddle. The opening story, “Auction”, sets the tone for the collection: the auctions in question are not genteel sales of antiques, but a terrifying form of human trafficking. People are dragged out of taxis and kidnapped, then taken to a barn where they are stripped down to their physical or financial assets and sold to the highest bidder.

The story opens with the narrator “kneeling, with my head down and covered by a filthy rag”, smelling the familiar stench of cockerels. We learn that she had grown up disposing of cockerel carcasses after cockfights organised by her father, and had developed an idiosyncratic but successful technique to survive harassment and rape attempts by the lowlife gamblers attending the fights: she would smear herself with the blood, guts and excrement of the dead birds, and stick a severed head or two between her legs when she went to sleep, to deter the men she had previously found peeking up her skirt when she woke.

Snap back to the auction, and a terrified middle-class man is sold off, followed by a desperate young woman who is handled like a piece of meat because, as the narrator observes, who’s to stop the auctioneer from groping her? There are no rules or laws in this horrific scenario, and so the resourceful narrator has to draw on her former experiences to ensure her survival. It’s a powerful opening story, and had me hooked.

The remaining twelve stories have a lot to live up to after such an explosive opener, and for the most part they do exactly that. From the nanny who tries to warn her charges that “we should be more afraid of the living than the dead” to the beautiful friend hiding a terrible secret, the beaten child turned voodoo warrior (“another lost girl in a world of lost girls”) to the young woman tied up in a shed by her brother so that the men of the village could do what they wanted to her, the women in Ampuero’s stories are prisoners in their homes, victims of “what a person is capable of doing when there’s nothing to stop them.” Yet they are fighters: they use the scant resources they have – abjection, witchcraft, tenacity – to survive the horrors inflicted on them.

Though each story is strikingly (and memorably) individual, there are connecting themes (and even, on one occasion, connecting characters) linking them. Casual, everyday sexism is taken for granted: households should have a (male) “head” if they are to command respect, religion is manipulated by godless violators as a pretext to control and “tame” women, beatings are readily accepted as necessary, and women are confined to the domestic space. People are monstruous, and grotesque imagery abounds (“He opened and closed his mouth, as if calling out their names, but no sound fell from that toothless gap, only maggots”), and the stench of blood and other bodily fluids pervades the stories. Religious faith melds with pagan magic in a way that places women at the centre of the story: in “Passion” a woman who is feared for her magical powers returns to the village where she was once a “creature of beatings, daughter of brutality, princess of the nights that end with wounded women”, in order to meet a special man; her love and powers are gradually revealed to be the secret to Christ’s miracles. In the horrifying “Mourning”, the two sisters Marta and María (Martha and Mary) are given a shocking contemporary re-imagining, María martyred “so she would understand from her scars that cruelty would always triumph over helplessness.” And yet there is a greater force at work here too: Marta fights her sister’s oppressor with “her dedication, her deference, her devotion, her broths, her tenderness, her herbal infusions”, wresting back power with quiet determination and a little black magic.

Frances Riddle’s translation is, as ever, admirable. I greatly enjoyed her exuberant rendering of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Slum Virgin (Charco Press 2017) and her nuanced presentation of Andrea Jeftanovic’s Theatre of War (Charco Press 2020), and she brings the same flexibility to Cockfight. Never shying away from the ferocity of Ampuero’s subject or style, Riddle offers an unflinching insight into the worlds Ampuero inhabits and constructs, with lexical choices that evoke the noise that serves as soundtrack to a story (“The men jeer, roar, applaud. Then the slap of flesh against flesh. And the howls. The howls”), that reveal abominations with a lightness of hand (“With her, I laugh as if there were nothing wrong at home, as if my dad loved me like a dad. I laugh as if I weren’t me, but some girl who slept peacefully. I laugh as if cruelty didn’t exist”), or that sum up in a single sentence all the horrors that haunt a character (“With a switch made of laurel – that switch made of laurel – they ripped up your back, your buttocks, your tiny chest, until shreds of flesh hung loose, like a half-peeled orange”).

With subject matter and descriptions that range from mildly uncomfortable to outright terrifying, these stories are disturbing and unsettling, and that is precisely the source of their power: no airbrushed, sanitised view of womanhood is offered, no false agency given to women who live in fear not just of what lies in wait for them outside their homes, but also within its walls. The insights in Cockfight are edifying and horrifying in equal measure, all upholding the observation in one of the stories that “People are incapable of seeing themselves, and that is the root of all evil.” This is a startlingly brilliant collection in an appropriately merciless translation; I highly recommend it.

Review copy of Cockfight provided by Influx Press