Author Archives: Helen Vassallo

REVIEW: The Book of Jakarta

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Edited by Maesy Ang and Teddy W. Kusuma (Comma Press, 2020)

The Book of Jakarta is the latest addition to the Reading the City series from Comma Press, presenting ten short stories based in the Indonesian capital. The stories that make up the collection share connected ideals, but each still offers a unique perspective on Jakarta, ranging from the political to the environmental, uncertain futures to seedy realities. Themes that recur in The Book of Jakarta are the stark divide between the wealthy and those struggling to survive, bureaucracies that range from the frustrating (“Seems like that rule was just put in place today, somehow”)* to the deadly (“for the past three days I’ve been watching the news, hoping to see his name on the list … We filed a report, and the officer told us they’ll be in touch”),** Jakarta as a place of multiple everyday dystopias – whether in the present reality, an imagined future, or alternative and not-so-unrealistic realities – and the perspectives of those on the margins of society. From an ageing sex worker to street buskers, a group of senior citizens left behind by modern life to a homeless artist, the voices are diverse but all speak from a place of dissent, of exclusion from a capitalist regime.

The translations are consistently strong and appropriately modern: there are clearly some cultural references that are tricky to translate, but I appreciated the use of occasional footnotes to help explain these.  One such reference explains the title of the opening story, “B217AN” by Ratri Nindity (translated by Mikael Johani): the title is a typical numberplate of the region, but is also a pun on a phrase meaning “together one destination”. This is key to the storyline of “B217AN”, which embodies two themes of The Book of Jakarta: movement and the outskirts. The brilliant opening line, “Tomorrow I’m getting married and tonight I rest my head on your shoulder”, sums up the story’s intrigue: two days before the narrator’s wedding she texts her former lover for one final meeting. At his insistence, the tryst is a scooter ride in adverse weather conditions to a seafood stall on the other side of town. The story is narrated in a second-person address, with the narrator both commenting on what is happening in the moment on their scooter journey, and remembering how they met and how their relationship developed. What is never explained is how they separated and the narrator came to be engaged to someone else: this is hinted at in subtle comments about the lover’s determination not to become part of mainstream life, and the narrator’s susceptibility to the myth that if she embraces such a life then she will be happy. This culminates in my favourite quotation from the piece: “People like me have to study really hard to get into the best school, the best university, and then get the perfect job that promises a better life. Sadly, this middle-class manual doesn’t have a section on how to be content.” The narrator is chasing after an elusive happiness that was promised to her generation if they followed a predetermined formula for success, but which never materialises, leaving her inhabiting the margins of a life from which she feels disconnected. Her eleventh-hour meeting with her former lover represents a final attempt to connect to life (“In this strange place, I feel like I can do whatever I want”), and to find something more satisfactory than the bland formula from which she feels disenfranchised: the detail of the journey and the not-so-final destination are superb.

Another striking perspective from the margins is found in Ziggy Zezsyazeoviennazabrieke’s “Grown-Up Kids” (translated by Annie Tucker), in which a group of senior citizens in an apartment complex make a suicide pact. Four women (Mrs M, Mrs N, Mrs O and Mrs P) plan an outing to an amusement park to scare themselves to death on the biggest ride, while Mrs M’s husband prefers to step out of life at the National Library, where he and his wife had their first date. Mr and Mrs M’s diverging plans for their last rites epitomise the combination of pathos and humour that characterises the story: “Mrs M received a text and when she opened it she found a message from her husband: he had arrived at the National Library. Mrs M didn’t like the place; it was too big and too quiet. But Mr M relished its stillness, and as part of his poetic departure, he insisted he wanted to return to the location of their first date. Mrs M had blushed and blown her nose when she heard his plan.”

The story opens with abject reality, Mrs M helping her husband with his adult nappy and delicately dealing with his digestive problems. They say goodbye as if they were both going on separate errands, and as Mr M heads to the library, Mrs M joins her acquaintances (the anxious Mrs N, the health-food-obsessed Mrs O, and the overly coarse Mrs P, brilliantly sketched out in a series of pithy observations that Tucker renders in English with great tongue-in-cheek humour) on their final journey to the amusement park. “Grown-Up Kids” is set in a near but all-too-possible future (in which the capital of Indonesia has relocated, a plan for the near future explained by editors Maesy Ang and Teddy W. Kusuma in their introduction to the volume), leaving Jakarta a shell of historic buildings and tourist attractions. We are given a flashback to Mr and Mrs M in their youth, when they met as rebellious students taking part in an uprising (which I understood, though perhaps erroneously, to be the May 1998 events referenced in the introduction). Mrs M then searched for Mr M on the internet, and given that they are now of an age that robs them of control over their own bowels, that could set the date of the story at around 40-50 years from now. *UPDATE: the demonstration referenced is actually a 2019 event, which would locate the date of the story around 60-70 in the future*

“Grown-Up Kids” showcases the anthology’s blend of tragedy and humour, ideals and banality, and its ending shows the cynicism needed for real survival in a not-too-distant evolution of modern society, as well as echoing the terrifying-turns-cynical ending of utuit’s “Buyan” (translated by Zoë McLaughlin). As in the excellent “A Secret from Kramat Tunggak” (by Dewi Kharisma Michellia, translated by Shaffira Gayatri), older generations who have helped modern Jakarta prosper are cut off from a world – or a city – that no longer has any use for them. This generational conflict, disenfranchisement and exposition of the concept of social “usefulness” is echoed throughout the anthology. There are also implicit and explicit criticisms of the Suharto regime, of what followed it and where this could lead: this is a collection that gently educates and enlarges perspectives without ever being overly didactic, and which brings together a common purpose without reducing the sprawling archipelago to homogeny or stereotype.

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Join us for the virtual launch of The Book of Jakarta! On Tuesday 2nd February at 1pm (BST) I will be talking to authors Ratri Ninditya and Ziggy Zezsyazeoviennazabrieke and translator Rara Rizal about their work on this exciting collection. Further details and tickets available here.

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Review copy of The Book of Jakarta provided by Comma Press

* From “The Aroma of Shrimp Paste”, Hanna Franisca, translated by Khairani Barokka

** From “The Problem”, Sabda Armandio Alif, translated by Rara Rizal

Women in translation 2020: my literary picks for the year that was…       

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I had intended to post this piece in December, but the end of the year brought some unexpected challenges and I had to delay it until the new year. So although you may have left 2020 behind with relief, I hope you’ll still be willing to travel back there with me in books: 2020 will be remembered for many things (okay, mostly for one thing), but here’s a reminder of some of the great books that were released in a year none of us saw coming.

It feels strange now to look back on the post I wrote a year ago about the books I was excited to read in 2020. Throughout the year, I didn’t read as much as usual. The reasons are probably obvious: the concept of “free time” shifted radically with the lockdowns and restrictions. I read a total of 56 books, and there were quite a few I didn’t really connect with – I don’t know whether this is partly to do with the circumstances, or whether 2020 just wasn’t the year for me in terms of new releases – but it does mean that the ones I really, truly loved were very easy to pick. I’ve gone for a “top nine”, which I know is a little irregular, but these were the ones I didn’t hesitate about when I came to pick my favourite books from this strangest of years…

Fernanda Melchor, Hurricane Season, translated from Spanish (Mexico) by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Hurricane Season was the second book I read in 2020, and it set the bar. I felt a little sorry for everything I read in the weeks after this, as there was just no way anything could come close for me. Hurricane Season opens with a rotting corpse found floating in an irrigation canal: the Witch is dead. A torrential vision of people on the margins of society, and a rage against a world that abandons them there, Hurricane Season is a linguistic and emotional whirlwind. Bewitching and almost unbearably addictive, the translation by Sophie Hughes is astonishing: if I had to pick just one book for the year, this would be it. Full review

 

Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs, translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Picador Books)

Natsuko longs for a child of her own, while her sister Makiko thinks life will be better if she has breast enhancement surgery and her niece Midoriko has taken a vow of silence. All three women are trapped in social conventions, and Breasts and Eggs is a delicate exposition of what it is to be in a woman’s body when that body is eternally viewed as either a commodity, a conduit for male pleasure, or a reproductive vessel. Bursting with the quiet tragedy of unfulfilled hopes, daily life for those without means, and longing for a person never met, this is a novel that both reflects on the life of ordinary people and thrums with their expectations and disappointments. Full review

Margarita García Robayo, Holiday Heart, translated from Spanish (Colombia) by Charlotte Coombe (Charco Press)

I’ll be honest: Charco had me at “new Margarita García Robayo novel in 2020”. In Holiday Heart, García Robayo’s talent for blending tragedy with humour and offering a fresco in a snapshot were in full force. The characters always disappoint: Lucía and Pablo are middle-aged, middle-class and mediocre, stagnating in their location, their social status, and their marriage. They left Colombia to move to the US in pursuit of the American Dream, but they are outsiders there and now belong nowhere: they have rejected their working class origins, but never ascended the social ladder in the way they hoped. This is an uncomfortable story, and García Robayo excels at depicting a seemingly simple situation which belies deeper emotions and greater complexities that we are invited to scrutinise, however uncomfortable it makes us. Full review

 

Lucy Fricke, Daughters, translated from German by Sinéad Crowe (V&Q Books)

Hilarious and emotional madcap road trip through Western Europe. Sold? You should be. Daughters was an outstanding release from new imprint V&Q Books, in which best friends Martha and Betty embark on a car journey to Switzerland to accompany Martha’s father to his appointment with euthanasia. Or so they think – a detour reveals a hidden agenda, and they never make it to Switzerland. There are losses, reunions, an accident, romantic intrigue, and the reappearance of someone long presumed dead… The storytelling of this fast-paced and eventful journey switches effortlessly between grief and humour, both of which are superbly communicated in Sinéad Crowe’s energetic translation. Full review

 

Claudia Hernández, Slash and Burn, translated from Spanish (El Salvador) by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories)

Slash and Burn follows the life of a Salvadoran woman who fought in her country’s civil war, and who struggles to keep her fragmented family together years later. Her first baby was taken from her during the war, and years later the spectre of the lost child hangs over the rural family life and its daily difficulties. Two family stories unfold simultaneously: the mother’s attempt to connect with her lost first child, and her efforts to keep together a slowly unravelling family back home. This simmering narrative is a story of resistance and resilience, quiet losses and enduring love, and is translated with great sensitivity by Julia Sanches. Full review

 

Négar Djavadi, Arène, Éditions Liana Levi (French; as yet untranslated)

Négar Djavadi’s second novel came out in French in the autumn, and it is magnificent. If you don’t read French, I highly recommend starting with her first novel Disoriental (tr. Tina Kover, Europa Editions), and then crossing your fingers that this one will be picked up for translation before long. The arena of the title is Paris: in a Belleville bar one night, a young man from a deprived housing estate knocks into the head of the biggest media streaming platform; neither of them are aware that this chance collision will draw them and everyone around them into a maelstrom of violence. Yet Arène is not just about the tragedy that unfolds, but also the chain of barely perceptible events that led there. Djavadi eschews facile stereotypes, and in a linguistically sumptuous narrative invites us to understand what lies behind our quick assumptions about power, race and relationships.

 

Europa28, edited by Sophie Hughes and Sarah Cleave (Comma Press)

2020 wasn’t just the year of Covid-19, but also the year the UK left the European Union. In response, Comma Press teamed up with Hay Festival and Wom@rts to commission Europa28, a ground-breaking anthology of women’s voices from across Europe. In this visionary project, editors Sophie Hughes and Sarah Cleave have brought together a fascinating and diverse collection of expositions on what Europe can, could, or should mean: from the personal to the allegorical, the real to the fantastic, this collection is by turns gentle and fierce, witty and emotional, bringing together 28 very different stories with a common purpose of discussing Europe in all its diversity, complexity, beauty and fallibility. Full review

 

Salma, Women Dreaming, translated from Tamil by Meena Kandasamy (Tilted Axis Press)

This beautiful story of a community of women in a small Muslim village in Tamil Nadu is exquisite in its style, pace, and depictions of the reality of life for women who have no real autonomy. When Mehar’s husband Hasan takes a second wife, she exercises her legal right to divorce him, and finds herself ostracised by the community. Goaded by Hasan’s righteous wrath and no longer able to bear her mother’s constantly-voiced fears for her future, Mehar marries again in order to regain her status, but she loses her children in the process. Eloquent, emotional and powerful, Women Dreaming is essential reading, in a dynamic yet delicate translation by Meena Kandasamy.

 

Yan Ge, Strange Beasts of China, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (Tilted Axis Press)

The final offering from Tilted Axis in 2020 is astonishing – possibly my favourite Tilted Axis book of all time. I had already read and loved Yan’s The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, translated by Nicky Harman for Balestier Press (and reviewed here), so I was excited to read this earlier work. Yet I wasn’t quite expecting to be so moved by this tale where humans and fantastical beasts co-exist (unharmoniously) in a Chinese city, trying to ignore the reality that sometimes the beasts are more human than the people and the humans more monstruous than the beasts. Though there is plenty of allegory in Strange Beasts of China, I just loved it for its compelling storytelling, the mystery at its core, and the heart of all the characters – whether human or beast. The translation by Jeremy Tiang is outstanding; I kept pausing to admire a turn of phrase, a beautifully crafted sentence, or a sensitivity to register.

 

 

So that’s my slightly belated round-up of my favourite releases of 2020. I hope there’s something in here that will pique your interest, and offer a small ray of joy from a challenging year. Happy New Year to all friends of Translating Women, and thank you as always for reading!

REVIEW: Esther Kinsky, GROVE and Jean Frémon, NATIVITY

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Esther Kinsky, Grove, translated from German by Caroline Schmidt (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020)

Grove is a story of mourning: the narrator has recently lost her love, and travels to places both familiar and unfamiliar to her in order to work her way through her grief. She visits cemeteries and attends unnoticed the funerals of strangers, observing death and the mourning of others as a way to cope with the pain of her own loss. She notices grief where it might previously have gone unobserved, underlining how loss can change everything in our perspective on the world. The narrator becomes herself like the herons she observes at one cemetery: “guardians of the dead who kept watch at a proper distance, unobserved attendants to the gathered mourners.”

This kind of voyeuristic introspection (I know that sounds weird – it’s the best description I can come up with) wasn’t the highlight for me, though; I responded much more viscerally to the narrator’s intermittent references to her own mourning. There are plaintive comments that describe grief vividly and yet without melodrama: it is acknowledged that there is “no consolation in bereavement”, and that an insurmountable loss makes things that once were simple seem impossible: “Each morning I had to learn everything anew”. Similarly, the instinctive connection between memory and objects is sensitively detailed (“For years these memories were stored somewhere in my head and now they surged up only because here, at this place, I came across the missing negatives that must have been tucked away in the unused side pocket for a long time”), as is the way in which memory changes over time: “As time passed after my father’s death, he became even smaller in my mental picture of this walk along the river, and his suitcase ever larger, into which he had stuffed who knows how much of his life that he had never found a name for.” These glimpses of the narrator’s own emotion were the parts that really appealed to me in this otherwise understated narrative of grief.

The translation by Caroline Schmidt is stylistically beautiful, capturing the wistfulness and the precision of the narrator’s observations. In particular, the descriptions of nature regularly contain a single descriptive verb that makes it clear how well Schmidt has “got” this narrator: “Scattered cyprus saplings buckled over, as if in pain”; “A violent thunderstorm broke the heat that had crouched above the landscape.” There is no dialogue in Grove, or overt interaction with other characters in the present; the narrator speaks very formally (objects are weighted “qua testimony”, a town sits “atop” a hill), and there are occasional arcane phrases (“a languid summer that augured ill”) and uses of syntax (“idle lists of a forlornness that knows not what to do with itself”). This lends a gravity and formality to the narrative that is maintained admirably by Schmidt, whose translation also includes plenty of references to nature that I didn’t recognise even in English (a red-backed shrike creaks in a bush, while cliffs form tuffs on the coastline and a water ditch is lined by canebrake). I always like learning new words, and Grove was certainly the book for that. While it wasn’t “my” kind of book, it did make me think about myself – specifically about how we have to listen to what other people need us to be when they’re sharing their pain. I may not have felt a close connection with the narrator, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the shortcomings are with her.

Jean Frémon, Nativity, translated from French by Cole Swensen (Les Fugitives, 2020)

This short essay from Les Fugitives is the second offering from Jean Frémon and Cole Swensen and, like the first, represents a kind of homage to Louise Bourgeois. 2018’s Now, Now, Louison was a fictionalised biography of Bourgeois by Frémon, who was a friend of hers, and Nativity features five original pieces of art by Bourgeois that she painted in watered-down gouache to accompany this reflection by Frémon on the representation of Jesus in art.

Frémon’s focus is on a painting being commissioned hundreds of years ago: the fictional painter is given the task of painting “a large Nativity on a single panel” for a palace chapel, and must succeed in representing divinity made incarnate. The painting is not solely for decorative purpose: it should not only inspire those who already read the Bible, but also serve as an instruction those who cannot read and write. His artwork must, therefore, make it clear that the baby in the painting is the son of God. Traditional depictions of the baby Jesus achieve this variously by painting a golden aura radiating from him to show that he is no ordinary child, revealing his mystery in the awe-filled faces of those gathered around, or filling the tableau with angels and kings to demonstrate the significance of his birth; this painter decides instead to dispense with the swaddling clothes, believing that the key to showing the child’s divinity lies in his nakedness. This is also, of course, the most basic sign of his humanity, thereby instructing all those who view the painting that the son of Mary is also the Son of God.

Frémon discusses the Nativity analytically, and Swensen translates with great poise, subtly communicating two key things in particular: firstly, that Frémon’s decision to focus on a painter and his mission brings something very personal to the history encompassed within this short essay and secondly, that the women are notable by their absence. The painting is commissioned by a man, of a man, about the Son of Man, but the illustrations offer a different perspective. The five paintings by Bourgeois are made up of red brushstrokes, and depict the more human side of the Christmas story: a child swelling in the womb, a birth, a hungry newborn.

In four of the five paintings, the mother is as present as the child, and these invite as much reflection as Frémon’s prose. Heavily pregnant, she has just undertaken a gruelling journey, and then gone into labour and given birth in a stable. While I entirely understand the focus on the child – whether divine or human – it’s the depictions of Mary that I’m always drawn to, and they could easily have been absent from this essay just as they are absent from much discourse of the Nativity. The artwork by Bourgeois fills this void: among other images, she traces in blood-red strokes a view such as the one that Joseph – as de facto midwife – might have had.

The reflections are compelling and lucidly composed; in contrast the representations offered by Bourgeois are carnal, showing that for all the divine wonder of the Nativity, it is also the story of a first-time mother giving birth in extraordinary – and probably terrifying – circumstances. At the start of the essay, the canon commissioning the painter explains that “we depend on the imagination of painting to prove reality”, and the prints by Bourgeois do exactly that: this is an distinctly humanised view of the Nativity, and an interesting alternative Christmas story for you to seek out this year.

REVIEW: Claudia Hernández, SLASH AND BURN & Juan Pablo Villalobos, I DON’T EXPECT ANYONE TO BELIEVE ME

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Claudia Hernández, Slash and Burn, translated from Spanish (El Salvador) by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories, 2021)

Slash and Burn is the first novel in English of Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández. Technically exquisite and sensitively translated by Julia Sanches, Slash and Burn follows the life of a Salvadoran woman who fought in her country’s civil war, and who struggles to keep her family together years later. The unnamed woman gave birth to a daughter during the war, but the child was taken from her so she could continue to fight; her husband died in the war and she later had three other daughters, but hanging over the rural family life and its daily difficulties is the spectre of the child who was taken away. The mother desperately wants to be reunited with her daughter, and embarks on a voyage of discovery that takes her to France, a country distant in every way from anything she has experienced. There she finds an uptight bourgeois girl who is prone to bouts of depression and wants nothing to do with her, and so two family stories unfold simultaneously: the mother’s attempt to connect with her lost first child, and her efforts to keep together a slowly unravelling family back home.

Silence reigns over the household, the village, and the country: an unwritten code of honour means that the ex combatants internalise pain and try to provide a better future for their children without explaining to them what came before. However noble the mother’s silence may be, ultimately it rips through her family, creating fault lines between them that the children try to cross while each generation struggles to understand the other: “She couldn’t expect her to get married, have kids, and stay there for ever, looking after the children, the fields, and the chickens. Why not? She would’ve liked to do that herself. She would’ve preferred it to going about the mountains, weapon to shoulder. But she’d done it so they could have everything she was claiming not to want.” Yet it is the silence itself that perpetuates this lack of understanding, as the mother’s insistence on keeping her pain secret alienates her from her children: “Why couldn’t they appreciate the sacrifices she’d made? In part because she’d never shared any of the particulars.”

The peripheral characters are also beautifully sketched, giving a sense of both rural and urban life, and an insight into how history has affected every household. Simple, almost throwaway clauses show the reality of life both generally (“they had an itinerary to keep and a specific time to be back by if they didn’t want roadside thieves to seize everything they’d gone to the capital for”) and specifically for households where no man was present to protect the family (“the robbers respected the men’s presence, even those who were elderly or weaker than they were. They viewed the women as they had before the war, even though they’d fought beside them, saved their lives on occasion, and could even kill them now, claiming they’d trespassed on their property. But they knew none of them would.”) This kind of understatement is characteristic of the novel, where a loved one’s brutal death is mentioned obliquely while remembering a lost wedding ring (“It can’t have been left in the place where he was turned into a thousand pieces. And it wasn’t at home. That much she was sure of: he’d have told her”) and an unwritten wartime law is explained impassively (“they could end up on trial in their camps and lose their lives after being forced to dig the ditch their bodies would lie in”).

No character is named, and many of them have two names (neither of which is ever used explicitly) – one given at birth, and another in wartime. This is occasionally confusing, and must have been extremely challenging for the translation, but Sanches is never heavy-handed: “her name, not the one she got from her mother but the one she was given in battle. She’ll call her by her given name unless she goes by the one on her birth certificate. Some ex combatants had gone back to their earlier ones.” The lack of names both reflects the ex combatants’ need for anonymity and elevates the experience of individual characters to a more universal one – this is a close scrutiny of one family, but it is also representative of a generation.

The translator’s note at the end is excellent, and offers insight into the complexities of the political situation, as well as the challenges of translating a text where no-one is named. Sanches also makes a vital point about the importance of circulating narratives from parts of the world that don’t receive much attention, and adding to the diversity of the literary landscape. Slash and Burn is a triumph from beginning to end, truly extraordinary in style and scope, its simmering narrative swelling towards an emotional conclusion.

Juan Pablo Villalobos, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, translated from Spanish (Mexico) by Daniel Hahn (And Other Stories, 2020)

My next recommendation is also published by And Other Stories, and is about as different from Slash and Burn as you could imagine, but equally brilliant. I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is a gangster-crime-campus-novel from Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos: equal parts hilarious and horrifying, it is translated with sublime deadpan humour by Daniel Hahn.

Juan Pablo is a hapless doctoral student from Mexico who gets caught up in a gangster underworld that takes him to Barcelona, where he is tasked with making the (lesbian) daughter of a high-ranking official fall in love with him. If he fails in his mission… well, this is a gangster underworld, so you can imagine the stakes. He might meet the same fate as the would-be-entrepreneur cousin who got him caught up in this mess in the first place (let’s just say it was a closed coffin).

From the first page I laughed out loud: “When I arrive, there are three of them there, plus my cousin. All with dark fuzz on their upper lips (we’re sixteen at this point, maybe seventeen), faces covered in spots oozing a viscous yellowish liquid, with four enormous noses (one apiece)” – it’s the “one apiece” that got me, and this kind of humorous parenthesis continues riotously through the entire novel – even when brains are splattered across basements and mistaken identity has fatal consequences. There are some hilarious send-ups of cultural stereotypes (“you know what Catalans think when Barça’s five-nil up? That the other guys are about to bring them to a draw”) alongside serious indictments of corrupt western regimes (“We’re giving him the opportunity of a lifetime, if he makes the most of it he could end up as a minister, or president of the autonomous government, if that’s what he wants, or rather if that’s what we want”), epistolary appearances from a neurotic mother and a dead relative, and a severe case of dermatitis nervosa.

The story is engaging and the storytelling wickedly funny, but it was the ending that absolutely knocked me for six: I have a no-spoiler policy here, so all I can say is read it and watch out for those final three chapters, and how different threads fall away until… well, until you’re left with an unexpected voice and an unpredictable ending.

Like Slash and Burn, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is followed by an exceptional translator’s note. Hahn dissects knotty translation problems with a sardonic humour: this translator’s note is as glorious as the novel itself. I read and re-read it, and then pored over page 243 (there’s a challenge, readers, and I dare you to pick up the gauntlet). Brimming with black humour, self-deprecating irony and surreal shenanigans, I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me is simultaneously witty and dark, an escapist read that will stay with you after the laughter has faded.

 

Review: Nino Haratischvili, THE EIGHTH LIFE

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Translated from German (Georgia) by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin (Scribe Books, 2019)

The prize ceremony for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation will take place online this Thursday, and before the winner is announced I wanted to talk to you about a stunning book on the shortlist, The Eighth Life (for Brilka). I read The Eighth Life in April this year, at the start of the first lockdown: diving into a 1000-page novel just when “free time” became an alien concept might seem a little foolhardy, but all I can say is that this book was good for my soul. I spent two weeks reading a little a day, and accompanying the characters through their dreams and their tragedies until they were part of my daily life: I would find myself turning scenes over in my mind while going about my day, and wondering what would happen to the characters next. So if the sheer size of The Eighth Life puts you off, let me assure you that even in the most extraordinary of circumstances, it’s compelling enough to keep you hooked. I recorded a video for The Eighth Life five months ago(!) – it’s a sign of this crazy year that I’m only now getting to share it with you, but I hope you’ll enjoy both the readings (click on the video at the end of this post) and the thoughts I’m noting down here.

The Eighth Life is an epic family and historical saga that sweeps through the twentieth-century Russian Empire in a series of chapters named for different characters (and different generations) of the same family. The present-day narrator, Niza, is keeper of the family secrets, which were passed on to her by her grandmother, Stasia. Stasia is the family matriarch, though she is much younger when we meet her at the start of the twentieth century. Her dreams of becoming a dancer are still intact, though will be slowly dismantled by both history and marriage. The daughter of a skilled chocolate-maker, Stasia also knows the family’s secret recipe for a hot chocolate so sublime it has an almost magical effect, but its benefits come at a price, as the chocolate is also cursed. Generation after generation, tragedy befalls those who drink it, to the point where the recipe is never written down and never disclosed (a cynical reader might find this rather melodramatic, and although I’d usually class myself as one such reader, I confess to having been completely swept away by the magnificence of the whole story).

Niza’s narrative is at times formal and at times conspiratorial, addressed to her niece Brilka and all the more inviting because of the direct second-person address. Niza knows a great deal about her family history thanks to Stasia passing on all her stories, but what she doesn’t know she openly supplements or invents. This offers far more freedom in the storytelling, and allows Niza to bring the characters to life as she chronicles the story of this broken dynasty. Stasia’s two children, Kitty and Kostya, grow up as communism takes hold in Georgia: Kostya joins the military, and becomes indoctrinated with values that he clings to throughout his life – to the detriment of his family and his own happiness. Though he spends the rest of his long life lamenting a lost moment (which you can hear more about in the video), he is singularly unable to see his own role in the downfall of his family.

Yet if I had strong emotions towards (or against) Kostya, they paled in comparison with my reaction to Kitty. Controlled in every way by either her brother or the state (at times the line between the two is rather blurred), eventually Kitty’s only option is to leave her home and start a new life. But despite her successes elsewhere, she will forever mourn the mother she left behind and another unbearable loss (no spoilers, but watch the video to get a sense of the depth of emotion – I had to re-take that excerpt three times and my voice still wobbles at the end). The entire family is trapped in silence, suffocating on words never uttered and tears never shed: each of them failed another in a way that set them on a different path, and all of the ways in which the characters disappoint one another have repercussions for their future relationships and life choices.

One of Haratischvili’s great achievements is the empathy she is able to ignite even for her most odious characters: for example, Kostya is infuriating in his insistence on what is “right”, his dogged, dogmatic and blinded devotion to his principles and his party, and his attempts to control all the women in his family – but by making Kostya such a key part of the story, Haratischvili deftly creates empathy for this broken man even as he destroys the lives of those he most wanted to save.

The immensity of history is evident throughout The Eighth Life – not only in the use of flashback and narration of past events, but also with Niza’s awareness of what came later in (or after) her ancestors’ lives. Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin translate with a sensitivity towards both historical detail and Haratischvili’s rich storytelling: this is a sumptuous novel, exquisitely rendered. On several occasions I found myself pausing to admire the translation, re-reading entire sections to enjoy them again or marvelling over the use of a particular word; the dialogues are outstanding, as is the use of syntax and the lexical range, striking a lithe balance between understatement and sentimentality without ever leaning too heavily in either direction.

This multi-generational story of revolution and downfall strikes a endnote of possibility and new chances: Niza offers Brilka her “eighth life” in a final chapter that is as original as it was unexpected. I cannot recommend this extraordinary book highly enough, and I hope you will read it and love it as I did.

Watch my video on The Eighth Life by clicking on the link below (don’t forget: if you’re reading this review in your email, you’ll need to click through to the website to view the video, or watch it directly on Vimeo!)

Review: Andrea Jeftanovic, THEATRE OF WAR

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Translated from Spanish (Chile) by Frances Riddle (Charco Press, 2020)

Theatre of War is Andrea Jeftanovic’s debut novel, and the final offering from a brilliant 2020 Charco catalogue. The narrator, Tamara, presents her past as if it were a play, inviting an audience to sit and observe “the spectacle of my childhood” in a script that is continually being written. Her family are all present on stage, acting the role ascribed to them, and Tamara is simply an actor playing her part, not directing or pulling the strings. This allows for an objectivity in parts of the narration that provides an excellent balance to Tamara’s more introspective monologues, a balance that mirrors the tension between historical atrocity and personal experience.

An unresolved trauma hangs heavy over the childhood household: Tamara’s father has fled his Balkan homeland, and is obsessed both with the memories of his losses there and with the news that tells him how his homeland continues to tear itself apart. “Dad is stuck in time, remembering the war” says Tamara’s child voice, observing how the present is not enough to pull her father out of the emotional stasis in which the war has left him. The legacy of the war is passed down to a generation who had no direct experience of it, transmitted through the father’s silences and obsessions: “I inhabit places I’ve never been. Dad, on the other hand, has never left that distant time.” Dragged into a past that her father can neither leave nor fully share, Tamara is left adrift, and turns to writing to find her own territory (“I founded my own country in a blue notebook where I’m not a minority”), and this gives her a place to call home (“My blue journal, the site where I’d founded my homeland, now pushes me into new territories”). As for Tamara’s mother, she is struggling with ghosts of her own, as it transpires that her other two children are from a different relationship (which will be the only one she remembers when a sudden collapse leads her to lose a big swathe of her memory). She papers over the cracks in her marriage, finding solace in the arms of a decorator, and ultimately leaves Tamara’s father one night that represents “another warped date that will alter the rest of the calendar.”

All of this brokenness is recounted in the present tense, lending an immediacy to the narration that works very well with the theatrical setting. Though Tamara as a character can only follow where her role takes her, Jeftanovic as author deftly directs her narrator via a detached yet expressive prose that recounts personal and historical tragedy without melodrama or sensationalism. Frances Riddle’s translation is, as always, impeccable: perfectly pitched and with an admirable knack for finding unexpected words and collocations that, once you’ve read them, seem like the only possible option: a “gnash of fire on the horizon”, “dented voices shuddering the walls”, “there are lagoons of silence”, “Dad cloaked by the newspaper, hiding his fist of a heart behind it”, “they strafe the centre of my heart”).

The wars in Theatre of War are all-pervading and suffocating, but feature primarily as a backdrop for the characters’ lives: the real battles are between the characters themselves, for their love and survival. In her adult life, Tamara struggles to build lasting relationships, to allow herself to love, and to come to terms with her childhood. Her multiple losses leave her standing “in the middle of the battlefield”, with the first glimmer of healing coming only when she reunites with her sister. I will, however, leave you to discover where that encounter (along with the many others that make up her adult life) takes her for, as the director of this play warns us as we hurtle towards the final scene, “everyone’s secrets will be revealed.” Theatre of War is a striking debut from Jeftanovic, a first-class translation from Riddle, and an excellent conclusion to Charco’s 2020 catalogue.

Review copy of Theatre of War provided by Charco Press

Join the virtual launch for Theatre of War on Tuesday 8 December

Review: Annie Ernaux, A MAN’S PLACE

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Translated from French by Tanya Leslie (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020)

The release of A Man’s Place makes Annie Ernaux the most published author at Fitzcarraldo Editions: this is the fifth of Ernaux’s books to be published in translation by Fitzcarraldo, with another two scheduled to come next year. A chronicler of personal and historical detail, Ernaux looks back on pivotal moments or relationships with a detached observation that belies deep emotion, and offers a portrait of a particular time, place and milieu that shaped her. In A Man’s Place, the subject is Ernaux’s father, a working class countryman who had been taken out of school at the age of twelve to work on a farm and pay his way. Defined when people spoke of him by the fact that he could neither read nor write, he had always wanted his daughter to rise above the “humiliating barriers” of a social situation in which he felt trapped, forever striving for a better life and never quite attaining it. Ernaux’s relationship with him was complex, and A Man’s Place represents her attempt to document his life as she knew it.

The narrative opens with Ernaux announcing her father’s death, information that she imparts with characteristic understatement: “My father died exactly two months later, to the day … It was a Sunday, in the early afternoon”. The earlier event to which Ernaux refers here was her success in the entrance exams to the teacher training college in Rouen: it was a milestone in her life, but she had been unaware that her father was proud of her achievement. She discovers the significance of her success for her father when she looks through his wallet after his death and finds a newspaper clipping of the exam results: the names are listed in order of merit, and Ernaux’s was second on the list. The father’s unarticulated pride is, however, always coupled with a more palpable resentment that his daughter has been able to move “up”, to leave her parents behind, to notice their lack of refinement and in that silent observation to make them realise that she no longer accepts their ways without question.

This is a story of missed moments and painful silences, written in what Ernaux herself identifies as a neutral style and presented as an endeavour that brings her no joy. Yet the words she chooses to write her father’s story are perfectly pitched to offer both an insight into the hardships of her father’s life and an understanding of her experience of him as a daughter. Emotions were not easily expressed in the household, and this inflects Ernaux’s detached writing style: not only does she describe it as akin to the way she wrote to her parents after she moved away, but also she observes her younger self from a vantage point years later, struggling to recognise in that stranger the person she still harbours inside her (this is even more evident in the wonderful A Girl’s Story, published earlier this year by Fitzcarraldo in Alison L. Strayer’s translation). Even the decomposition of her father’s corpse is presented in a measured way (“Within a few hours, my father’s face had changed beyond all recognition … The smell set in on the Monday”). Indeed, the imperative to remain objective is explicitly voiced when Ernaux notes that she had originally thought of writing a novel about her father, but realised that this was out of the question as “in order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach.”

Yet Ernaux creates a work that is artistic in an unconventional way: to write a man crippled by fear of saying the wrong thing, she chooses her words with great care and embeds simple refrains from her childhood household in beautifully crafted sentences. She places these phrases in italics, and so they stand out to allow insight into the way her parents thought and spoke. Her parents are “afraid they would lose everything and lapse back into working-class poverty”, “always afraid they would eat into their capital”, and are haunted by “this fear of being ashamed, out of place.” Ernaux’s father is afraid of what other people will say, of using the wrong words (which would have been “as bad as breaking wind”), of being looked down on; the italicised phrases and the fear they contain are, as Ernaux explicitly notes, inseparably linked to her childhood. Tanya Leslie weaves them admirably into delicate sentences of her own, her careful and lucid translation respecting Ernaux’s understated eloquence. The only thing I’m less convinced about in the translation is the title: the French La Place is less specific, and so the translated title becomes less representative of the book itself. I had similar reservations about the translated title of Happening (though my quibble there was more that the title diluted the original), and I do think that Ernaux’s titles (with the possible exception of The Years) are particularly difficult to translate literally. I’m sure this won’t be a deal-breaker, anyway – fans of Ernaux will find much to enjoy in A Man’s Place, and for those new to her work it will give an excellent introduction to her writing style and preoccupations.

It’s twenty years since I first read La Place, and it was fascinating to read it in translation with a couple of decades of reading and living under my belt. I felt much more empathy towards Ernaux’s father than I remember feeling back then, and the carefully contained and articulated emotion struck me much more than they had twenty years ago – my over-riding memory had been the depiction of a suffocating home environment and Ernaux’s detachment towards her family. These things, of course, are only part of the story, but that’s how my memory had condensed it (“Memory resists”, writes Ernaux; personal reminiscence is unreliable). Above all, A Man’s Place is an emotive goodbye to a man who remained distant from his daughter, a homage born of silences and the inability to find a way to reach one another. Ernaux’s father’s greatest fear was giving his daughter cause for shame; his greatest satisfaction “the fact that I belonged to the world which had scorned him.” In this touching tribute she creates in her “educated bourgeois world” a legacy for a man she will never fully know, giving him his place by carving it out in a world from which he always felt excluded.

Review copy of A Man’s Place provided by Fitzcarraldo Editions

REVIEW: Translators Aloud YouTube channel

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Earlier this year, literary translators Charlie Coombe and Tina Kover set up Translators Aloud, a YouTube channel dedicated to putting translators in the spotlight. The channel grew from a speculative tweet by Tina, who at the time was considering reading a section from one of her translations and wondered whether there would be an audience for it. The response was definite and affirmative: not only did people want to hear it, but many other translators had also had similar thoughts and fears. Buoyed by this wave of response, Charlie suggested setting up a YouTube channel: by the end of that same day Translators Aloud (which was given its activism-meets-popular-culture name by Open University PhD student Babs Spicer) had been created.

On the channel, Charlie and Tina post regular short videos of translators reading from their work. A fruit of the global lockdown which Charlie says came about because “we were both looking for something inspiring to focus on” at a difficult and restricted time, it is a venture that brings together the best of a virtual community. Translators Aloud shares work at a time when it has not been possible to meet in person, using the modern technologies we’ve never appreciated so much until now to create a positive space for exchange. Translators Aloud is not only an excellent platform for translators trying to promote or pitch their work, but also a space in which to represent voices from around the world, bringing cultures together at a time when we are physically distanced and subjected to powerful discourses of division. It also advocates for the visibility of the translator, showing explicitly how these texts became available in English by having them read by the people who wrote the English versions.

The channel has grown in popularity and diversity, with almost 700 subscribers to date; there are over a hundred videos available to view, with the readings grouped into playlists for easy navigation. There were a number of special posts to mark International Translation Day on 30 September, notably videos from the wonderful Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Ros Schwartz, in which they give guidance to aspiring literary translators on how to pitch projects and read from their own work. Tina says this is the feature she’s most proud of, as “it felt like we were helping our community and our colleagues, and that was great.” As an added International Translation Day bonus, you can also watch Emily Wilson give a dramatic reading of her controversial and highly acclaimed translation of Homer’s Odyssey.

You won’t be surprised to learn that my favourite playlist is the one devoted to readings of women in translation. I’m always slightly wary of grouping translations by original language (though I fully recognise the convenience and simplicity of doing so) because it can potentially mean that less dominant languages still don’t get the same recognition that the “big” languages (such as French and Spanish) do, and so for me the themed playlists do exactly what I want from publicising translations – they promote diversity, encourage us to look beyond our own bubbles or what we think we like or identify with, and discover something new.

When I asked Tina and Charlie about their hopes for the future, Tina had this to say: “Obviously I hope we’ll continue to attract subscribers, and to boost sales of translated books as people discover these wonderful readings and are inspired to buy books they wouldn’t even have heard of otherwise. But right now what I’m most excited about is our new ‘Seeking a Publisher’ playlist, which features as-yet-undiscovered projects that are ripe and ready to be picked up, with the English-language rights available. If we can help in bringing more world literature to the market, I would feel incredibly satisfied that we’d really made a difference at the end of the day.”

That notion of “making a difference” is so close to my heart, as if we don’t actively do what we can to make that difference, challenging universal structures or dominant narratives, then we allow an incomplete and inadequate status quo to perpetuate itself. Those of you familiar with my more academic research focus will know that I’m currently writing a book on the agency and activism of translators and publishers, so this comment from Charlie about her hopes for the channel’s growth also very much hit home for me: “I am really keen to increase awareness of how important translators are in the process of a foreign language book getting published in English, increasing awareness of what we do in general, and also increasing transparency in the publishing process. This all goes back to the main aim of Translators Aloud which is to shine the spotlight on translators.”

Any initiative that makes translators more visible gets an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me, and Translators Aloud is a wonderful community resource that both fosters and thrives on engagement and inclusion, and one which I hope will continue to grow in scope and success. You can see more in any of the hyperlinks, or follow my viewing recommendations below.

You can probably guess my first two recommendations, since Charlie and Tina have translated two of my favourite authors, and in my list you’ll also spot a number of books I’ve reviewed on this blog – if my review hasn’t already encouraged you to discover the book, hopefully the translators reading from their work will do so!

Tina Kover reads from Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental (Europa Editions, 2018)

Charlie Coombe reads from Margarita García Robayo’s Holiday Heart (Charco Press, 2020)

Ellen Elias-Bursać and Paul Gordon read from Olja Knežević’s Catherine the Great and the Small (Istros Books, 2020)

Katy Derbyshire reads from Sandra Hoffmann’s Paula (V&Q Books, 2020)

Elisabeth Jaquette reads from ‘Edges’ by Rania Mamoun, from Thirteen Months of Sunrise (Comma Press, 2019)

Annie McDermott reads from ‘The Same Stone’ by Edurne Portela, from Europa28 (edited by Sarah Cleave and Sophie Hughes, Comma Press, 2020)

Richard Philcox reads from Maryse Condé’s Waiting for the Waters to Rise (World Editions, 2021)

Fiona Graham reads from Elisabeth Åsbrink’s 1947: When Now Begins (Scribe Books, 2017)

Instructions for submitting work to Translators Aloud are pinned to the Twitter page, and can also be found on the “About” section of the YouTube channel.

Review: FAREWELL, GHOSTS by Nadia Terranova

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Translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein (Seven Stories Press, 2020)

This week the new UK imprint of Seven Stories Press releases Nadia Terranova’s English-language debut, a coming-of-age story with a family tragedy at its heart. Ida Laquidara is a 30-something writer living in Rome with her husband, the dependable (if not exactly passionate) Pietro. This apparently contented equilibrium is disrupted when Ida’s mother calls her back home to Sicily to help her sort out the family home before she sells it; Ida’s mother wants Ida to go through her childhood possessions and decide what to do with them. Yet this will prove an emotionally intense task, for the house and all Ida’s former belongings are heavy with the memory of her father’s abandonment: when Ida was 13, her father left the house one morning at 6.16 and never returned. Though Ida starts the novel by stating that “there’s always a reason that memories should remain memories and not come to disturb the present”, in the end her return to Messina makes the memories surge and threaten to engulf her if she does not finally confront them.

We learn little about Ida’s father, Sebastiano, other than that he was depressive and that Ida had to care for him while her mother went out to work. The abandonment is what remains: the unanswered questions, the life interrupted, the unexplained departure that leaves Ida “the daughter of the absence of Sebastiano Laquidara.” As for Ida’s relationship with her mother, it is fraught and tense: reigning over the household is the silence of a pain that they both had in common but never shared. The two women are “a family that was maimed and full of silences”, bound together by a mutual rage and an inability to move on from a morning in the 1990s that has defined their life.

Twenty-three years on, the rooms in the family home are “saturated with unused hope” just like Ida and her mother, and the house itself is on the verge of falling apart. The walls, floors, plumbing and heating look in order but all threaten to give way at any time, and the metaphor is not much of a leap: Ida and her mother stay upright but brittle, silently imploding and never far from collapse. The clock, too, symbolises their life together: it is, Ida says, stuck forever at 6.16 – and so are they (she notes that “inside me the clock had never signaled afternoon”). The unresolved trauma of Sebastiano’s disappearance weighs heavy on the household, the women and their emotional lives, both of them turning into fortresses who refuse to open up but are eroding on the inside. The Sicilian landscape also comes alive in Ida’s story, aesthetically beautiful and dramatic but unwelcoming to her. Messina is her father’s city, its shoreline walked by him so often, and her certainty that he has returned to the sea both evokes images of the (overtly referenced) mythological creatures hiding in the deep and provides the turning point for Ida’s voyage back into her past.

Ann Goldstein’s translation successfully conveys the melancholy that treads a delicate path between concision and self-indulgence. The language is suitably limpid, refusing to descend into melodrama even as dramatic events unfold: “Death is a full stop, while disappearance is the absence of a stop, of any punctuation mark at the end of the words.” This considered, almost detached narration makes the heart of the story is all the more effective (for example, in the observation that “a depressed man had consciously and forever left life and the two of us.”) There aren’t so many of the syntactical or collocational calques that characterise other translations of Goldstein’s that I’ve read, and those that are there are slightly less noticeable, such as “My mother and I didn’t know how to repair the damage and so we lived it”, or they simply add to the way in which the narrative voice is constructed (“Twenty-three years ago I put in here the proofs of the existence of a man named Sebastiano Laquidara, in this red box I buried the smell and voice of my father.”)

Though Ida at times appeared a self-absorbed narrator, the defining moment in her emotional journey is realising that this is what she has become: someone so consumed with the pain of her own grief that she is no longer alive to the grief of others. Ida’s pain has taken up so much space that there was no room for anyone else, and this realisation may just be the key to letting it go – not to making amends, or to making good on the past, but to releasing her ghosts and allowing the living to take their place: Farewell, Ghosts is a melancholic and reflective novel that swells with intelligence and heart.

Review copy of Farewell, Ghosts provided by Seven Stories Press

Review: DAUGHTERS by Lucy Fricke

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Translated from German by Sinéad Crowe (V&Q Books, 2020)

The new English-language imprint of V&Q Books offers another belter for its launch: following on from last week’s review of Paula (Sandra Hoffmann, translated by Katy Derbyshire), today I’m looking at Lucy Fricke’s Daughters, a book that manages to switch effortlessly between grief and humour and which, in a superb translation by Sinéad Crowe, is one of my favourite books so far this year.

Meet Betty. She’s a writer, recently turned 40, single, grieving, recovering from depression but clear-sighted enough to know that she won’t give up alcohol and adventure to aid her recovery. Betty is our narrator, and one of the most riotously caustic literary companions you’re likely to meet. Betty is best friends with Martha, who is a few years younger and desperately trying to have a baby with her husband Henning (who Betty thinks is the best thing to happen to Martha, though Henning himself considers Betty to be a nefarious influence on Martha). Betty and Martha are going to take us on a madcap road trip through Western Europe, for reasons that start out seeming fairly clear and become more complex as the story unfolds.

As well as a common loss that recurs as a leitmotiv through the narrative, Betty and Martha have another significant connection: they both have disappointing, absent, and pretty useless fathers. More than that: they are both still helplessly bound to those fathers – whether by a sense of duty or by genuine affection – and it is the fathers who become both the instigator and the destination of the daughters’ journey.

The journey itself originally comes about because Kurt, Martha’s terminally ill father, announces that he has booked himself into a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland, and his last request is that Martha take him there because, as Martha puts it, “it’s not enough to get his own daughter to pay for him to die, but he expects me to drive him there too.” Still reeling from a recent accident, Martha feels unable to drive herself, and so ropes in Betty to act as chauffeur and chaperone for a journey that should be morbid but is truly hilarious.

The gang never make it as far as Switzerland. There’s a detour (romantic intrigue and promises broken), an accident, and a clue to the whereabouts of another father long presumed dead. Daughters is a fast-paced and eventful journey that packs an emotional punch, but tragedy is always underscored with humour: for example, of Kurt’s final trip, Betty’s stance is that “the thought of making one’s final journey in a Golf depressed me. I ordered a second pint and a shot”; faced with a set of tall bronze doors, she reflects that “if the doors of heaven are anything like that, I’ll never get in”, and of desperate new beginnings she opines that “At every new stage of life you end up back at Ikea, where every hope begins and ends.”

With two forty-ish women falling apart and taking to the open road, this book could very easily have fallen into tropes of gender and facile stereotypes (there is even an overt reference to Thelma and Louise), but the beauty of Fricke’s narrative direction is that it sidesteps all such conventions. Yes, there is an almost-final scene that could have felt contrived in other hands, but Fricke brings together her various narrative threads so skilfully, and smashes the picture-perfect ending so deftly, that she is always one step ahead of expectation. The friendship between the two women is multi-dimensional: they have a quiet complicity as well as a common grief; each is the only one the other can count on to offer unconditional support, yet they are fully aware of one another’s flaws (Betty is selfish, sensitive only in matters that concern her, whereas Martha “had a tight grip on herself … so tight that she was in danger of strangling  herself”). Above all, their bond is very human: Betty says of Martha that “There was no one else in the world with whom I could laugh so uproariously at misfortune” (as literary companions go, one could say the same of Betty herself).

Sinéad Crowe’s translation is edgy and full of verve, and nowhere more so than in the range of lexical expression she uses to reproduce Fricke’s humour: Betty is a “left-eyed bawler”, dangling in Kurt’s car is “a fir-shaped air freshener that had given up the ghost long ago”, and teenage dreams come to an abrupt end with the realisation that “we’d wanted to be champion race-car drivers, and now, twenty years later, we couldn’t even get out of a northern Italian car park.” Crowe excels in communicating Fricke’s sardonic wit, but also allows the pathos to come through in plaintive sentences such as “I had no idea how tenacious grief can be”, “neither of us talked any more about the powerlessness and unhappiness that hounded us every day and were slowly eating away at us”, or the one that most moved me: “Love began with you.”

I love the translator’s notes at the back because, as with Paula, it is revealed after the fact that this seemingly effortless prose is the result of much deliberation. It’s not that I (ever) want the translator to be invisible – hence my love of translator’s notes, and joy every time I see a translator’s name on a book cover – but rather that I prefer it if the process of translation – the brow-furrowing, synonym-searching, come-back-to-it-later or try-it-out-loud to see how it sounds and all the other countless demands that getting to grips with writing a text in another language entails – doesn’t jump out at me as I read. To me, the magic of a great translation (and a great translator) is making a complex task appear effortless. Both Katy Derbyshire with Paula and Sinéad Crowe with Daughters pull that off; I highly recommend that you give V&Q’s new women in translation a whirl.

Review copy of Daughters provided by V&Q Books