WITMonth Day 27 | A Bed for the King's Daughter by Shahla Ujayli

Note: This is another one I actually read (and reviewed) last year (in 2021), but hesitated to publish this critical review, seeing as the book is published by a small publisher and has largely flown under the radar. As I said previously: This year, I've decided to let my blog go back to being just that - MY blog. Anyways. Here's a not-so-thrilled review of a book that I didn't really get.

Confession: I didn't like this collection. It surprised me a bit, truly, but I just couldn't connect with the work. I didn't like the writing, I didn't like the supposed experimental nature/"surrealism", and I didn't like most of the stories themselves, which seemed to wash over me without leaving any sort of imprint. I actually read A Bed for the King's Daughter (translated from Arabic by Sawad Hussain) in two bursts, but forgot to set a bookmark and found myself rereading some of the stories, without even realizing it until I got to the story's end and went "wait, I read this already". This happened with three consecutive stories... rarely a good sign.

A Bed for the King's Daughter is a slip of a collection, a tiny book along the lines of Thirteen Months of Sunrise or a poetry collection. The fascinating translator's note addresses this rather bluntly, opening with quotes of "Too short. Too experimental. Not enough sense of place. Not Arab enough." that encompass the sorts of supposed limitations that prevented the collection from being published, per different editors. Hussain's note is extremely successful at showcasing Ujayli as a unique, talented voice, whose experimental short works are important reading for anyone trying to break free of ingrained expectations and assumptions. But this same (understandably glowing) endorsement ended up making me feel all the worse for not enjoying the collection. I didn't think that Ujayli's collection was any one of those quoted critiques, but I also just... didn't get it. 

There's certainly something special in Ujayli's writing, a little sing-songiness to how these stories flow, something that makes them a little ethereal and fairy tale-like (and indeed, a few of them directly reference or play with fairy tale tropes). I can see how this might be a very unique book, but that doesn't mean I enjoyed it; the writing grated on me within one story, and the tendency to end the stories on some sort of half-conclusion largely left me irritated. Short story collections often struggle in needing to find the balance between having a strong overall style, while also maintaining clear individual boundaries for each story (that is - individual stories ought to be memorable enough on their own). A Bed for the King's Daughter did reasonably well at having a unified tone without stories fully bleeding into each other, but none stood out either. I can remember only fragments from different stories, less than I might take away from a poetry collection of a similar length. 

Obviously not all books will click with all readers, but the briefness of A Bed for the King's Daughter made me all the more baffled by the collection. Some of the stories are barely a full page in length; they must want to say something, but they don't always seem to do something with their ideas. Or if they have a good message, they don't seem to have a particularly smooth wrapping for it. Take "An Incident in Town". Under a slightly different layout, this story would probably span just one page. It utilizes beautifully poetic language in its opening paragraphs, setting the stage for the town in question with eloquent descriptions of storefronts and children. And then... there are two additional paragraphs, one of which details what I can only describe as the story's "plot" in similarly poetic terms and the latter of which provides an almost whimsical/dry explanation for the previous paragraph. The conclusion is meant to draw together the different pieces of the story to a message about corruption, but it ends up ringing hollow. There's a tonal shift that is probably meant to invoke a wry understanding of the absurdity of the situation, but instead just left me scratching my head as to what the story wanted to do versus what it did.

Other stories left me similarly bemused. There are all sorts of topics in this collection - xenophobia, racism, war, violence, corruption, sexism - but they all feel a little empty. The closest I felt like I got Ujayli's style was in the extremely short "Lilith" (basically one paragraph long), which felt like it would have been at home in a poetry collection rather than a short story one. And maybe that's the point? Maybe Ujayli's greatest experimental contribution is her tendency to play around with form and stylistic expectations. But the moment I didn't particularly like the writing, it was inevitable that I wouldn't really enjoy the collection as a whole.

I can't especially recommend this collection, but I wanted to. I wanted to appreciate Ujayli's tricks and stylistic quirks. I wanted to appreciate the topics raised. I wanted to come away with something that I could hold onto from the collection, but I didn't. And so I sign this review with an uncomfortable shrug and handwave. I cannot say I liked this book, but maybe you will? Maybe you can even better explain to me what it is that I'm missing.

WITMonth Day 19 | The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk | Review

Note: This review contains mild spoilers for The Books of Jacob, and references to the real-world figures described within the novel.

I first learned of The Books of Jacob in reference to the English-language translation by Jennifer Croft, whose work on Flights I had quite enjoyed (and whose other translations I have also liked quite a lot). But the first edition of it I considered purchasing was actually the translation into Hebrew, which came out before the English. I ultimately decided to wait, and then wait again for the US hardcover edition to come out. If I was going to read a massive, almost-1000-paged book, I wanted it to be a comfortable reading experience. Hardcovers are ridiculously heavy, but they can be placed flat on a surface and their pages easily propped up. Plus, they're prettier.

So it came to be that I had already heard a lot of opinions about The Books of Jacob before I ever began it, from fellow English-language book bloggers and "casual" Hebrew-language readers alike. The consensus was that the book is massively impressive, immersive, and interesting. And yet I came into the reading extremely skeptical. While I had quite enjoyed Flights when I read it several years ago, my experience reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones) was anything but. I found that novel to be tedious and wholly overrated. Almost everything about it irked me, even in the parts where I could again recognize Tokarczuk's literary talents. Against all odds, I found a novel so beloved by so many other readers to be thoroughly mediocre. (When has that ever happened to me?? Not on a bi-weekly basis, surely not.) What guaranteed that this wouldn't be the case with The Books of Jacob?

Once I began reading this massive book, though, my concerns began to morph a little. And by the time I was well on my way, I realized that my concerns were much more about what the novel was about than what the novel was. And they were really more about myself than anything else.

There are a few things that make The Books of Jacob fairly remarkable. Beyond its size, its status as a massive opus from a Nobel-prize winning (woman!) author, and its stylistic quirks (all of which I'll discuss momentarily), The Books of Jacob is one of the first books I've ever read, I think, that so clearly focuses on religious Jewish life without having been written from within that community. Jewish stories are often narrowly limited in terms of their scope, particularly as written by non-Jews. And even when there are representations of Jewish life or Jewish characters, they are often stripped of their faith and traditions. There really aren't that many books today about Judaism.

The Books of Jacob is... not quite that either, because The Books of Jacob is only nominally about Jews. It's a book about Jacob Frank, a messianic cult leader in the 18th century who was born to Jewish followers of the earlier messianic cult leader, Shabbtai Zvi (this spelling is per the Hebrew convention; there are many alternate spellings). I was familiar with Shabbtai Zvi before reading The Books of Jacob, but had never heard of Jacob Frank himself - until well into reading The Books of Jacob, I had not realized that he was not a fictional leader but based on a real historical figure. This did little to temper my hesitation, to be perfectly honest. The problem - and this is certainly not Tokarczuk's fault! - is that I myself (as most of you probably know) am Jewish, and more importantly, observantly, deeply anti-mystical Jewish. I grew up in a tradition that firmly rejected precisely the sorts of religious leaders who could ultimately become someone like Jacob Frank. From almost every perspective, the traditions, behaviors, and choices carried out by Frank's followers within The Books of Jacob are anathema to my life.

Suffice to say, I had to grit my teeth a lot throughout this book. But it was not always a bad thing.

It was an odd feeling, no doubt. Tokarczuk very clearly lays out the premise of her story and the narrative she wishes to share. This is a story of a particular cult leader and a particular religious denomination, through the lens of that group. While Tokarczuk does, on occasion, give the perspective of the "Talmudists" who reject Sabbatean/Frankist ideology as heretical, I kept wondering how this novel reads to someone unfamiliar with the nuances of Jewish faith and tradition. Most of those reading this novel are likely not Jewish. While Tokarczuk is never judgemental in her perspective (one way or another; this is actually somewhat remarkable, I must say), it does feel like the reader is supposed to look upon Frank and his followers in a skeptical light, at the very least. It's hard not to. The reader is privy to all of his flaws and to the trickling effect of his actions. But does a non-Jewish reader recognize just how much of Frank's decisions and actions go against even the Jewish traditions from which he claims to emerge?

There are other aspects that left me wondering whether the text was truly explicit enough. Unsurprisingly, The Books of Jacob includes a lot of antisemitism. Some of it is voiced by point-of-view characters; some of it is merely referenced. But it's constantly there, humming under the surface. There is a recurring discussion of blood libel, in particular, with the Frankists using that ancient and terrible antisemitic trope to try to discredit their Talmudist opponents and strengthen their own position in relation to the Christian authorities. The same leveheaded, non-judgemental approach that Tokarczuk employs throughout the novel began to feel extremely uncomfortable. Does Tokarczuk believe that her readers - particularly her Polish readers, coming from a country where antisemitism never really left and where there is a profound refusal to acknowledge a responsibility for antisemitic violence - can read these casual explorations of blood libel and know for certain that the Frankists are the ones who are lying? I mean, yeah, probably, but I could not shake off my own discomfort throughout those sections. The cruel and casual antisemitism of so many different characters, the almost cheerful pogroms incited... they all reminded me of my own family's Jewish history in Poland. That history is pockmarked with violence, culminating in the Holocaust. Even knowing that Tokarczuk herself surely does not mean to perpetuate these harmful myths, reading them on the page was painful and difficult. I cannot pretend otherwise.

Yet even with these personal doubts and discomforts, I could barely set this book down. For all its size, for all its breadth, for all its sprawling massive messiness as it alternates between dozens of different characters (many of whom end up having two names - Jewish and Christian), for all its feeling of being oddly incomplete and also somehow way longer than any book reasonably could be (though it's hardly the first long book I've ever read, and also hardly the longest...)... The Books of Jacob is good. It's good in how it shifts its focus at just the moment where you start to feel exhausted by the current narrative thread. It's good in how it makes you hate and care for a dozen different characters, the vast majority of whom emphatically do not deserve to be appreciated as characters. It's good in how the writing does, against all odds, maintain a very distinct external narration (alongside the explicit in-story external narration; the two somehow feel distinct) and a cool detachment from a thoroughly engaged text. It's good in how it travels, both as a literal narrative and as a figurative one, starting as one sort of story and ending up as a thoroughly different one. Like in Flights, Tokarczuk does an excellent job of showing that there is more than one perspective, experience, or narrative to a given story (in this case, an individual). It's a good novel and a good translation and a worthy piece of fiction, despite its flaws. I could not possibly recommend this strange, expansive novel to every reader, but certainly if you've seen The Books of Jacob and contemplated reading it, I would say you should. You'll find the pages flipping by rather quickly...

WITMonth Day 15 | If Not, Winter by Sappho (tr. Anne Carson) | Minireview

It seems strange, in retrospect, just how long it took me to read Sappho's Fragments. It seems stranger still, in retrospect, that I own an almost 400-paged edition of these fragments, which often comprise of a few words on an otherwise blank page (with the original Greek on the opposite side).

This is a difficult book to review, in part because it's poetry and I always struggle to review poetry, and in part because it's so very... minor, while also being massive. Sappho's poetry has meaning across many different contexts, from the literary to the musical to the cultural (specifically, queer-cultural). It's hard to read this should-be-small work without that extra understanding. It's harder still to review it.

I didn't linger over most of these poems/fragments. Here and there, I found a line that was revelatory, like fragment 50: "For the man who is beautiful is beautiful to see / but the good man will at once also beautiful be." It's a line that feels fresh and resonant, even though the language of it is obviously worked in order to achieve a particular rhythm in English. I'm totally fine with that. Most fragments, though, felt precisely like that - fragments that glided over the surface of my brain, with little to grasp. I'm not a scholar of classical poetry and I cannot properly gauge whatever impact three words scattered on a page might have. And once I don't have that, pretty much all that's left over is my emotional response to the poetry (because, as I've said many times, that is how I personally read poetry - through a deeply emotional, personalized lens; it may not be "correct", but it is what it is) and there can't really be all that much of one when... there's isn't really all that much to grasp.

And so most of this book... just sort of existed for me. I enjoyed the reading process and I'm delighted to have gotten a chance to finally read some of Sappho's works, but I was a bit disappointed in the edition (it felt pointlessly padded, sorry) and mostly felt like this was a technical exercise rather than a true, nuanced poetic reading. Maybe some day I'll be wise enough to gain more from the text. In the meantime, I can simply say: That was cool. Onto the next.

WITMonth Day 13 | Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin

I appear to have never written a full review of it on the blog, but when I read Notes of a Crocodile several years back, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Qiu Miaojin's novel (translated from Chinese by Bonnie Huie) was tightly written, insightful, and ultimately extremely rewarding as a general reading experience. It's a book I've frequently recommended, and one that I will likely continue to recommend. It also guaranteed that I would purchase Qiu's other book available in English - Last Words from Montmartre, translated from Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich.

Last Words is a harder book to classify. For starters, it hardly reads like fiction, with a deeply up-front first-person narration that is hard to separate from Qiu the author, though it also very much reads like a novel. The idea that any book with biographical elements must be a memoir is, of course, ridiculous, but there's something intensely intimate in this text that I could hardly separate what I knew of Qiu from the narrative unfolding on the page. (It's hard to call it a story, exactly, but there is certainly a narrative.) Maybe it's possible to read Last Words without the meta-knowledge that Qiu committed suicide not long after the novel concludes. Maybe it's possible to truly shuffle these letters and separate the art from the artist, but I often couldn't. Even as I read the letters that form Last Words as fiction, they somehow felt colored by Qiu's own life and, sadly, her death. When read linearly (as I did), it feels even more like a narrative that is pushing toward this final conclusion that can only be reached by the external reader. And since the book is comprised of letters which the reader is basically intruding upon (or being invited into?), there emerges this sort of unique conversation between author and reader that both defines the novel and breaks it down into little pieces.

I liked Last Words, though I cannot say I liked it nearly as much as Notes of a Crocodile. In many ways, it's a much more complex work, certainly in terms of what it demands of its reader. As translator Ari Larissa Heinrich writes in the fascinating and insightful afterword, it's an almost relentlessly dark book, challenging its readers and raising extremely difficult, ugly topics. If Last Words is meant to be a conversation with the reader, it is one that is shaped by the narrator's anguish, depression, and even violence. Slim a work as it may be, it is heavy. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but there's a bleakness to the entire reading experience that I don't think existed in quite the same way as in Notes of a Crocodile.

It's also a fascinating text in how it addresses relationships and sexuality. For a work written in the 1990s, it feels astonishingly modern in its approach to bodies, sexual desire, and romantic love. Parts felt like they could have been written just a few weeks ago, and shared on a Tumblr blog. Qiu also delves into cultural topics, frequently looping back to discussions of particular films and artistic narratives that the narrator admires. It's one of the few spaces in which the book gains a little distance from the internal darkness that dominates it. It wasn't necessarily my favorite part (I can't say that I really understood what Qiu was going for, not being familiar with many of the films cited), but it provides an interesting dimension to an already complex, multifaceted work.

Ultimately, this isn't as easy a book to recommend as Notes, because it's much less straightforward. At the same time, this is probably what makes Last Words such a unique, lasting piece of art: I can't think of many other novels, memoirs, or even poetry collections that managed to convey such intimacy and depth in so short a time. On just about every technical level, it's hard to find fault in Last Words. Its brutal honesty can be uncomfortable at times, and there were certainly aspects that I didn't connect with as much, but that has little to do with how the book is built on the whole. No, it's not easy, and no, I can't say that I found it to be as globally rewarding a reading experience as Notes of a Crocodile, but I did like and admire the work. I suspect others will too.

WITMonth Day 9 | Far From My Father by Véronique Tadjo

Upon finishing Far From My Father by Véronique Tadjo (translated from French by Amy Baram Reid), I found myself itching to find more of her works. The additional material on Tadjo included in my edition made references to her earlier novels, as translated into English. It didn't take me long to realize that those novels were no longer in print. Indeed, despite a rather rich catalog of works in both French and in English translation, Tadjo is a fairly "under-the-radar" sort of writer. Far From My Father and her recent not-quite-novel of the Ebola epidemic In the Company of Men (translated by the author and John Cullen) are the only two of her books that I have been able to easily track down. This, again, despite many of her works actually having been translated into English (and published). Including children's books! Go figure.

It's hard not to want to keep reading Tadjo's writing after settling into Far From My Father. The novel - marketed as semi-autobiographical, though I have found myself less and less inclined toward that definition in recent years - is crisply written, with a clarity that I wish more stories has. It tells of a woman returning to her old family home, upon the death of her father. There, she untangles pieces of her history and her father's secrets, with a solid exploration of identity and selfhood.

If you're reading that brief (and wholly inadequate) description and thinking "that sounds really banal", you're right that it's a basic framework that has been written of many times throughout history. But Far From My Father is elevated by a warm directness, excellent writing, and a solid understanding of its own limits. A lot of family stories get bogged down in their attempts to explain everything and everyone; Far From My Father is thankfully a fairly brief novel and one that knows to tighten its focus when needed, even if I didn't love some of the subplots and tangents.

At its best, Far From My Father tells of the complications that arise after a man's death. There are practical considerations, but also an emotional toll from the very predictable decisions that need to be made. Not to mention, the aforementioned secrets. It doesn't necessarily feel like outright spoilers to get into the details, but ultimately it also doesn't feel necessary. Is it not enough for a novel to examine grief, loneliness, and self-identity? Is it not enough for a novel to weave together different threads without actually forming a whole picture out of them, instead leaving much open to reader to continue contemplating?

Regarding the latter, I can see how Far From My Father might not work for everyone. Tadjo doesn't linger much on her characters, who can often feel a tad hollow as they orbit the protagonist. But it also very clearly isn't their story, and some characters in particular are almost designed to be just a little... vague, I suppose. Imprinted.

This is not a long enough book to justify writing a full, detailed review. I'm not sure I'd have something particularly meaningful to write, either. I can only emphasize that initial sentiment: Reading Far From My Father immediately made me want to pick up Tadjo's other works. This is a novel that can feel a little underbaked at times (see the above-mentioned hollow characters, as well as that all-too-common blurry plot matter), but its writing is so immediately engaging that it's hard to set the book aside. And isn't that one of the great strengths of literature?

WITMonth Day 7 | Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge tr. Jeremy Tiang | Review

I actually originally purchased Strange Beasts of China well over a year ago. Or, rather, I received it as part of a subscription to Tilted Axis Press I had that year. Yan Ge's Strange Beasts of China (translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang) was the last book of my subscription. It arrived several weeks after publication, completely water-damaged and moldy. Suffice to say, I could not read it. One year later, I decided to buy the US hardcover edition (...I like hardcovers, sue me!). Within a couple weeks of this second acquisition, I had finished the book and could think over what I had just read.

There was a lot to consider. My gut sense of the book is that it's good - it's good! - and I stand by that. On a technical level, the novel is excellent, with a wondrous balance between its fantasy elements and its exploration of the human condition. It's hard not to appreciate any story that so cleverly delves into humanity through the lens of a fictionalized other. (Hi, I'm a giant Star Trek fan.) It's also a book that in my head rings as fairly "confident", whatever that might mean. There's something about how it flows and how neat it is that I'm not sure is present for many other books. A self-awareness and clear bit of editing.

And yet I didn't love it. Even months later, I'm still not entirely sure why. As I said, it's such a technically good book that it's hard to put my finger on what it was that didn't work for me. The writing was great, certainly. The translation too. The imagery and world-building were fantastic. So what was it? The narrator's cool voice, perhaps? The constant sense that the story was rewriting its own context as it progressed?

The thing about good, smart novels is that they often force the reader to reassess their very own reading as its happening. This happened to me a few times with Strange Beasts of China. I had, in my mind, the vague notion that someone had once commented that when they'd finished the novel, they immediately went back to start the book over again, to reframe the beginning. By the time I reached the novel's end, I could no longer be certain that I had, in fact, read any such remark about Strange Beasts of China in particular. Maybe it was about a different book altogether. Yet that was the thought that remained imprinted on my mind as I worked my way through the book. Chapter by chapter, sub-story by sub-story, I found myself trying to recontextualize what I had previously read, based on whatever new information emerged from the latest story. It made for somewhat exhausting reading, though obviously it was entirely my own fault. 

There's no doubt in my mind that Strange Beasts of China is not only a good book, but also a special one. It was clever in the way its stories unfolded and brushed shoulders. It was intelligent in its pacing and restraint, lasting exactly the length it needed to be. The book works in a way that many novels simply don't. And as a work of genre fiction, it's wonderful in the way it merges urban fantasy, folklore, and hints of horror without ever feeling overcome by any one genre. If small things ended up making me like this without loving it, it has little bearing on the actual quality of the text or whether I think someone else might enjoy it. Strange Beasts of China is a good book. More people should read it.

WITMonth Day 8 | Night Birds and Other Stories by Khet Mar | Review

I sometimes grow nervous over the books I choose to read. In my desire to read writers from across the world, there is always the risk that I may forget that the works that I'm reading are, above all else, works of literature with artistic value and meaning beyond their meta-narratives, and often very good works of literature. After all, consider the hurdles writers of particularly marginalized/"underrepresented" backgrounds must face just to get translated, and what that typically means in terms of someone's very strong insistence that this particular work be published. By virtue of having been translated, it reflects an often-extraordinary effort to see the work make it across linguistic borders. But the fear lingers. 

I came into Night Birds and Other Stories (translated from Burmese by Maung Maung Myit) with threads of this concern. Night Birds is the first Burmese work I have ever read, having been introduced to Khet Mar while compiling the DailyWIT. The short collection piqued my interest and I purchased it not long afterward. I finished it yesterday; this review is far more fresh than my typical ones, in which I usually prefer having some space to process the text and my reaction to it. But somehow, that feels mildly unnecessary with Night Birds. Simply put: It is a solidly good book. Not an excellent one, but a good one.

The titular novella - Night Birds - reads almost like a young adult novel (even though its main characters are adults, full stop, despite the brief introductory paragraph which describes them as teenagers...), with a quiet emotional bond and a slowly unfolding understanding of the world. The novella is direct. Even without that odd introductory blurb expressly pointing to how the story is a metaphor for prison and oppression (thus explaining why it was banned by the government), the story reflects a tense claustrophobia and pervasive oppression. The story opens with violence and locked doors and isolation, slowly opening up as the two deeply lonely main characters share their stories with each other and the reader. It is, as I said, fairly direct. There's poeticism and beauty in the writing, in the integration of the musical theme, and in the hopes and dreams that these young people struggle to fulfill, there is subtlety in the choice of metaphors and even pacing, but generally speaking: The story unwinds clearly.

There's a deep melancholy to it, of course. It's impossible to read a story from an effectively imprisoned youth without feeling anguish and loneliness yourself. Khet Mar does a brilliant job of capturing how isolation and loneliness can feel for the different characters. One sings and smokes to herself, the other seeks conversation and company. Their lives intertwine and touch, without quite managing to breach each others' bubbles. The closeness and distance is sharply crafted, particularly by the story's end. It works. And it will also feel oddly familiar, given the events of the past year.

The problem was that I never felt fully emotionally involved. I was moved, yes, but from my own distance. Which is good for a story about isolation and oppression! It just wasn't quite what I wanted. Nor was the writing style always my favorite, occasionally irritating me with its pointed quality. It's not remotely bad writing, but it didn't always fit my own style.

These two flaws, however, disappear in the following two works housed in this English-language edition. Night Birds - published in 1993 - is clearly the main course in this "collection", but it's extremely well served by two additional nonfiction pieces. The first is "Life on Death Row", a slip of a story that I initially read as fiction because of its tight writing and economy. In less than 5 pages, Khet Mar manages to tell a surprisingly whole story of injustice, oppression, and imprisonment. Is it the actual whole story? Obviously not. But it does an excellent job as a "slice of life" story that also showcases so many casual horrors.

The second nonfiction story is "Night Flow", which sees Khet Mar writing about Iowa, Burmese kindness, crying, and environmental justice. The piece is a short personal essay, but it flows beautifully and seems to gently stir so many different topics and themes. The naturalistic tone is absolutely lovely and feels like it follows a wholly different style from the two works that preceded it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's interesting, maybe even a little jarring. More frustrating is the publisher's choice to bold the sentences and paragraphs that the Burmese government ultimately censored from the original piece. The political implications are stark (and fascinating!), but it's hard to read the essay with a clear head when it so loudly seems to tell me where it wants me to focus. I would have preferred a more subtle approach, I think, though of course it's hard to say what is the right way to address such a complex editorial choice...

All in all, Night Birds and Other Stories is a good, short collection. There is little to write against it and quite a bit to write in its favor. And from the meta-perspective of my fears as a reader, it strikes me as an excellent jumping off point for my own exploration of Burmese literature. I cannot view this as a single story that encompasses every narrative Myanmar has to offer, but I can still learn from it about a region of the world with which I am less familiar. I can still appreciate that through this (good) work of literature, I have a greater understanding of small nuances of Burmese life and culture (and music! Oh how I loved the musical touches) and a greater toolbox with which to keep learning. Pretending that I am not also learning from the literature I read is foolish in my mind; this need not be the reason for which Night Birds was written, nor even translated, but I can appreciate it nonetheless. I can find other avenues to explore and to learn. And I can go back to those scenes of isolation and linger on them in my own way...

WITMonth Day 6 | No One Writes Back by Jang Eun-jin

No One Writes Back is one of the ultimate WITMonth books. Why? I purchased it during the first ever WITMonth - August 2014, way way back in the earliest days of the women in translation project. I recall purchasing it alongside another book from Dalkey's Library of Korean Literature (Lonesome You, a collection that left very little impression upon me), and it's languished on my shelves for years and years since I purchased it. Somehow, it became one of those books that simply blends into the background of the bookshelf. It was always there, and it gradually became one of those always there books that doesn't seem very attractive and readable. There was always going to be something newer and more appealing. Not to mention that it was never a particularly popular book to begin with, and as such was easy to ignore.

I don't know what brought it off my shelves a few weeks ago, but goodness. Goodness. I'm so glad I finally read it.

No One Writes Back (translated from Korean by Jung Yewon) surprised me from the start. Something about its tone is just so confident, so strong, and so clearly defined that I was a bit taken aback. This was the book I'd been avoiding for so long...? Okay then. The novel immediately sets its stage with the narrator informing us that he's left home, he's a traveler, and he's traveling with Wajo (his dog). Bit by bit, we learn more about who this man is, who his friends are, and what makes him tick. As he goes from city to city, motel to motel, he assigns numbers to the people he meets and then writes them letters. Letter-writing is something pivotal to this novel, reflective of an almost naïve adherence to a past that is quickly disappearing (and has disappeared even more since the novel's original publication in 2009). 

The narrator soon meets a woman on his journey, but she is not there as a love interest or narrative-altering presence. Rather, she is writer and curious mirror to the narrator. The two both travel, they both try to make peace with their home, and they both interact with their environment in a unique way that shapes (and is shaped by) their worldview. The writer seeks to keep traveling as long as she's still working on her latest work; the narrator seeks to keep traveling as long as he hasn't yet received any letters of response from his many correspondents. The two travel together for a while and their relationship is fascinating to watch, because it's always still very clearly about the narrator. He is the center of this story, someone who is lonely and yet not alone, alone at times and yet not lonely.

By the midway point of the novel, I was certain I was reading a good book, but something about it felt hollow. The writing is excellent, the character designs precise and clear, and the pacing extremely direct, but I couldn't for the life of me tell where the story was heading (or if, indeed, it was heading anywhere). I wasn't sure what was keeping me reading, but it didn't seem to be the sort of situation to quit. I resigned myself to the idea that No One Writes Back would have some sort of placid, dissatisfying ending, like so many other well-built novels.

But no, this is so much better than that. With a precision that made me feel like rereading the whole novel as soon as I'd finished it, the pieces fell together into one of the more beautiful, emotionally affecting endings to a book I've read in a long time. That sounds so cliched, but it's true - it wasn't about whether aspects of the ending were sad (and yes, aspects were), it was about the way everything fit together and completed each other. No One Writes Back not only did a brilliant job of justifying almost every one of its pages prior, it also did so in a truly uplifting, positive, and life-affirming way. I finished the book feeling like I'd just had something wonderful open up before me, and while I don't want to spoil what made the ending so beautiful for me, suffice to say that it inspired something pretty good in me.

By the end, I didn't just enjoy No One Writes Back, I loved it. I loved what it sparked in me. I loved how it made me think. I loved how it unfolded and grew. I loved how its technical pieces didn't mask or try to replace its emotional ones. I loved how it made me want to read (and write) so much more. I loved how much it made me feel.

I am also ultimately grateful for how long the book spent on my shelves. I usually bemoan books that I read at the wrong times and ask myself whether I might have liked the book better at a different stage of life (or even on a literal different day). No One Writes Back probably wouldn't have meant the same to me seven years ago, when I first purchased it. I might have liked it, no doubt, but I think that initial hollow feeling would have dominated. Now? The book fit in perfectly.

As to you, dear reader? I suggest you give it a try. I think there's a decent chance you will find it as beautiful as I did.

WITMonth Day 29 | Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano | Review

There's a lot of meta to unpack before I can write about Léonora Miano's Dark Heart of the Night, translated from French by Tamsin Black. Miano, after all, is credited with disliking the University of Nebraska Press edition of Dark Heart of the Night even on her own Wikipedia page, having publicly critiqued the book's foreword (which I assume has been removed from subsequent print runs, since my edition has none) and much of the book's paratext (cover and title). A little digging reveals that Miano had serious concerns about how the University of Nebraska Press ultimately framed the book, from the foreword that was "full of lies" to changing the book's original title to resemble Heart of Darkness (a comparison that is also mirrored in the back cover description). I thus came into Dark Heart of the Night knowing that Miano had critiques, but not quite remembering what they were, instead reading into it more after reading the book. And I have to say - her critiques are valid from all sorts of perspectives and also point to a pivotal reading of the novella itself.

I'll start with my conclusion: Dark Heart of the Night is a bit of a brutal, unpleasant read, but one that is uncompromising and fascinating. It's a book that batters its reader again and again from all sorts of perspectives and doesn't seem particularly concerned with expectations of how the story is supposed to advance or fall into place. Its pacing is steady, its plot scattered without a single fixed peak, and its emotional impact a sort of pulsing, constant effect. Miano packs an extensive critique of different forms of violence and community life in the short novel, with a sense that there is much more that she could say on either topic (as well as many others). Dark Heart of the Night does a lot, almost all of it efficiently and effectively, and the end result makes for a book that is hard to set aside but also... not entirely enjoyable.

One of my impressions while reading Dark Heart of the Night was the Miano sought to create a sort of generic form of violence in the face of war and chaos. Miano's descriptions of village life as a contrast to city life all felt a little purposely blurred, with fictional names designed to place her story across a wide range of regions. Nationalism does not feature in regards to this specific country, exactly, rather the story's core violence stems from a place of a flawed and despotic perception of African identity. Perhaps I should have, but I did not assign too much importance to this on a deeper level; can Miano not critique violence in the same way that any other novelist might write of in the world? 

The brutality of violence that Miano introduces feels like a contrast to the individual identity subplot that centers now-village-outsider Ayané who has returned to her home village following her mother's death, yet the two narratives intertwine in defining identity, community, and belonging. Dark Heart of the Night is not just its most violent moments, but also their aftermath, their effects, and the way these fit into larger political balances. It seems important to remember that the novel continues past what can be viewed as its darkest moments, with that unrelenting continued bluntness. 

It's hard to write about Dark Heart of the Night without getting into details, and I think that any details take away from the book's power. It is a powerful novel, in many of its different threads. It's true that they occasionally muddle and the writing style sometimes feel out of place for the different subplots, but the book on the whole is depressingly effective. 

It's also - to loop back to my introduction - a lot more nuanced and complex than its paratext would suggest. To begin with, the back cover description centers Ayané in a way that frankly seems to emphasize one of the novel's themes over others. While Ayané is very much the novel's main character, she is often counterbalanced within the story and her experience contrasted. These contrasts feel important in how Miano builds a larger narrative regarding that blurry African identity. Furthermore, the casting of the novel through the lens of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (a work that has roundly been criticized for its racist, generalizing portrayal of Africa, though I have not read it myself...) also seems to strip away some of the weight of Miano's vague placement of her story. I can't imagine how the original foreword also attempted to alter Miano's experiences and identity herself in order to fit a narrative regarding African literature. Why can Dark Heart of the Night not simply be allowed to stand on its own?

I'm not sure that my own review doesn't fall into similar, problematic patterns in terms of what I'm mistakenly focusing on. I feel as though I walked into the novel mostly unaware of the controversies and thankfully unaware of the actual plot. (For once, I can at least be grateful for the book's vague and vaguely inaccurate back cover for not creating false expectations.) I read the book with little external context and without feeling like I knew enough to place Dark Heart of the Night's plot in any one specific place. My ignorance, it seems, ultimately matches Miano's own intentions. But is my sense that Miano is deeply involved with questions of identity something that follows from the retrospective reading of her critiques of the original foreword? Am I misreading her response to it? Was there something else in reading this novella that I was supposed to take away? Knowing what I now know in terms of Miano's own sense of her work, I find myself wishing for a deeper, detailed analysis that views Miano's work as part of a larger whole. Individual debut work as it may be, Miano clearly has had more to say, having published several books over the past decade. Would we as readers not benefit from reading those works as well? (Yes, we would.)

I did not struggle with reading Dark Heart of the Night, though the book saddened, angered, and disheartened me in many ways, as I believe it intended. The writing is brisk and clean, and again, the pacing is remarkably steady for a book that contains several different gut-punch peaks. It is far from a pleasant book, but it is definitely a good one, perhaps even a great one. It is certainly a work worth reading. I also think there is some value in the questions it forces us to grapple with regarding how works by African writers in translation (and perhaps African women writers more specifically?) are packaged for English-speaking audiences. Miano's critiques may be presented as a surprising bit of anger from an author over how her writing is sold in translation ("drama"), but ultimately it's worth noting two things: 1. The original foreword no longer appears in print, and 2. Miano's critiques end up providing a much better context for what Dark Heart of the Night is trying to do than the book's remaining paratext itself. I suppose some good comes of bad as well...

WITMonth Day 27 | Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen | Review

You know what's one of the most frustrating trends in the literary world? Different titles for the same book. This phenomenon is understandably more common with literature in translation than books in their original language, though those too will occasionally pop up with a new name in the weirdest way. Why do books need vastly different titles across different countries? The book had a title - translate it and leave it be!

Last Night in Nuuk by Niviaq Korneliussen (tr. into English, to my knowledge, from Korneliussen's translation into Danish, by Anna Halager) is another example of this extraordinarily annoying phenomenon. The UK edition is marketed as Crimson, and both editions are marketed very different from translations into other (European) languages. Go figure! Marketing is weird, right? But then there are folks like me who don't pay attention and do some of their bookshopping from UK stores and some from US and almost buy the same book twice. At least this time I didn't, but you know. Keep an eye out.

I actually read Last Night in Nuuk last year. Somehow, I forgot to add it to my reading list and it quickly felt like a book I had read long ago, not a recent read. A year later, I find myself with a similar overall impression. It feels like a book I've always known, somehow. It's a book that's always been in my memory, even though I can vividly recall reading it.

There is a decently high chance you will not like Last Night in Nuuk. The things about the book that make it good and interesting are not necessarily things that will appeal to all readers. For instance, I really liked just how quick the book is - Last Night in Nuuk moves at an extraordinarily brisk pace - but it's the sort of overly fast pacing that makes a book always feel like it's existed in the past. Many readers have not enjoyed that aspect as I did.

The writing is similarly divisive. The immediacy of the first-person present tense isn't for everyone. I often don't love it myself, but it made perfect sense for a book that's as contemporary as Last Night in Nuuk is supposed to feel. Everything about the book feels designed to capture an instant moment for a very specific group of young people (i.e. millennials, and specifically queer millennials) and it really only works within that context and understanding. Even the use of text messages embedded into the story is something that would probably ring false for some readers, but I felt fine with. To mix metaphors, the book seemed flow at just the right register.

So what's Last Night in Nuuk about? In short, it's about the muddled and messy lives of a group of young, queer Greenlanders just trying to figure it out. For some, it's about a sense of identity. For others, it's their actual relationships and the way these shape their lives. The characters cross narratives frequently, their stories and lives overlapping. This ultimately also contributes to the retrospective feeling that the book was always a memory in my mind, since I can't fully extricate the story of each character from the others (with one exception, where an especially sloppy bit of writing left its mark). It also feeds into the feeling that the book is vaguely timeless, despite its strong millennial root. The texting and style date the novel, but the overall story vibe feels disconnected from all of this.

I ended up liking Last Night in Nuuk a lot more than other readers, I think. I've thought about the book's unique style a lot over the past year and tried to understand what it was about the novel that worked for me when it didn't for other readers. It's a book that's tough to recommend (especially without knowing someone's reading tastes!), but I think readers who are willing to let their books get a little weird and rough around the edges, Last Night in Nuuk pays off by having well defined characters that dig their way into your mind and feel uniquely alive in a very particular moment. Whatever else, it's a fairly different book, and if you're open to that sort of difference (bearing in mind that the style really might not work for you!), I think it's worth reading.

WITMonth Day 23 | Night by Sulochana Manandhar | Minireview

When Tilted Axis Press announced their first Translating Feminisms series during WITMonth back in 2018, it was obvious that I needed to back it, for all the reasons. This set of four poetry chapbooks is no longer fully available, with two out of print, and it has had a curiously quiet impact on the literary community despite its successful campaign. Interestingly, the two chapbooks that are out of print were also the two that I preferred less; as a whole, I found the collections to be somewhat uneven. But let's focus on my favorite of the four, a book I genuinely fell in love with: Sulochana Manandhar's Night, translated from Nepali by Muna Gurung.

I can't claim to have read much Nepali literature. Or, frankly, any, prior to Night. This tiny, 38-page chapbook sums up the whole of my literary travels to Nepal, and a decent chunk of the book is the introduction and translator notes (which were very insightful!). And though I didn't review it at the time, Night was actually one of the more memorable books I read in 2019 and it's one that continued to hum in my mind in the past year since I read it.

All of the ways I have to describe Night revolve around music, somehow. It sings, it hums, its tone is resonant. Lyricism is a word that is overused in literary review and oddly doesn't apply here - Night isn't especially lyrical because it isn't especially verbose. Every poem feels gorgeously clear and calm and just the length it needs to be. The theme of night - sleep and dreams and darkness - is woven throughout each of the poems, threading each individual piece together into this (still-tiny) whole. Everything about the collection feels... just right. Rereading individual poems from it again stirs that feeling that Night is a perfect piece of music.

I don't know if Tilted Axis Press intend to reprint the whole of the first Translating Feminisms series, especially now that they are crowdfunding Translating Feminisms 2 (which will feature women and nonbinary writers from Indonesia, the Philippines, and hopefully Tibet; the campaign is currently ongoing), but I at least hope that Night will remain in print for a long time. That it will sell out soon and lead to a full-length translation of the original book (since the current chapbook is only a selection of the original "Night" poems, a little less than half). I would really, really love to be able to read much more of Sulochana Manandhar's poetry and writing. I hope I get the chance soon.

WITMonth Day 21 | Island of Shattered Dreams by Chantal T. Spitz | Review

I first heard of Chantal T. Spitz at the wonderful, inaugural Translating Women conference last year. Spitz's English-language translator Jean Anderson presented a paper about cross-cultural literature, representing Pacific literature in a way that I had never before heard. I'm not in the literary field, after all, and the Translating Women conference was my first experience attending a literary academic-style conference; I've attended other literary events and plenty of scientific conferences, but nothing like this. For me, Anderson's presentation was one of the most fascinating and memorable of the conference as a whole. In the course of the talk, she discussed Spitz (as well as other, untranslated writers), and I jotted down in my notes "French is 'not her language', but the language she writes in due to school and education". Moreover, I was fascinated by the idea of exploring Tahitian and Pacific literature, since these are regions of the world I know very little about. I ultimately ordered Island of Shattered Dreams a few months later and read it just at the onset of August.

It would be unfair to say that I devoured Island of Shattered Dreams in one rapturous swell, though I did. It would also be unfair to say that I've been thinking about the short novel extensively since finishing reading it, though I have. These both feel unfair because they don't do enough to emphasize just how strongly Island of Shattered Dreams made me feel, nor how strongly I feel that more readers should be seeking this translation out. From a technical standpoint, Island of Shattered Dreams manages to do so much in so few pages (157), and with an extraordinary balance. Poetry, lyricism, history, politics, and romance all intertwine to form a tiny epic that never feels incomplete. Simply saying "oh, this book is wonderful!" or "I couldn't put it down!" seems like underselling.

The novel - which carries with it a unique meta-context that becomes more apparent and important by the story's end, which I won't get into because I quite enjoyed how it unfolded - follows an Indigenous Tahitian family, initially focused on Tematua and his great love Emere (whose mother is Indigenous and father a white Englishman), later shifting focus to their children: Terii, Eritapeta, and Tetiare. The fluid passage of time is beautifully framed by Tematua: "As Tematua foresaw in his heart, time is rushing out of control", precisely at the cusp of the novel's focus change. Island of Shattered Dreams covers a significant portion of the 20th century without it feeling like an overly drawn out narrative, and the tight family saga means that the novel's overall flow is never impeded. 

Yet this very sentence I just quoted also defines a second, critical theme in Island of Shattered Dreams, since the quote does not end where I stopped it. The full quote is actually "As Tematua foresaw in his heart, time is rushing out of control, troubling people's minds and surreptitiously filling their hearts with shame for the Mā’ohi world and admiration for the pale reflections of the foreigners' world." Ultimately, Island of Shattered Dreams must also be read as a novel about Tahiti/French Polynesia at large: its cultural shifts, its status as an island outpost for a massive colonial power, and various racial/cultural complexities that come attached with both. 

Emere's story is particularly central in this, as she is the not only the product of a mixed-race relationship, she is also caught between cultures and the love both of her parents have for her in that context. Her mother Toofa "hadn't prepared her daughter for the difficulties of life on the outlying islands. She had wanted an easy, modern lifestyle for her, hoping that the man who married her would provide her with a housekeeper and every comfort." Toofa remains rooted to joining the white, Western world (which goes on to influence her grandchildren too), yet accepts Emere's choice leave this society behind and marry Tematua. It's a balance that ripples throughout the remainder of the novel, a reminder of the family's complex history and one that shapes the drama in the book's final chapters.

It's impossible for me to ignore how much I learned from Island of Shattered Dreams. Learning from literature is obviously wonderful and part of the point, but I can't help but feel disheartened by how much I end up relying on fiction to teach me things that I probably should have known earlier. I knew absolutely nothing about French Polynesia or Tahiti prior to reading Island of Shattered Dreams; it's just about exactly on the opposite side of the world from my own home and with no shared language, so this isn't particularly surprising. Still, I left Island of Shattered Dreams wanting to learn more about France's colonial history in the region and its power today. Much like the anthology Indigenous Literatures of Micronesia left me hungry to learn and read other books, so too does Island of Shattered Dreams make me wonder about the island today (Island of Shattered Dreams was published in 1991, which makes it as old as I am, aka not exactly young anymore...). What does Tahitian literature look like today? Will any more of it get translated into English? Spitz's other works are themselves still unavailable in English translation - are these also to remain out of grasp for English-language readers?

And I'm left with more questions, hearkening back to Spitz's remark about writing in French. There are several Mā’ohi words and phrases throughout the novel and Spitz even opens her novel in Mā’ohi. Spitz has already made her words "more accessible" to Western readers by writing them in the colonial French, a language that is bountifully translated from across the world. Yet Island of Shattered Dreams does not appear to have been translated between most languages. It is certainly not available in my native Hebrew, nor, to the best of my Googling, does it appear to have been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, or Japanese. Why not? The supposed language barrier (had Spitz written her work entirely in Mā’ohi)  has been "helpfully" removed by the author herself. What more is needed?

I've written all these words without getting to the heart of my response to Island of Shattered Dreams which is, quite simply, that I loved it. I loved the writing. I loved the fluidity. I loved the poetry. I loved the warmth with which Spitz describes her world and life, new-to-me yet so far from being new (and it never feels like an introduction, it feels like... life). Most importantly, I loved the love that is central to so very much of the novel. To use what Anderson explains in her translator note as a Mā’ohi cultural touchstone which I was obviously unfamiliar with until reading the book, I felt Island of Shattered Dreams deep within my belly, that place from which emotions truly do rise (even if this is not how it's usually described in either of my languages). I could not set this book aside for a moment, sitting outside to read under a perfect summer sky, drinking in the book from when the morning air was still cool until the hot noonday sun reached my reading nook. Alongside all of the rest that makes it a valuable work, Island of Shattered Dreams is a beautiful story brimming with all sorts of different forms of love and a love of storytelling (once oral, now put to print) at its very core. How could I not fall in love myself?

#WITMonth Day 19 | The Restless by Gerty Dambury | Review

I was not expecting The Restless to be what it was. Gerty Dambury's novel (translated from French by Judith G. Miller) somehow struck me as the sort of book I'd need to slog through, something that would be experimental in a frustrating-but-understandably-important way. I have no idea where that idea even came from or why I was initially so put off from the book. Maybe (as always...) the fault is in my own perceptions of the meta-framing - the Feminist Press cover shows a brown-shaded old-fashioned classroom, rows of empty seats. The back cover blurb leads with a little girl's concern over her teacher's disappearance. Somehow - bafflingly - I created some sort of story in mind of what The Restless would be and concluded that I would struggle to read the book. Oh, how wrong I was.

I positively devoured The Restless. 

At 237 pages, The Restless is neither a short nor particularly long book, but it's somehow massive and brisk at the same time. The best word I can think to describe it is "crackling". And okay, maybe part of my association with that word is because I accidentally got the book wet a year back when I bought it and it dried in such a way that the spine crackles whenever you flip the pages, but goodness if it doesn't apply to the inside as well. The Restless is indeed experimental in a lot of senses, using an honestly pretty strange quadrille framing technique, with alternating narration and constant perspective shifts. That most of the narrators are dead is definitely another weird factor, but my goodness it works. There's so much about this novel that could go wrong, and yet it all works so well.

At the center of The Restless is Émilienne, the young girl "struggling with the sudden disappearance of her teacher and father", per the cover description. Émilienne defines the novel through her insistence on sitting outside of her house, waiting for her father to return home. Her older siblings look on with worry and fear, narrating the dance that outlines the novel as a whole. Émilienne tells her story in bits, but is also in the process of an abstract conversation with dead neighbors and semi-strangers, characters whose lives intertwine or at times barely brush each other. The dead constantly jostle each for their stage, arguing in little asides and scenes. Together, this mish-mash of different characters tells the story of several pivotal days in Guadeloupe's history, starting from a worker's strike and leading into widespread rioting and violence in May 1967. Thus alongside the story of Émilienne's family history and personal narrative arc (and oh, I do so love a good childhood arc!), Dambury paints a striking portrait of Guadeloupe as a complex whole.

These different threads frequently tug at each other, but the balance is shockingly good. Dambury has the rare ability to pack her story with dozens of characters and plot pieces and keep things tight. The Restless never feels like it's unsure of where it's going or what the point of the novel is. There's always that crackle, something tense and fully confident, both in the writing and the plotting itself. The writing never lets you forget that this book is telling a wide story that is at the same time fully focused on Émilienne. It's relentless. It's excellent.

The Restless has, unfortunately, not gotten very much attention in English, nor has its author. As of publishing this review, Gerty Dambury does not have a Wikipedia page in English and The Restless appears to be her only work translated into English. Dambury, it turns out, is predominantly a playwright, and it occurs me now that this may explain The Restless's pacing, tension, and excellent storytelling balance. I would absolutely love to read/experience more of Dambury's writing, but in the meantime I'd be satisfied to see her gain a wider audience in English through The Restless. A wonderful, special book that I'm so glad I ended up reading.

WITMonth Day 17 | A Kitchen in the Corner of the House by Ambai | Review

 It's an odd thing to retroactively compare a book to another that you read later, and yet this is what happened to me with Ambai's A Kitchen in the Corner of the House (tr. from Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström). Not long after reading this collection of short stories, I read the multi-author collection Spark of Light: Short Stories by Women Writers of Odisha. In essence, there is very little that connects these two books other than the fact that they are both short story collections by Indian women writers, except of course we need to remember that Tamil and Odia are two completely different languages representing completely different parts of India (which, you know, is huge), they don't even belong to the same language family. Perhaps I would have had the same feeling had I read a short story collection from China or Senegal or Haiti as well. Either way, reading Spark of Light seemed to cement some of my struggles with A Kitchen in the Corner of the House. And I did ultimately struggle with this one quite a bit, even as I recognized a lot of good in it as well.

I'll start with the positives: I loved some of the stories in this collection. I loved the cool writing style. I loved many of the journey stories. I loved how Ambai centered her stories around women's experiences in many different ways. There are some fiercely feminist stories in this collection, as well as stories that reflect changing cultures and societies. As one of the back-cover blurbs note, Ambai does a brilliant job of conveying women's anger in the face of injustice. There's a lot to appreciate here.

The problems begin when judging the book as a whole. First, like many collections, A Kitchen in the Corner of the House doesn't find a very good balance between stories sounding individual enough to stand out and stories flowing together. Short story collections are so often frustrating for this reason, with stories either sounding too similar or too apart. At first, I thought that Kitchen... did a pretty decent job of this balance, but the stories and characters began to blur as I got deeper into the book. This was one of the early points of contrast I found with Spark of Light; that collection is comprised of short stories by different authors and their individual voices carried the book admirably. Kitchen... started to lose me around halfway through, with stories that felt narratively repetitive (if not actually on a plot level). 

The next problem was another retroactive contrast with Spark of Light: the story topics themselves. There are several parallels in terms of stories conveying women's domestic/personal struggles in both collections, but Ambai's oddly seemed less consequential. Ambai's stories are often experimental or slightly shifted in terms of their narrative frame, which leads some to end abruptly or never quite reach their point. I can understand the literary value behind this, but it ends up creating a collection that's much less satisfying than it could be. Many of the stories hover around certain themes without fully landing on them, and this too led me to feel like Kitchen... was somewhat incomplete. The clean lines and conclusions of Spark of Light - which also includes some more experimental stories, yes? - felt like a sharp contrast.

But the biggest problem I had with Kitchen... was ultimately in its lack of context. I have long argued and will continue to argue that readers do not need to be spoonfed when it comes to books from cultures or backgrounds that are different from their own. Moreover, who's to decide whether something is new or unfamiliar to a certain reader, right? I may be unfamiliar with Indian literary traditions, history, religion, or myths, but that doesn't mean that every reader is. Except... except that in translation, the point is often that a book is being brought across different cultures where the reader can't be expected to understand everything. 

And so A Kitchen in the Corner of the House has basically no context beyond the literal text. There is no introduction, there is no afterword, there are no translator notes, there are no footnotes, and even the author biography is not exactly extensive. For a book that includes so many regional, linguistic, and cultural references, this felt like a huge oversight. I tried to supplement what I could through Wikipedia, but this felt like a classic example where a well-written introduction regarding Ambai's writing style, feminism, and academic approach would have hugely benefited the book as a whole. Even just a brief afterword may have tied the collection together a bit better, giving some degree of context to the stories. Worst of all, rather than wanting to read/learn more, I felt like Kitchen... existed in some sort of isolated dimension that didn't invite greater interest. Something critical was missing. 

I came away from the book feeling a little baffled and unhappy. As I already noted, some of the stories were great - memorable, strong writing, powerful in their perspective - but others seemed to float in and out of my consciousness. I ended up skimming quite a few that just weren't doing it for me. And no matter how much I wanted to understand the collection, I felt like I wasn't fully able to, and that kept me from fully appreciating it too. Is it possible that other, more clever readers will understand A Kitchen in the Corner of the House without any sort of extensive introduction or spoonfeeding? Sure, it's possible. But it still feels like a missed opportunity and something that should be an option for the book, even as an external supplement. It still feels like the book - as a whole - just wasn't complete in a lot of ways, not in its context, not in its flow between stories, and not in its own overarching message. I ultimately liked A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, I can rank it as a decently good read and recommend it to some readers. But it's not an easy recommendation. And even with the positives, I find myself somewhat disappointed.

WITMonth Day 15 | Kuessipan by Naomi Fontaine | Review

I rarely remember how a book gets on my radar, but when I find a small gem that doesn't seem to have gotten much attention, I find myself wishing I could remember who deserves that credit. How did I first hear of Naomi Fontaine, a French-Canadian First Nations writer? What made me look up Kuessipan (tr. from French by David Homel)? What eventually led me to actually buy it? Even though it was all within the past year or so, I no longer remember.

Yet I'm grateful to whoever it was, dear anonymous reader. Kuessipan is a tiny book that I could easily have not connected with, and I wonder if I was almost expecting to not enjoy it. I have often found myself struggling to enjoy vignette-style novellas, feeling as though they're neither the style of poetry that I typically like nor fiction-y enough. Kuessipan was teed up for my disappointment, and yet. And yet! I liked it a lot.

Part of what worked, I think, was that I ended up reading Kuessipan as an almost wholly poetic book. Not poetry, but poetic. Something in its rhythm didn't feel like it was trying to build a structured narrative, nor was it especially loose. Each vignette felt well and intentionally crafted, with care and detail. The pieces flowed into each other naturally. The book - generally speaking - flowed, and this perhaps is also what made it feel so much more poetic than a standard novella. 

There's a part of me that also wonders if Kuessipan simply doesn't feel more consequential than the average vignette-style novella. Stark, clean writing isn't a rarity for novellas (isn't it kind of the point?), nor is plotlessness with powerful resonance, but I feel most novellas don't really manage to tell an epic in such sparsity. Fontaine's writing covers so much and so many in a way that makes it feel like a much longer book than it really is (and it really is tiny, barely 99 pages). Part of Kuessipan is a coming-of-age story, part is a cultural history, part is a contemporary snapshot, and yet these different pieces fit together smoothly. Fontaine includes many different pieces of Innu life (based on her own experiences, I have to assume), whether in describing community life or traditional history. Some are painful - substance abuse is a recurring theme - and others almost wistful, casting their eye toward things like salmon fishing or hunting or nomadic wandering. Fontaine writes of young motherhood, childhood, and leaving home with the same sensitivity as in describing death, old age, or memory. 

Kuessipan does not feel like a linear work. As I write this review, I find myself flipping back through different vignettes and segments. The poetic nature of the writing means that these don't feel out of place in any order, even though I quite liked how things fit together and grew when read in sequence. But something about the out-of-time nature of the work makes it feel like it has a slightly longer impact. Novellas and poetry can often get lost in one's memory, if only because the power is in the emotional response. Kuessipan certainly doesn't feel like it has the strongest plot-based hook, but the clarity of its writing and storytelling is remarkably memorable. Even without clinging to specific phrases or segments, I have found myself thinking about the book quite a bit in the months since I read it. Kuessipan is yet another in a long line of books that deserves far more attention than its received. I - for my part - eagerly await the opportunity to read more of Fontaine's writing in English translation in the near future.

WITMonth Day 13 | The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn by Tanella Boni | Minireview

I first learned of Tanella Boni through A Rain of Words, which I finally reviewed earlier this month. Boni's poems jumped out at me enough that she was one of the authors I featured in last year's 50 Day Countdown, one of relatively few poets that I featured in the list. I don't quite remember when it was that someone (can't remember who, either, ack!) pointed out to me that a full length book of hers actually was published in English, but it immediately jumped to the top of my "must buy" list. And once I received my copy of The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn, it was pretty clearly bumped to the top of my reading list.

I read The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn in a single sitting. It's not a poetry collection, but a poetry book, that rare, single piece that fits together so very neatly and tightly that I'm not sure why there aren't more such works. (I imagine because they're so hard to pull off well?) Reading Boni's writing (translated by Todd Fredson) reminded me of reading Inger Christensen (tr. Susanna Nied), not because the styles are necessarily similar (though both have a certain thematic clarity that I think complement each other nicely), but because like Alphabet, The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn left me fairly breathless. It's the sort of breathlessness that comes from wanting to swallow the words whole, pausing, reflecting, but needing to keep reading, always needing to keep reading. Some lines biting so strongly you recoil, some lines so beautiful you can't find your next breath, all of it flowing in the best way.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I cannot review poetry. What can I say here? I loved The Future Has an Appointment with the Dawn. It's one of the better single poetry books I've read in ages, ranking up there with my favorites. Not just the language, not just the structure, not just the use of breaks and pauses and recurring motifs, not just the flow, and not just the emotions. All of these things together. If I liked Boni beforehand from a sample of her poetry and knew I wanted to read more of her writing, I can now say that I want to read all of her works. I want to be able to bask in her poetry, whether individual, isolated poems or whole works like this. Whatever she's written, I want it.

WITMonth Day 9 | The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail

In brief: Dunya Mikhail's The War Works Hard  (translated from Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow) is a good book that was one of the more inconsistent works I read this past year. It's tough to say that, especially when I'm excited to read an author and fall in love with her words, but ultimately The War Works Hard felt very much like a collection, for good and for bad. There were some works here that I really loved, there were some works here that I didn't like very much, and there a few that I was thoroughly ambivalent about. Overall, I came away with a mostly positive view of the book, but I won't pretend that I loved it. Instead, I can say that I liked it.

I say this basically every time I need to review a poetry collection, but it's very hard for me to properly "judge" poetry. Poetry is and always will be about how it makes me feel. A good poetry book (or collection) is one that manages to wreck me, one way or the other. Maybe it's because I have to hold my breath to the rhythm of the words or maybe it's because the thoughts and descriptions are so resonant or maybe it's because there's something deeply personal about how emotions are conveyed... It doesn't really matter what the reason is. I'm not usually the sort of reader who lingers on specific phrases or quotes (in poetry or in fiction, for that matter), which really means that either the writing techniques/gimmicks have to be extraordinary to get my attention (see: Inger Christensen's crystal clear alphabet) or the text has to hum with an emotional understanding that lingers beyond the last page (see: Mary Oliver, Tanella Boni, Sulochana Manandhar).

The War Works Hard doesn't quite fulfill either fully, but it also doesn't really disregard it either. Part of the problem, I think, is that it collects poems from three different collections, but in backwards order (i.e. the first poems in the collection are the newest, the last are the oldest). The style and tone shifts in Mikhail's writing end up feeling like they degrade or fold in on themselves, rather than grow. And it's especially odd given the seismic political shifts that take place in the gaps between the original publications. "The War Works Hard" collection was originally written in 2004 (this translation overall was published in 2005), with the previous poems mostly written in the 1990s. Mikhail is an Iraqi writer whose writing is wholly rooted in Iraq's turbulent history between 1990 and 2004. War appears not only in the modern, US-influenced context of 2003, it also appears in her very oldest poems. It's not the only theme in this collection, but it's prevalent enough that the backwards order feels like it misses the point of how much of a constant this really is.

And relevantly, I'm left with my own confused questions. As always, I have to wonder about the politics of translation: Are Mikhail's political/war-related poems more likely to be translated because it fits a "Western" narrative of an Iraqi asylum-seeking poet, or is this her focus of choice? Am I unfairly reading a political context into poems that are actually just about childhood, or is this subtext that I'm supposed to understand? What biases are rooted into how the book is marketed and presented (rather than what the poems themselves offer) and how does this affect my interpretation of the text?

Mikhail's poetry draws circles around themes of death and life (sometimes literally!), with some of the best poems capturing a single instant in a sharp and memorable way. Mikhail's observations about children and old age are particularly nice, especially in shorter poems, though these also often lead back to conclusions about war or violence more explicitly. There is life, of course, and the way many poems end up reframing themselves to focus on children's voices is especially reminiscent of this, but I was still left with the feeling that the book overall focuses on the death side of the coin more than life. Is this my own projection?

This is what I mean by The War Works Hard as inconsistent. Poetry collections are almost always inconsistent in terms of liking some poems more than others, that part is fine, but the problem here was that the whole flow of the book felt a little weird. Like I said at the beginning - this is a good book overall. It's definitely made me want to read more of Mikhail's writing (though probably in a more strictly structured context, if I'm being honest). But I also didn't like the book as a whole in the way I expected to and I'm curious to know how each original poetry book holds up relative to this collection mashup.

WITMonth Day 7 | Beyond Babylon by Igiaba Scega

I'll admit, I was somewhat surprised and disappointed by Beyond Babylon. Igiaba Scego's book (tr. from Italian by Aaron Robertson) caught me off guard from its first pages, which are filled with the sort of crude language that struck me as at odds with the quiet cover photo. And that was fine, for a start; I quickly recognized that the book had its own rhythm going and I was happier for it. The problems began once I realized how the book was progressing, or rather how it wasn't. Publisher-created expectations strike yet again.

I'm learning that I simply need to stop reading book summaries. Beyond Babylon markets itself as a reunion between half-sisters, but this is... emphatically not what the book is about. Narrated by wildly different voices - the aforementioned half-sisters (whose connection we discover fairly late in the book, and it is... honestly pretty subtle), their respective mothers, and their shared father - it's also a book that doesn't feel the need to stick to one narrative style too strictly. This is Beyond Babylon's greatest strength, with the book rarely feeling like any one dull progression. The storytelling is muddled and messy in the best possible way, with each narrator sharing a story across time and space and emotions and internal confusion. The daughters both have very present narrations, sharing about their recent lives in a sharp way that emphasizes both strengths. The mothers loop in their storytelling, with stories about their respective childhoods and thematic hints about what this teaches us about modern life. And then the father hovers in the background, the most distant of the protagonists, and not really much of one himself, preferring to tell .

The downside to this sort of storytelling approach (with a fixed order for each of the characters) is that it doesn't always work as a whole book. In the case of Beyond Babylon, I explicitly think it hurts the novel as a whole. Rather than feeling expansive and epic, each subplot feels perpetually truncated. The rhythm constantly felt just off, especially once three of the characters begin to narrate around similar events. There's an unsettling quality that feels intentional and well-placed, but the overall effect is still one of a story that isn't quite grounded enough in what it's trying to say.

This is another of my major criticisms of Beyond Babylon. The book touches on a lot of different themes, not least because its characters are all so thoroughly different from each other that they each have their own unique contribution to the story. And so we have stories about Somalia, about Italy, about toxic relationships, about sexual abuse and its after-effects, about Argentina's Dirty War, about the diaspora, about the concept of self, about bodies, about family, about identity... The themes end up largely overwhelming any semblance of story that lurks within each individual narrative, and certainly whatever overall message Scego wanted to convey. The individual pieces are there, but they don't really fit together.

It means that the novel as a whole just doesn't really flow well. Each character has such a strong voice that the transitions are jarring rather than identifying, which is such a shame given how well Scego gives them life. And the messages and themes that Scego explores end up feeling thin rather than part of a greater whole. Without getting into specifics, the novel's ending only emphasized the book's flaws, with a truncation that didn't actually wrap the story. At times, it felt like Beyond Babylon was little more than a vessel for conveying certain ideas. which is definitely a legitimate writing choice, but not one that works very well when the story is both so expansive and... padded.

There's a lot I liked in Beyond Babylon. Scego's writing often sizzles and it really is remarkable how well she managed to differentiate between her different characters (in many different ways). Scego also has a wonderful eye for cast-off comments that linger for pages afterward, whether in small observations or world-building remarks. There's so much excellent work going into play here that it ends up more disappointing that the book as a whole doesn't fully work. I'm not disappointed to have read it, but I'm also not sure I can recommend it to most readers. Beyond Babylon inspires admiration and recognition at best, not adoration. As a reader who lives and breathes emotional responses, that's just not enough for me.

WITMonth Day 5 | A Rain of Words edited by Irène Assiba d'Almeida

I was surprised to realize I never reviewed this collection. I was certain - certain! - that I must have reviewed it last year. Did I simply discuss it? Did I mention it in so many other contexts that I forgot to discuss it here? Either way, A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women's Poetry in Francophone Africa (edited by Irène Assiba d'Almeida and translated by Janis A. Mayes) is a remarkable collection that deserves that much more attention and recognition.

I have often described my inability to review poetry books, and this feeling is exponentially higher when it comes to poetry anthologies. How can I really review a book that encompasses so much, that showcases so many voices, that alternates styles and perspectives and approaches? Some writers are given little more than a handful of lines to get their words across while others leap across multiple poems and pages. Some write succinctly, some write sprawlingly, some use intimate imagery, some use direct references, some bathe in lyricism, some laugh in modernisms, some are angry, some are happy, some are beautiful, some are not to my taste... The usual problems I have in addressing how poetry makes me feel are fully exacerbated by the nature of anthologies. So is this really a review? Who knows.

Suffice to say that I enjoyed A Rain of Words on just about every possible level. Did I love all of the poems? Of course not. I disliked some, was ambivalent about several, enjoyed many, and adored just a few. Each writer brings her own style and flair to this collection, making it less an individual song and more a cacophonous choir that doesn't always know what it's trying to do. Yes, there are moments when it sounds a little awful, but it's mostly glorious just to have the opportunity to experience it.

And in a WITMonth when I'm trying to focus on African women in translation in particular, it seems necessary to remind people that books like this exist. Some of the poems here address topics that can be viewed as uniquely "African", whether in addressing politics within their own or neighboring countries, or in raising specific cultural or religious touchstones. Some are from uniquely feminine perspectives, like poems that deal with motherhood or sexism. But many of the poems simply are, without adhering to any cultural assumptions or expectations, sometimes telling a specific story about a specific place and a specific experience and sometimes not. Poems about family, love, nature, peace, war, politics, life. Each one of these poems has value for the same reason that any poem does, and simply from the perspective of experiencing new poetry, I'm grateful to the CARAF Books series for putting out this collection. The collection sent me hunting for more works by these writers, and though I'm disappointed to see that too few of their full-length books have been translated into English, I am grateful for the exposure to those that have, whether poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. This book was indispensable for me while compiling this year's 50 Day Countdown (see tomorrow's post as well) and has been a great jumping off point in terms of finding other works.

For you, O poetry lover, I simply say this: In the same way that we seek out collections by writers from all sorts of different backgrounds, so do I recommend A Rain of Words. I think you'll enjoy it as I did.

WITMonth Day 3 | Don't Whisper Too Much / Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella by Frieda Ekotto

It wouldn't surprise me if you missed the publication of Frieda Ekotto's Don't Whisper Too Much / Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella (translated from French by Corine Tachtiris). Published in 2019 by Bucknell University Press and distributed by Rutgers University Press, this isn't exactly a major publishing event. There's a part of me that also feels that it shouldn't be a major publishing event, because queer African literature in translation should simply be a natural part of our literary landscape. And yet... we're nowhere near that reality.

On each level, Ekotto reflects the ways in which bias pervades our literary consciousness. In her introduction, Lindsey Green-Simms tracks the difficulty Ekotto had in initially publishing Don't Whisper Too Much in French, writing: "Ekotto persisted for ten years until the novel was eventually picked up in 2001 by Editions A3, a small publishing house in France, and then reprinted in 2005 by L'Harmattan, who also published Portrait in 2010. Thus, even the publication history bears the traces of confinement and the difficulty of breaking through power structures." That it would take almost two more decades to publish Don't Whisper Too Much in an English translation doesn't even surprise much. The WIT publishing gap is especially wide when it comes to African women writers in translation (particularly black African women writers, it should be noted), and it's not as though the English-language market is particularly eager to embrace queer stories from outside a handful of highly specific (and often fetishized) narratives. 

And yet Ekotto's work is, surprisingly (and pleasantly) enough, not the only queer book by an African women writer to be translated into English in recent years. While there is absolutely no similarity between these books in either writing style, storytelling approach, subgenre, or even broader socio-political context, my immediate association is with Trifonia Melibea Obono's La Bastarda (translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel). It's an unfair association for both works, largely borne only because both books deal with African love between women, but I think it's also reflective of why we need more stories like this - each represents a wholly different experience and perspective on queer African women. That's exactly the point of why we should all be trying to read more widely, in that eternal effort to avoid Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's single story and experience the world through different voices.

It further helps, I think, that this book comes in a bundle. Don't Whisper Too Much and Portrait are two very different works, both in terms of style, narrative voice, and "messaging". There's a lot to learn from both works individually. From a purely literary perspective, however, I wasn't able to read the two fully back-to-back (I paused for a few hours between the two halves), and I think that the stylistic differences of each work would have been better served by a cleaner separation. Oh well.

Don't Whisper Too Much is the first of the two works, and the more... I suppose the word "lyrical" or even just "stylistic" is the closest way to describe it. It's a story that feels somewhat removed from time, hovering at the outskirts of village life and shifting narration and era in a way that feels consistently fluid. I also felt this fluidity in the central, encompassing "love story" that forms one of the pillars of the novella, something in the way Ada seems to move between childhood and adolescence in the context of her growing love for Siliki. This style isn't always my favorite, and I have to admit that it didn't always work for me here either. Parts of the story felt like they connected all too loosely, and I found myself somewhat at a loss when the story ended. This is partly intentional with several stories explicitly untold by the novella's end, but it didn't make me feel any less... unsettled. Perhaps that was the point.

Other aspects, however, struck me hard. The storytelling theme translates much more specifically into the promised whispering from the title. Ekotto frequently returns to this theme of women's voices and women's intimate stories, whether in Siliki's stories of her mother, the lessons Ada learns from Siliki, or Ada's own storytelling around Siliki's daughter Affi. Early in the story, Ada "[...] decides to give her own version of the story of the old legless witch. No matter what, she must tell her own story, which includes the stories of all women without voices, condemned to muteness." This follows her passionate interest in Siliki, even before "gain[ing] admittance to her refuge". Ada draws parallels between her own status as a cast-aside daughter and Siliki, the legless hermit. Later, Siliki's voice literally rings out: "The force of Siliki's voice awakens [Ada's] entire realm, not because she speaks loudly but because her voice overflows with a strength that envelops every creature's soul in immense joy." Yet in the very next passage, Siliki is whispering. Later still, deep into their relationship, Ada reflects on the lessons she has learned from Siliki: "Siliki once told her how important it is to sculp violent words onto her skin. The hollow of the text always loses its strength, but a woman's text - a text that inscribes her pain - is powerful. A woman's written story is not at all saturated; on the contrary, this writing is animated by the sign of survival, the symbolics of life where language is traced." In a novella where women's texts outlive them and carry their stories onward in direct and plot-relevant ways, it's hard not to feel that this theme of words, stories, and women's voices (particularly in the context of queer love) is the most important pillar on which the novella stands.

There are other themes as well, alongside subplots and side stories that are effective to varying degrees. In one thread near the novella's end, Ekotto introduces an American couple that, while moving the story forward in a relatively minor way, seem mostly to present a social commentary on many "Western" attitudes toward African villagers. "'We want to observe the marriage ritual of the Fulani culture. These poor women are victims, oppressed, bullied by their traditions. It has to be exposed!'" This proclamation triggers a fierce response from a new of Ada's, Nafi, who criticizes the "anthropological" approach of Westerners coming to Africa and ultimately describes (albeit not in these exact words) the ways in which different cultures may define things differently, and particularly what that means for women. This section of the novella also comes with a slightly tighter, more traditional writing type; it's a fairly jarring shift, and despite appreciating many of the cool observations Nafi and additional friend Sula whip out in the face of American obtuseness, I'm not entirely sure that the story flowed well around it. The tonal shift along with my general preference for tighter stories meant that I came away from Don't Whisper Too Much feeling somewhat disappointed.

Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella, in contrast, feels like a much more "standard", straight-forward narrative. A short story collection that alternates narration and storytelling style and is deeply rooted in modern city life, it ends up feeling wholly distinct from Don't Whisper Too Much. I also, accordingly, ended up enjoying it a whole lot more. There's something a lot more casual about Portrait, whether in its quiet, sly self-references linking the stories together, or its portrayal of life in Bona Mbella, or the way love between women simply seems like a natural part of the world. The more structured nature of the short stories also meant that I felt like I was better able to follow what was happening within each vignette. I thoroughly enjoyed the short collection, and though I liked both Ada and Portait's primary narrator Chantou in relatively equal measures, I felt like the mysteries and vagueries of Chantou's life were more justified within the context of her (short) passage through time. Portrait felt like a series of crisp, detailed snapshots, filled with characters who felt real even without much explanation or exploration. 

Together, these two works form an odd whole, but it's very much a whole worth seeking out. Not all of Ekotto's different writing styles worked for me in the same way, but all were still remarkably effective in getting their story across. Even at the moments that I felt most disconnected from the text, I still had the pressing need to keep reading, to keep listening, to keep seeking out those stories that Ekotto was bringing forward. Later, in Portrait, there was also a sort of comfortable rhythm keeping the stories moving from scene to scene. The stories all work in different ways, but that too can be seen as part of the appeal; the way different voices leap out of the page across the various stories and sub-stories is another bonus. Not everything will work for every reader, but you're likely to find that one theme or perspective that will work for you, and it'll be totally worth it.