Doubt anyone has, what with COVID time making everything take twice as long and be four times as frustrating, with Putin being, well, a massive, invasive dick, with inflation the highest it’s been since I was five years old, and with no spring baseball. [UPDATE: Baseball is coming back!]

Life has been rather uncomfortable for basically everyone—triply so for anyone with children, and sextuply so if you have��three—and I don’t pretend to have any great insights, or try and make the case that I’m in some way unique. No, not by a long shot. But I’m becoming more and more aware of how the fuckery of time and stress has been acting its way through me, and I need this to stop.

I’ve always tried to do too many things at once—Open Letter + Best Translated Book Award + teaching classes + Translation Database + writing biweekly posts + two podcasts—but when John O’Brien passed away, things reached a new level. (Follow my not at all regular substack “Mining the Dalkey Archive” for more.) Overseeing over fifty titles a year, along with a 1,000 book backlist is quite exciting . . . and murder on the last remaining shred of my “work-life balance.”

Working hard is a very American virtue, and one that we, collectively, seem to finally be questioning. (Speaking of, fuck Daylight Savings Time and its corporate sponsors.) We all deserve some time to ourselves. Some time to be ourselves instead of our jobs, our labels. To not be a parent or an editor or someone who is perennially behind on spreadsheeting.

For years, writing these blogs has been my preferred form of self-care. Set myself up with a beer and/or a whiskey, let my mind spill out—unfiltered—all over the page. This was a place of pure honesty, which is a true double-edged sword. On the one hand, speaking your truth can center you, can help you (or at least me) think through complicated issues and ideas in a creative way. At the same time, making an opinion or idea public is a true risk. Pissy comments, semi-serious cancellations, l—all these are possible, all these are internalized regulators that make it really easy to pause, to not say something that might launch a dozen sub-tweets about your ignorance . . .

I know that in the past, my “articles” walked that line between semi-informed, somewhat rational opinion pieces, and anger-making diatribes. I crossed the line willy-nilly, mostly for laughs, sometimes to prove a “point.” And I’ve had to live with the consequences. To this day, most people think I’m a crazy madman who hates the world (I don’t! Although writing the edges of that character can be fun.) and because of this reputation certain poet translators people will take a non-aggressive statement as some sort of condemnation.

It’s paralyzing to think this way. It’s time to find a balance again. To push the limits and have some fucking fun. The sad, scared times must come to a stop.

by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Penguin Random House)

A couple weeks ago, a prominent experimental writer started a thread on Twitter (possibly inspired by a bottle of mezcal) following the “feeling cute might delete later” meme. But instead of a mildly attractive, no filter selfie, they posted a series of hot takes on books/authors universally praised by the international literature community. This was so refreshing to see!

Of course, now it’s been deleted

Such is baseball, such is life.

But I did manage to screen cap one little bit of the thread. A bit that included the following:

• You can read��When We Cease��when you’re hungover because it’s just data strung together entertainingly [Chad Note: But not all that entertaining if you know much about math or science.]
• Zama‘s as boring as the movie
• Chilean Poet��is a fun conventional novel the author probably wrote because he had a mortgage to pay now

That last one is a sick, sick burn—and one I’m 100% behind.

I haven’t read��Chilean Poet��(this’ll come up again in a minute, but I haven’t read��any of the books on this list—no time!), but I’m always a bit gleeful to see someone criticize Zambra.

Yes, we published��The Private Lives of Trees, which was also Megan McDowell’s first published translation (! Open Letter is �����ɲ������ahead of the curve), and I was one of his earliest champions. But since he told two of my translator friends plus two Open Letter authors to relay to me that I’m a “son of a bitch,” I figure it’s time to be honest.

Alejandro Zambra is massively overrated.

(And Neal Stephenson is Ayn Rand for crypto bros.)

My opinion, isn’t a form of hate, nor a comment on his background, looks, or general demeanor. At least one of us is willing to punch above the belt.

He hates me because his third novel,��Ways of Going Home, isn’t very good, and I was very, very honest about it. (This review actually cracks me up. Especially the bit about the character who “shuts her vagina completely.”) That was the beginning of his decline as an interesting author. The James Wood Praise Piece was a really public nail in Zambra’s reputation as someone capable of surprising prose. Multiple Choice��is a shitty, flaccid Barthelme knock-off. Establishment authors are generally so . . . establishment.

At least he has a mortgage to pay. Hit pieces on sacred cows only get you a one-bedroom apartment. In Rochester.

Also, XXXXX, it’s so weak you deleted your thread. I’m going to make it a contractual rule that you can’t do that when I publish your books.

��by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (FSG)

What a timely book that I hadn’t heard of before today! I love Sjón’s writing (see this season of TMR), but over the past few years we haven’t been receiving galleys in any sort of regular way. Occasionally I get FSG packages from FedEx, but haven’t seen a new New Directions book since the pandemic. (Or *cough cough* since I wrote these pieces expressing my honest opinion about a couple totally unmarked manuscripts��I didn’t care for, but were written by two untouchable ND authors.) This has made keeping the Translation Database up to date rather complicated, to say the least.

Anyway, fuck fascists, fuck Putin, fuck invasions, and fuck anyone who isn’t pro-Ukraine.

That said, I don’t really need your listicles, Ukrainian flags in your Twitter bios, a downtown skyline lit up in blue and yellow, or whatever other form of virtue posturing you want to display. I’m pro donation, refugees assistance, and Anonymous. Instead of telling me that your literary magazine is “supportive of Ukraine’s autonomy,” hack an oligarch.

In 2014, on the occasion of Russia invading Crimea, I wrote this post about Ukrainian literature. I thought it was a good way to utilize the Translation Database and bring some attention to Ukrainian writing. No one followed suit. Now, every day there’s a new “Read these XX Books to Better Understand Ukraine!” listicle. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s just sooooo tired. The need to “get those clicks” has such a��Glengarry Glen Ross vibe to it in 2022 as legit literary magazines (The Believer, Conjunctions) are defunded in favor of facile, middle mind centric websites.

by Llorenç Villalonga, translated from the Catalan by P. Louise Johnson (Fum d’Estampa)

Why should you support Fum d’Estampa? Because you like interesting Spanish literature. There’s my pitch. They do good books. They are the equivalent of Charco (another press whose books I haven’t laid my hands on since 2019), but for Spain. Actually, they started out doing only Catalan books (yes!), but have since expanded . . . Anyway, the main point still stands: Their books rock.

The other day, I was picking up my son from pre-K and the founder and recent winners of the local “ROC Wordle” league were on . Topical, I suppose; a relief from war talk?, definitely.

As a daily Wordle player—who isn’t, and who cares—I would never ever in a million years join a Wordle “league.” And will never share my daily yellow and green grid to Twitter. It all seems so embarrassing! (Look at me! Look at me!) But what I found super offensive is the fact that the top ROC Wordle League players all use spreadsheets��to determine their guesses.

Spreadsheets! It’s amazing how quickly certain humans can suck the joy and fun out of things.

And yeah, I could get it in 2-3 every day if I were using this . It’s not that that’s cheating, per se, but it’s definitely lame as fuck. Makes me want to get up at 4 am every day, solve the puzzle, and post a single word Tweet (“WATCH”) while tagging everyone I know in this “league.”

That’s crossing the line from “opinion” to “just being mean.”

But spreadsheets!!!! SMDH.

editing and collected by Yu Chen and Regina Kanyu Wang (Tor)

I have a couple of updates deserving of official press releases that I’m instead going to bury in here.

First up, the Best Translated Book Award.

When we put this on hiatus in 2020, it totally made sense. The world was ending! Everything was on fire! But now, three years later, the world is��still��on fire (maybe even more so), and we haven’t done a single thing.

There are two-three issues at play here. First off, the funding from Amazon dropped over the past few years, and without any other organization/angel donor to step in . . . well, reducing the prize money is a step in the wrong direction.

Secondly, the time required to coordinate fourteen judges, accept and log over six hundred submissions, and properly promote all the longlist/shortlist/winners is a��lot. (Time is the villain of this post.)

Finally, I want it to be different from the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the Man Booker International. But how? What is the rationale? What makes it interesting?

If you have ideas and ambition and desire, hit me up. (Preferably by text. I’m embracing my worst email habits at this time.)

I do know what I��don’t��want for BTBA 3.0: Translators judging translations. This field is way, way too small for inclusions or snuffs to not feel/be personal. This is true for the translators involved and their publishers. Most translators are hustling, and if there’s an Open Letter title that’s “tied” with one from New Directions or FSG . . . we ain’t gonna win. (Actually happened, so this is still just truth saying and not hate slinging.)

And, pardon my French, translators are sooooo bitchy. I’ve ignored multiple awards this year once I saw which translators had been named to the jury. We all have agendas—mine is pro-experimental weird literature and anti-Zambra—and seeing them play out in Award Land is both disheartening and pathetic.

A correlated problem is that if you ask authors to judge these awards—the closest thing to “celebrity” in the eyes of booksellers, readers, and the like—they’ll ALSO starfuck the credibility away right from the jump. We all have motives, which is why indie booksellers kowtow to the Big Four to get bigger rewards: both in terms of financial kickbacks (aka co-op) and cultural capital.

Who should judge an award? And why do TWO PRESSES (Titled Axis and Fitzcarraldo) make up almost 50% of the International Booker longlist? The concept that out of 135 submissions, 10% make the longlist (13 titles) is already bananas enough, but to claim diversity while simultaneously worshipping the same old same old has left me cold.

I couldn’t care less about which book wins this award. There’s basically zero chance I’ll have time to read it.

��by Yeong-Shin Ma, translated from the Korean by Janet Hong (Drawn & Quarterly)

Which isn’t to say the Man Booker Group Hedge Fund Premiere League Santander International Book of the Year isn’t worthy! I’ll bet it’s great. I just have zero zero time.

I mean, seriously, if there’s one book on this list I would normally make time to read, it’s a graphic novel called Moms. Based on what I know—the title, the fact Janet Hong translated it, that it’s Korean, the art—this is everything I want from a reading experience.

And yet, and yet.

Then again, with no baseball on the horizon [UPDATE: BASEBALL IS COMING BACK! And Rob Manfred? You can still go fuck a wall] I may just have spare time come April . . .

New and Selected Stories��by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker, Lisa Dillman, Francisca González Arias, and Alex Ross (Dorothy)

Speaking of Janet Hong, Last week, Open Letter unveiled its featuring Katie Whittemore, Janet Hong, and Kaija Straumanis as the first three “curators.” This was something I’ve been toying with for a while because I think we need to respect translators as more than a name on the cover, and hopefully this is only the beginning of a set of changes within the industry.

We’ll get to some other radical proposals below (for you Old Timers, we’re about 300 words before I go off the rails), but I want to start by saying that translators should not negotiate for higher wages per word. Rather, they should start with a total dollar amount in mind, and work from there.

Why would a 33,000 word book be worth $0.13/word to a publisher?

Spoiler: It’s not. A book is worth its sales and grants and cultural capital. We base our offers to the author on how many copies we expect to sell—let’s do the same for translators.

If a publisher expects a ~120 page book to sell 4,000 copies, they should pay EVERYONE based on that, rather than screw the translator (“it’s short! not much work!”) and continue to advance the idea that the translator is a laborer.

From now on, I will advocate, with all of my limited financial acumen and power, for translators who bring me a fixed price they want.

You want $5,000 for a 100-page book? If it’s a book that has potential, funding, etc., then, sure! Why should I discount your earnings because the author was��concise��and not Jonathan Franzen? That’s not fair!

The downside is if you bring me a 1,000-page book and ask for $50K. Ain’t no way that shit computes.

There has never been so many brilliant people involved in literary translation as there are today, on March 11th, 2022. Let’s use our collective brain power to stop repeating crass capitalistic systems (did I already say “fuck Daylight Savings”? If not . . . ) and come up with fair negotiations.

Keeping in mind, this . . .

��by Heimito Von Doderer, translated from the German by Vincent Kling (NYRB)

Printing prices have gone INSANE.

I have a 1,000 page book that, from our preferred printer, would cost $15 per unit to print. Given that we receive less than 40% of the retail price in revenue (deduct 50% discount to retailers and 26% net for distribution), we would have to sell this at $37.50 to breakeven on the printing costs alone—not taking into account fixed costs (editor, grant writer, marketing employees), marketing expenses, payments to translators and authors, etc.

The real cost—for a paperback, mind you—would have to be $50+ to make us any sort of a profit.

Y’all want to preorder that??? No? Well, I spent my entire summer vacation editing this book and hope that other people will have that same opportunity . . . someday.

But if the printing costs—due to a paper shortage, set off by Obama’s biography, with delays lasting months—fuck our cash flow and income . . . paying translators more that we currently do will become an impossibility.

There’s a reason Open Letter’s staff is two-thirds as big as it used to be and we’re both working fourteen full time jobs to keep multiple presses afloat.

by Vladimir Sorokin, translated from the Russian by Max Lawton (NYRB)

It’s spring break at the University of Rochester, so I worked 65 hours this week trying to update the . It’s still not complete—not quite—but it’s closer to being up to date than it has been since last summer.

Tell me what’s missing. Next month when I post another list of nine books I can’t find time to read (along with baseball anecdotes for each one since baseball is dead back!), I’ll break down some stats for y’all. And not be so navel gazing.

��by Peter Neumann, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (FSG)

Let’s end with Book #9 and the most bananas PR I’ve seen in a while.

Earlier this week, on March 8th, which happens to be International Women’s Day, Knopf, that bastion of “good taste,” announced the release of Paul Tom Cormac McCarthy’s new “book,” which is actually a diptych (aka one volume short of a triptych) coming out this fall:

“The Passenger,” which comes out on Oct. 25, takes place in 1980, in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. The plot is set in motion when Bobby, a salvage diver, gets assigned to explore the wreckage of a sunken jet off the coast of Mississippi, and discovers that the plane’s black box, the pilot’s flight bag and the body of one of the passengers are all missing. With the pace and twists of a thriller, the 400-page narrative follows Bobby, who is haunted by his memories of his father and sister, as he gets drawn into the mystery of the plane crash, and realizes he may have uncovered something nefarious when strange men in suits show up at his home.

“Stella Maris,” which will be released on Nov. 22 and serves as a coda to “The Passenger,” tells Alicia’s story, over roughly 200 pages. The narrative unfolds entirely in dialogue, as a transcript between Alicia and her doctor at a psychiatric institution in Wisconsin in 1972, where Alicia, a 20-year-old doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, receives a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Of course, the “male” volume is twice as long as the “female” one. Although I’m willing to bet it’s only 320 pages and the final 80 are just a “rounding error.”

CODA

This video is so, so sad. And the irony should not be lost that he’s speaking for the women who made these suggestions . . .

I’ve been a big Zambra fan since I read the first paragraph of Bonsai. His first two novels—one of which we published—are spectacular gems, best read in one sitting and reflected upon for days.

Which is why it’s a bit heartbreaking that Ways of Going Home is a bit of a disappointment. (To me at least.) I’ve been looking forward to this book since I read a sample way back when, and I’m really glad that FSG is behind it and will help get Zambra an even larger international audience than he currently has. But it would be intellectually dishonest to simply praise this book because Zambra’s one of our authors and a great guy, and Megan’s a friend and a great translator. Which is why I wrote this as seriously as I could.

Ways of Going Home, Alejandro Zambra’s third book to be published in English (and second translated by Megan McDowell), packs a lot of themes—historical memory, difficulties of love, honesty in art—into a brief 139 page novel set between the two great Chilean earthquakes in 1985 and 2010. It’s an ambitious project from one of Granta’s “Best Young Spanish-Language Novelists,” and one that is a bit of a mess.

Before getting into the reasons why I think this book doesn’t work, here’s a brief synopsis of the two intertwined storylines: In what I’ll call the “Claudia novel” storyline, the narrator is growing up in Chile in the mid-1980s, at the time when Pinochet was finally forced out. On the night of the 1985 earthquake, he meets Claudia, a pretty, slightly older girl who is somehow connected to the boy’s neighbor, Raúl, the only single man in the neighborhood. Two years after the earthquake, he sees Claudia again, and she asks him to spy on Raúl. That’s part one. Part two—of the Claudia novel narrative—takes place twenty years later, with the narrator decides to try and find out what’s going on with Claudia. Oh so coincidentally, she’s about to return home to deal with her father’s death, during which time, she hooks up with the narrator, explains her life story (bit more on that later), and then breaks things off with the narrator.

Interspersed between these two sections are two sections written by the “author” about writing his Claudia novel. The author and his wife have separated, he’s a bit lonely and nostalgic, and having a really hard time writing this novel. He wants Eme—his estranged wife—to read it and approve of it, and he surrounds his explication of this basic desire with a ton of quasi-intellectual observations about life and forgetting, parents and love, and everything else. He reunites with Eme briefly, but that doesn’t really work out. Then the 2010 earthquake takes place.

Two earthquakes, two failed love stories, two tellings of the same story involving his mother, Eme claiming Claudia’s story is just a retelling of hers, the end of Pinochet’s realm kicks off the book and Sebastian Pinera’s election ends it—there’s a lot of doubling in this book. Also the two narrators—one pretty obviously the novelized reflection of the other.

Overall, this set-up—which calls to mind tons of so-called metafictional works, such as Lost in the Funhouse and the vastly superior Mulligan Stew—is Zambra’s attempt to break out of the writing style that defined his first two novels. This is a very difficult situation for a young author. Those two books have a very specific style, one that’s emotionally affective, incredibly compelling to read, and instantly recognizable. The writing in those novels is very precise, almost poetic, and the stories are related from a restricted third-person point of view, allowing for certain “cheesy” moments to play more seriously than they might in a first-person voice.

Anyway. Ways of Going Home feels like a novelist trying to change his aesthetic, maturing from something simple and direct into something more complex and respectably “Literary.” Reading the representation of the author in this novel as Zambra himself, and the author’s relationship to the Claudia novel he’s writing as Zambra’s relationship to this book, it’s clear that there’s a lot of anxiety, an awareness that this book might not live up to heightened expectations. And one of the best tricks for evading that is to foreground it (it’s a book about an author who can’t write his next novel!) and then bury it in a false postmodern trick (the novel isn’t just a novel, but a novel about the difficulty of writing novels!). Everything about this rings false, and makes me feel sympathetic for Zambra—he doesn’t have to hide his talents. But then again, I have no idea what it’s like trying to create art after being anointed by just about everyone important in the world of letters.

You can read the entire review by clicking here.

Before getting into the reasons why I think this book doesn’t work, here’s a brief synopsis of the two intertwined storylines: In what I’ll call the “Claudia novel” storyline, the narrator is growing up in Chile in the mid-1980s, at the time when Pinochet was finally forced out. On the night of the 1985 earthquake, he meets Claudia, a pretty, slightly older girl who is somehow connected to the boy’s neighbor, Raúl, the only single man in the neighborhood. Two years after the earthquake, he sees Claudia again, and she asks him to spy on Raúl. That’s part one. Part two—of the Claudia novel narrative—takes place twenty years later, when the narrator decides to try and find out what’s going on with Claudia. Oh so coincidentally, she’s about to return home to deal with her father’s death, during which time, she hooks up with the narrator, explains her life story (bit more on that later), and then breaks things off with the narrator.

Interspersed between these two sections are two sections written by the “author” about writing his Claudia novel. The author and his wife have separated, he’s a bit lonely and nostalgic, and having a really hard time writing this novel. He wants Eme—his estranged wife—to read it and approve of it, and he surrounds his explication of this basic desire with a ton of quasi-intellectual observations about life and forgetting, parents and love, and everything else. He reunites with Eme briefly, but that doesn’t really work out. Then the 2010 earthquake takes place.

Two earthquakes, two failed love stories, two tellings of the same story involving his mother, Eme claiming Claudia’s story is just a retelling of hers, the end of Pinochet’s realm kicks off the book and Sebastian Pinera’s election ends it—there’s a lot of doubling in this book. Also the two narrators—one pretty obviously the novelized reflection of the other.

Overall, this set-up—which calls to mind tons of so-called metafictional works, such as Lost in the Funhouse and the vastly superior Mulligan Stew—is Zambra’s attempt to break out of the writing style that defined his first two novels. This is a very difficult situation for a young author. Those two books have a very specific style, one that’s emotionally affective, incredibly compelling to read, and instantly recognizable. The writing in those novels is very precise, almost poetic, and the stories are related from a restricted third-person point of view, allowing for certain “cheesy” moments to play more seriously than they might in a first-person voice.

Anyway. Ways of Going Home feels like a novelist trying to change his aesthetic, maturing from something simple and direct into something more complex and respectably “Literary.” Reading the representation of the author in this novel as Zambra himself, and the author’s relationship to the Claudia novel he’s writing as Zambra’s relationship to this book, it’s clear that there’s a lot of anxiety, an awareness that this book might not live up to heightened expectations. And one of the best tricks for evading that is to foreground it (it’s a book about an author who can’t write his next novel!) and then bury it in a false postmodern trick (the novel isn’t just a novel, but a novel about the difficulty of writing novels!). Everything about this rings false, and makes me feel sympathetic for Zambra—he doesn’t have to hide his talents. But then again, I have no idea what it’s like trying to create art after being anointed by just about everyone important in the world of letters.

Put in that context—striving to evolve as a writer in a situation in which everyone expects huge things from you—makes the bad writing in this book nearly forgivable. But only nearly.

Claudia’s first memory of the stadium is also happy. In 1977 it was announced that Chespirito, the Mexican comedian, would bring the entire cast of his show to perform at the National Stadium. Claudia was four years old then; she watched Chespirito’s show and she liked it a lot.

Her parents refused to take her at first, but finally they gave in. The four of them went, and Claudia and Ximena had a great time. Many years later Claudia found out that for her parents that day had been torture. They had spent every moment thinking how absurd it was to see the stadium filled with laughing people. Throughout the entire show they had thought only, obsessively, about the dead.

This is a pretty trite set-piece, and one that comes off as über-manipulative and totally unbelievable. (I distrust all writing that hinges on memories of a child, since most of these memories are way more specific than any person would actually have.) It’s the sort of manipulative sequence you’d find in story from a mediocre creative writer. (See how it contrasts the naive happiness of the child with the sullen awareness of the parents? And how parents sacrifice for their children? Do you see what I did there?)

But it gets worse:

I’ll always remember the pain, one night, years ago: in the middle of an argument we started caressing each other and she got on top of me, but in the middle of penetration she couldn’t control her rage and she shut her vagina completely.

SHUT IT! SHUT THAT VAGINA!

A few days ago Eme left a box for me with the neighbors. Only today did I dare open it. There were two shirts, a scarf, my Kaurismäki and Wes Anderson movies, my Tom Waits and Wu-Tang Clan CDs, as well as some book I lent her these past months.

God, that is SO PRECIOUS. At this point in time, can you really do something like this in an unironic fashion? Your Wes Anderson movie? Oh, you, Mr. Narrator, are SO SMART AND SENSITIVE. (And have very questionable taste in directors.)

This isn’t the Zambra book I wanted to read. In part because one of the challenges Zambra’s trying to face—how to write about Pinochet and the violent history of Chile when that wasn’t something you experienced first hand—could have resulted in an absolutely fascinating book.

In the Claudia section of Ways of Going Home, the one that opens in 1985, just a few years before Pinochet is deposed, the narrator is 9 years old, fairly confused about the politics of the country, in part because his parents have remained on the sidelines during the Allende-Pinochet periods. He is a character forcibly disconnected from the past, living in a sort of constructed world:

We arrived, finally, at a neighborhood with only two streets: Neftalí Reyes Basoalto and Lucila Godoy Alcayaga. It sounds like a joke, but it’s true. A lot of the streets in Maipú had, and still have, those absurd names: my cousins, for example, lived on First Symphony Way, near Second and Third Symphony, perpendicular to Concert Street, and close to the passages Opus One, Opus Two, Opus Three, et cetera. Or the very street where I lived, Aladdin, between Odin and Ramayana and parallel to Lemuria; obviously, toward the end of the seventies some people had a lot of fun choosing names for the streets where the new families would later live—the families without history, who were willing or perhaps resigned to live in that fantasy world.

“I live in the neighborhood of real names,” said Claudia on the afternoon of our reencounter, looking seriously into my eyes.

In case you don’t catch the subtext—and it’s these sort of so-obvious-as-it’s-beaten-over-your-head allusions and metaphors that marks another flaw in this book—Claudia’s family is political, was part of Allende’s government, is reactionary.

I vote with a sense of sorrow, with very little faith. I know that Sebastián Piñera will win the first round I’m sure he will also win the second. It seems horrible. It’s obvious we’ve lost our memories. We will calmly, candidly, hand the country over to Piñera and to Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ.

It’s an interesting artistic conundrum: How to write about a childhood taking place during a very important time in history, but one that you, and a lot of your characters, weren’t directly impacted by. Tricky.

Which brings me to David Shields. If you read enough David Shields, your relationship to literature is irrevocably altered. The part of Shields that always sticks with me is the idea that the best works of art are those in which the creator’s consciousness as he/she creates is revealed in the course of the work of art. Frequently, these are hybrid works that aren’t exactly autobiographical or fictional—what Shields refers to as “lyric essays.”

There are hints in Ways of Going Home that this sort of “coming clean” is something that Zambra was aiming for:

It’s strange, it’s silly to attempt a genuine story about something, about someone, about anyone, about oneself. But it’s necessary as well.

Or, more explicitly (this book excels at stating things explicitly):

Today my friend Pablo called me so he could read me this phrase he found in a book by Tim O’Brien: “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end.” I kept thinking about that and stayed awake all night. It’s true. We remember the sounds of the images. And sometimes, when we write, we wash everything clean, as if by doing so we could advance towards something. We ought to simply describe those sounds, those stains on memory. That arbitrary selection, nothing more. That’s why we lie so much, in the end. That’s why a book is always the opposite of another immense and strange book. An illegible and genuine book that we translate treacherously, that we betray with our habit of passable prose.

I think about the beautiful beginning of Family Sayings, Natalia Ginzburg’s novel: “The places, events, and people in this book are all real. I have invented nothing. Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt impelled at once to destroy everything thus invented.”

The sort of honesty and directness that Zambra is talking about and aiming for is much more evident in his earlier works. See the opening of Bonsai:

In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was along some years before her death, Emilia’s death. Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature:

The unveiling of the creative process in Ways of Going Home is way more dishonest. Instead of seeing the real Zambra struggle with the above themes and his attempt to create a more “mature” style, we get two manipulative narrators, each as “novelistic” as the other. Going back to the doubling mentioned way back in the beginning of this review, instead of having two narratives—one fictional, one an autobiographical reflection on that—we get two fictional bits, which play off each other in a way that, unfortunately, isn’t very satisfying.

All that said, I eagerly await Zambra’s next book. He is one of the best young Latin American writers, and even this book, as disappointing as it might be to me, is better than a lot of books that will come out this year. He is still an author to watch.

It’s a pretty decent, if wide-ranging, group of books, which includes everything from Paul Auster’s latest to Sofi Oksanen’s Purge to our own Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zambra to fricking Freedom. In glancing through this, it’s difficult to figure out which recent books aren’t on the list.

But I think that’s sort of the point at this stage: to provide library patrons and general readers with a list of titles that covers most every interest and aesthetic. You want sci-fi? Try China Mieville’s Kraken. Scandinavian thriller? How about Nesbo’s The Snowman. From a librarian perspective, this sort of makes sense, and provides a solid list for putting together a decent “new titles” shelf.

Personally, I’m too distracted by the continued ugliness of their website to give this as much attention as it might deserve. There are a good number of books on this list that I haven’t heard of, but I’ll be damned if I click through to see what they’re about. I know I’ve been relatively quiet about shitty website design as of late, mainly since some people can’t take a joke, but how hard is it to use the same color scheme and template across a handful of pages? The and all employ different looks and menus and colors. And looks like a seven-year-old’s first attempt at learning HTML. (Note the changing font-sizes. Classic.)

Websites don’t have to be overly flashy to be effective, but seeing that this is one of the richest literary prizes in the world, you’d think they’d drop $10K into putting together a site that doesn’t suck. End rant.

I am looking forward to seeing the shortlist (which will be announced in April 2012), especially since Dubravka Ugresic is one of judges . . . I have a feeling that list will be a pretty cool collection of titles. And a lot easier to process than this overwhelming list of books written by people about things.

Today’s featured author is Alejandro Zambra—a personal favorite and the first author from this list to be part of the Open Letter catalog.

Seeing that I’ve written about Zambra before (namely here and here) and that we publish The Private Lives of Trees, this seemed like an easy post to write. But it never is, is it?

So at the risk of repeating myself, I want to try and explain what it is about Zambra’s work that I really like.

I first heard about Zambra at the ALTA conference before Bonsai came out from Melville House. Megan McDowell read a bit of his work (if memory serves, she read from The Private Lives of Trees, which may have even been The Secret Lives of Trees at that time) as part of her ALTA fellowship. I’m usually pretty terrible at paying attention during readings (much prefer discussions, modulated voices, and off-the-cuff responses), but I remember being struck by the freshness and honesty of his prose.

When Bonsai came out, I read it from the perspective of a judge for the Best Translated Book Awards, and fell in love with this first paragraph:

In the end she dies and he remains alone, although in truth he was along some years before her death, Emilia’s death. Let’s say that she is called or was called Emilia and that he is called, was called, and continues to be called Julio. Julio and Emilia. In the end Emilia dies and Julio does not die. The rest is literature:

Yes! Yes, the rest is literature!

In some ways, this is a bit of a wink, a pulling back of the curtain, a metafictional moment that was popular years ago and has been written and rewritten every since. But at the same time, Zambra’s novella adopts this tone, this style, with an attitude more akin to truthfulness than game-playing. He may be young, but this youthfulness comes through less in the look-at-me-I’m-winking-back cuteness of some of his peers, and more in the I’m-young-and-believe-in-things sense. Stealing a bit of an argument Adam Thirlwell develops in The Delighted States, Zambra tries to get to a sense of reality through a style that feels alien. It’s so unadorned, it’s so non-American-realist that it feels much closer to “how things really are.” We die. The rest is literature.

I also like the way Zambra just tells things in a way that almost feels artless . . . or at least not as manipulative as some other novels (cough, Freedom, cough) can feel at times:

The first night they shared a bed was an accident. They had an exam in Spanish Syntax II, a subject neither of them had mastered, but since they were young and in theory willing to do anything, they were willing, also, to study Spanish Syntax II at the home of the Vergara twins. The study group turned out to be quite a bit larger than imagined: someone put on music, saying he was accustomed to studying to music, another brought vodka, insisting that it was difficult for her to concentrate without vodka, and a third went to buy oranges, because vodka without orange juice seemed unbearable. At three in the morning they were perfectly drunk, so they decided to go to sleep. Although Julio would have preferred to spend the night with one of the Vergara sisters, he quickly resigned himself to sharing the servants’ quarters with Emilia.

Julio didn’t like that Emilia asked so many questions in class, and Emilia disliked the fact that Julio passed his classes while hardly setting foot on campus, but that night they both discovered the emotional affinities that any couple is capable of discovering with only a little effort. Needless to say, they did terribly on the exam. A week later, for their second chance at the exam, they studied again with the Vergaras and slept together again, even though this second time it was not necessary for them to share a room, since the twins’ parents were on a trip to Buenos Aires.

(By the way, I’m pulling these passages from of the Virginia Quarterly Review, which included this entire novella. Not entirely sure what would happen if you tried to subscribe to VQR and access this issue, but it might be worth a try. Otherwise, you can buy the Melville House edition, which was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award.)

After Bonsai came out—to much praise and bookseller adoration—we had the opportunity to publish Zambra’s second novel, the aforementioned Stylistically, this is a lateral step. It’s got the same sort of voice, the same unadorned prose:

Julián lulls the little girl to sleep with “The Private Lives of Trees,” an ongoing story he’s made up to tell her at bedtime. The protagonists are a poplar tree and a baobab tree, who, at night, when no one can see them, talk about photosynthesis, squirrels, or the many advantages of being trees and not people or animals or, as they say to each other, stupid hunks of cement.

Daniela is not his daughter, but it is hard for him not to think of her that way. Three years ago Julián joined the family. He came to them; Verónica and the little girl were already there. He married Verónica and in some ways, also, Daniela, who was hesitant at first but little by little began to accept her new life: “Julián is uglier than my dad, but he’s still nice,” she would say to her friends, who nodded with surprising seriousness, even solemnity, as if they somehow understood that Julián’s arrival was not an accident. As the months passed this stepfather even earned a place in the drawings Daniela made at school. There’s one in particular that Julián always keeps nearby: the three of them, at the beach, the little girl and Verónica are making cakes out of sand, and he is dressed in jeans and a shirt, reading and smoking under a perfectly round and yellow sun.

It’s a shorter, tighter book, depicting Julián’s long night waiting for Verónica to come home from art class. (She’s late. Really late.) This is really the only event of the novel’s plot. As the omniscient narrator puts it,

When she returns, the novel will end. But as long as she is not back, the book will continue. The book continues until she returns, or until Julián is sure that she won’t return.

The rest of the novella is a trip through Julián’s imagination.

Getting back to this issue of Granta though . . . The piece they chose to include is “Ways of Going Home,” an excerpt from his forthcoming novel. A novel that’s much longer (or so I’ve heard), and has a very different style from the others. The presence of a first-person narrator changes Zambra’s game entirely, although he’s still trying to tell us about life (or, life as literature) in as direct a way as possible. Here’s the opening:

Once, I got lost. I was six or seven. I got distracted, and all of a sudden I couldn’t see my parents any more. I was scared, but I immediately found the way home and got there before they did. They kept looking for me, desperate, but that afternoon I thought they were lost. I believed I knew how to get home and they didn’t.

‘You went a different way,’ my mother said later, angry, her eyes still swollen.

You were the one who went a different way, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

Papa watched placidly from the armchair. Sometimes I think he spent all his time just sitting there, thinking. But maybe he didn’t really think about anything. Maybe he just closed his eyes and received the present with calm and resignation. That night he spoke, though: ‘This is a good thing,’ he told me. ‘You overcame adversity.’ Mama looked at him suspiciously, but he kept on stringing together a confused speech about adversity. Back then, I had no idea what adversity could possibly mean.

I lay back on the chair across from him and pretended to be asleep. I heard them argue, always the same pattern. Mama would say five sentences and Papa would answer with a single word. Sometimes he would answer sharply: ‘No.’ Sometimes he would say, practically shouting: ‘Liar,’ or ‘False.’ Sometimes he would even say, like the police: ‘Negative.’

That night Mama carried me to bed and, perhaps knowing I was only pretending to sleep and was listening attentively, curiously, she told me: ‘Your father is right. Now we know you won’t get lost. That you know how to walk alone in the street. But you should concentrate more on the way. You should walk faster.’

I listened to her. From then on, I walked faster. In fact, a couple of years later, the first time I talked to Claudia, she asked me why I walked so fast. She had been following me for days, spying on me. We had met a short time before, on 3 March 1985 – the night of the earthquake – but we didn’t talk then.

And I’m pretty much 100% sure that this book will come out in English sometime soon . . . .

Don’t forget! Sign up now for and get this entire issue—featuring 22 Spanish-language novelists—absolutely free!

July 2010

by Roberto Bolano, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (Chile, New Directions)

Let’s start in the Southern Cone with the latest book from international superstar Roberto Bolano. Fans of his can’t get enough, and this collection of stories—his second to appear in English—should be fantastic. The earlier story collection, Last Evenings on Earth, is one of my favorite of all his ND books. And this collections sounds just as stunningly strange and wonderful: “Consider the title piece: a young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor; just as his soul is departing his body, it realizes strange doings are afoot — and what follows defies the imagination (except Bolaño’s own).”

by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Chile, Open Letter)

Personal favorite from our list. I love Zambra’s style, his directness. This book is about a man who tells his step-daughter a nightly bedtime story about “The Private Lives of Trees.” On this particular night his wife is late . . . and then later . . . and later. And the book ends when either she arrives or he decides she never will. If you want a chance at winning a free copy of this, visit our and “like” or comment on the Private Lives of Trees post.

edited by Alvin Pang, translated from Chinese, Malay, Tamil and English by a variety of translators (Singapore, Autumn Hill)

Not surprisingly, not many works of literature from Singapore make their way into this country, which is one reason why this book is so intriguing. This anthology is a collaboration between Autumn Hill Books and the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and features work from thirty-nine contemporary writers. To illustrate the range of pieces in this book, here’s a brief description of a few pieces (from Autumn Hill’s website): “Tan Chee Lay’s meditative ‘Post-Terrorist Phenomena,’ a candid re-examination of the War on Terror, carries the subtle assurance of centuries of literary tradition in ‘san wen,’ a popular Chinese form of creative non-fiction; Malay-Muslim Johar Buang’s verse is recognizably modern, yet draws from the same mystical tradition as Rumi and other Sufi masters; Yeng Puay Ngon’s Ginsbergesque long urban poem, Wena Poon’s magic realist short story and Xi Ni’er’s barbed fictive quips would all find favor in global literary circles today, while remaining grounded in a sense of place.”

by Jaume Cabre, translated from the Catalan by Patricia Lunn (Spain, Swan Isle Press)

A few years back, when I visited Barcelona on an editorial trip—and fell in love with the works of Merce Rodoreda and Quim Monzo, along with Spanish wine, tapas, and the entire Catalan culture—Jaume Cabre’s massive book Les veus del Pamano had recently come out. It sounded pretty interesting, but for a variety of reasons, we couldn’t get it on our list. So I’m really glad that someone else is making some of his work available. Winter Journey is supposedly a collection of short stories, but according to Swan Isle it is “a singularly brilliant and enigmatic narrative, novelistic in its approach, with mysterious connections linking characters, objects, and ideas across time and place. The text takes the form of a Schubertian musical progression in prose, a philosophical mystery moving freely through a labyrinth of centuries and cities, historical and contemporary.”

Tomorrow we’ll look at August . . .

Three Fates Linda Le Mark Polizzotti New Directions

Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier wrote in an essay that a Baroque style was the natural mode for Latin American fiction. He claimed that an excess of language was needed to account for an unknown reality. It was not possible to write “a ceiba”, he said, as one wrote “a pine tree”. It was necessary to describe and define the ceiba. Is it necessary to create a Latin American minimalism?

No, it isn’t. I don’t promote minimalism nor maximalism. I think people should write what they want and need to write. I think Carpentier’s observation is beautiful, but it implies a risky idea regarding audiences. Whom do we have to explain ourselves to? I believe to no one. We should not write to let the ceiba be known. We should write because of a personal need, because it’s what we do best.

The event is at Melville House’s office in DUMBO (145 Plymouth St, at Pearl St) and starts at 7pm.

Greenlight has a display of the entire Novella series (I snuck Private Lives in there too!).

Then last night he had a reading with his translator Megan McDowell at the beautiful 192 Books.

I had a front row seat.

If you’d like to meet Alejandro while he’s here in NYC, and hear him read from The Private Lives of Trees, your last chance is tomorrow night at the , where we’re throwing a book launch party for him. And when you meet him, be sure to ask what he thinks of Pablo Neruda.