This match was judged by Margaret Carson, who co-chairs the and crunches numbers for (WiT).

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

In today’s match, Ecuador is represented by Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands, translated by Amalia Gladhart, and Cameroon by Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night, translated by Tamsin Black.

Here’s one of those odd WWCOL matchings that other judges have commented on: under what circumstances would these two novels have otherwise been paired? The playing fields could not be more different. Beyond the Islands takes its cues from that well-worn playbook, magic realism, while Dark Heart of the Night tangles with cruelty, horror, violence, blood and guts. This is a match in which Miano’s dangerous writing squares off against Yánez Cossío’s safer and somewhat recycled magic realist storytelling.

In eight, mostly self-contained chapters, Beyond the Islands (in Spanish, Más allá de las islas Galápagos, and what’s so clunky about “Galapagos” that it was left out in the translation?) draws from a rich storehouse of imagery and fantastical elements to portray eight characters, each with something a little “special.” Morgan, a green-eyed pirate with a peg leg, Iridia, a tenderhearted prostitute, Alirio, a poet whose pockets are stuffed with abandoned poems, others. Each one meets a mist-shrouded end and gets transported elsewhere, often on wings. That’s where the magic comes in. Iridia, for example, ascends to the great beyond in a grand Chagallian flourish. As translated by Amalia Gladhart:

Iridia began to ascend the celestial ramp . . . [she] might have lost her balance, but a supernatural force was carrying her obliquely upwards toward the center of the sun, with the mechanism of an automatic staircase. Iridia was light and she kept walking; she was slowly gaining altitude like a weightless figure from the brush of Marc Chagall. From time to time she paused to breathe and reestablish her balance, although she knew that her shoes had sprouted soft suction pads that stuck to the ray, which was the same one that trapped the white butterfly that emerged from Morgan’s foot, and that illuminated the viscous dampness, like semen, that had been Alirio.

Exuberantly fantastical passages like this happen over and over in the novel, and they might be just your thing. But as someone who has been hearing about and reading Latin American magical realism for over thirty years, I wanted at times to yell, “ya basta,” enough. It felt as if the team were dribbling in circles, running down the clock, indulging in flashy play for its own sake. Look! Another player has sprouted wings and is suspended midair!

But it’s a tenacious genre. To my surprise, the game would pick up, new players would be introduced, each with an idiosyncratic tic. Long dull stretches would be followed by something stupendously ridiculous, like the story of the life-size woman doll that when filled with warm water turns into a kind of high-maintenance sex toy. It’s almost all harmless, with metamorphoses rather than outright death, except for the cruel burning of the plant-gatherer and healer Brigita, who’s taken to be a witch.

You might ask why a magic realist novel first published in 1980 comes into English thirty years later, well after the heyday of Latin American magic realism; but put those questions aside. Here it is, still playing with zest and wacky energy, winging its way down the field to score a few goals.

On the other hand, Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night (published in France in 2005 as L’intérieur de la nuit) plays a much more disturbing game. Set in a remote village in an unnamed African country, the novel tells the story of Ayané, the only child of the Aama and Eké, a couple who ignore the traditional customs and rules of the village and are ostracized as a result. But it’s just as well, because it allows Ayané to escape the destiny of other girls whose mothers “taught them to live as they had done, with gritted teeth, a ramrod-straight back and vanquished hope” (in Tamsin Black’s translation). Ayané is sent away to school and grows up, mostly off stage, to become an enterprising and spirited young woman.

Up to this point the novel seems like a rare coming-of-age story of a young African woman, but then it suddenly turns into gruesome bloodbath. Ayané’s return home to tend to her dying mother coincides with the arrival in the village of a band of drug-crazed revolutionaries in need of soldiers. There is resistance, followed by page after page of unbearable brutality, witnessed by Ayané from the high branch of a tree. You might find yourself recoiling from the descriptions of decapitations, castration, the murder of a child, disembowelments, the cooking and eating of entrails and brains, sustained for over forty pages. Once again, you want to yell, “enough!”

When I first read this novel I hated it. Its violence and cruelty seemed gratuitous, over the top, frankly sadistic. But just as the sporting world has its “extreme sports,” maybe literature too has its “extremes” that deeply disturb and push at whatever limits are out there? Of course it does; the orgies of violence in Dark Heart make you think of the Marquis de Sade, Alejandra Pizarnik in The Bloody Countess, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker. Contrary to what we might think, Miano is not doing social realism. She’s not chronicling horrendous acts of violence in Africa (which of course are not unique to Africa) in order to cater to the expectations of outsiders. Whether or not she succeeds is another matter, but she could care less about enchanting the reader. She’s asking herself: can this be described in words?

I won’t overdo the soccer analogies, but I considered: which of the two novels “goes for it”? Which one scuffs up the turf, does some damage, earns a few red cards, challenges some notions about what women write about when they write novels?

For her more ambitious game plan, Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night advances, beating Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands 4-3.

And now half of the final six are set, with Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night joining Bronsky’s The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine and Atwood’s Oryx & Crake in the upcoming quarterfinals.

Tomorrow’s match features Nigeria’s Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie up against Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent.

This match was judged by M. Lynx Qualey, who runs the website, and can be found on Twitter at @arablit.

For more information on the Women’s World Cup of Literature, click here or here. Also, be sure to follow our and like our And check back here daily!

Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales, translated by Stephen Snyder, and Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands, translated by Amalia Gladhart, take two very different stylistic approaches. The first is spare, light, and beautiful, while the second bounces along wildly, piling words on top of words (on top of words). But both are collections of linked stories that confuse magic and reality. One takes us around Japan and the other around the Galapagos.

Ogawa scores first with her tidily crafted tales that give us strange, miniature portraits of rejection, with perfectly tended sentences ably re-crafted by Snyder. Each of Ogawa’s creepy story-portraits is linked to the next, sometimes through a character, but more often through a single image. The stories aren’t linked organically, but through their recurring images: a strawberry shortcake, a torture device, apartment number 508.

She scores again as the stories go off-kilter. Each tale of revenge isn’t much in itself: a man won’t leave his wife for his lover, a father doesn’t properly look after his daughter, a woman kills and buries her husband. In the course of them, we hear about violence, but we don’t feel its impact. Instead, the camera cuts away just as a human tongue rolls semi-comically out of a pocket. It soon becomes clear that the violence has been staged for us, and are we to enjoy it? A character’s boyfriend asks, “Do you find it amusing that someone died?”

The echoes grow stranger as they move from one story to the next: kiwis, tomatoes, hand-shaped carrots, torture devices, a dying tiger. As the stories progress, the earlier tales reappear curled up inside the later ones. The women in the stories grow older, clutching their manuscripts, or their reams of blank paper.

None of the individual stories is particularly memorable. Instead, what fascinates about the collection is the echoes that move from one story and the next, often pointing back at the reader. These aren’t really dark tales. They’re light and creepy, twisted in their reflection of the reader looking at the strange violence of rejection, in a mirror that includes a look at ourselves.

Alicia Yanez Cossio’s playful, satiric Beyond the Islands is also a collection of short tales, each chapter focusing on a character who’s at the edge of the world, on the Galapagos Islands. The characters are wonderfully storybook: the pirate with buried treasure, the poet who’s lost his muse, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the narcissistic scientist, the spinster schoolmarm, the grieving mother, the witch-healer, and the baker with the blow-up baroness.

All of them are migrants in some way, and all have come to live among the strange animals on the beautiful, forbidding islands. Each is pushed to his or her outer limits in this place where land shifts its location and the rules of life and death are different than they are elsewhere. Many of the sections—particularly the poet and the scientist—are told with such over-the-top joie de vivre that the reader, thanks to Amalia Gladhart’s translation, goes bouncing over the sentences, with humor and exaggeration.

Everyone is pushed to absurdity here, as for instance the scientist who hijacks a plane in his self-important eagerness to get to the Galapagos (and to his lover), and the spinster schoolmarm who whips up the entire island in the cause of greeting Princess Anne.

This novel scores again and again with its bouncy sentences, its exaggerated marginal characters, the exploration of place beyond place, and the pure joy of its delivery.
Both books have their own strange wit, but Beyond the Islands is a thrill, even steering the reader in to a ridiculous, moving finish. Beyond the Islands definitively beats Revenge 4-2.

And that does it for the first round of the inaugural Women’s World Cup of Literature!

For Ecuador, Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands will next face off against Cameroon’s Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano on Wednesday, June 24t.

The second round will kick off on Monday with Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood (Canada) taking on The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (New Zealand). That’s a huge match! Experience against youth. A book about the future versus one set in the past. A reasonably sized novel compared with a giant. This should be interesting . . .

Tomorrow’s match will be judged by Rachel Crawford, and features Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent against Sweden’s The Stranger by Camilla Läckberg.

Each chapter takes the form of someone (usually the narrator) listening to one of Trafalgar’s wild tales about some unique world or other while he pounds gallons of coffee and digresses all over the place. Like something dreamt up by Kilgore Trout, these worlds often have strange societal arrangements—like in “By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon,” which describes a civilization ruled by 1,000 women who retain their power in part by having sex only once a year, via a virtual reality creating machine—that illuminate something interesting about human nature. For example, here’s a bit from “Mr. Chaos,” a story about a madman Trafalgar meets on one of his journeys:

“Aleiçarga. Almost the complete opposite: little sea and lots of green. Two itty-bitty seas at the poles and another larger one close to the equator. It rains a lot, the rest is fertile ground, and the cities are disgusting.”

“Big, dirty, with smoke and drugs and loudspeakers.”

“Not so fast. Small cities because they, and they’re not the only ones, seem to have figured out what we are just learning; very clean, without smoke, don’t even think about drugs, and a few loudspeakers but they’re not bothersome.”

“Then they’re quite nice. I don’t know why you say they’re disgusting.”

“They are too well organized.”

“So far as I know, that is not a defect.”

“You, being Madam Organization; but when a whole city and all of the cities and everything is like an enormous and efficient company presided over by a narrow gauge logic where the effects always follow the causes and the causes march along single file and the dodo birds don’t worry about anything nor are they surprised by anything and they slither along beside you faintly pleased, I—like any normal person—feel a great desire to kill someone or commit suicide.”

Although these stories do, in a way, build on one another and are all tied together at the very end, the real pleasure of this book is in mulling over the philosophical and social underpinnings of the various worlds Gorodischer/Trafalgar describe. They’re like little gems that are fun to think about, and, for the most part, are explained in an entertaining fashion given Trafalgar’s roundabout way of telling his stories, and the sort of interplay with his various interlocutors.

That said, this set-up—a collection of stories told exclusively through dialogues—presents a lot of translation challenges, some of which Amalia Gladhart solved admirably, and some of which bog down the text.

The thing is, for a dialogue-driven book to work right, the dialogue has to always sound right. If it’s clunky, awkward, or tonally inconsistent, the whole illusion falls apart and the narrative feels very strained and stilted. This can happen when the writer/translator choose uncommon slang (“you’re going to end up in the slammer“), or have stilted word combinations (“I hope you haven’t contracted an exquisite inclination for fragile youths with smooth skin and green eyes”), or wordplay that doesn’t necessarily carry over from one culture to another (“Fernando had a tic and opened and closed his eyes every five seconds. If he’d been one of the boys at the cafe, they’d have called him Neon Sign, bet on it”). On a more subtle level, the use of contractions—or the decision not to use them at certain points—helps to replicated the cadence and rhythms of speech on the written page.

In terms of the examples above, I think these oddities are a combination of Gorodischer’s desire to create a verbally quirky character, and Gladhart’s attempt to bring that quirkiness into English. Sometimes it works—especially when describing one of the imaginary worlds—other times it falls flat.

I had a much bigger problem with the high number of grammatically questionable, extremely knotty, sentences in this book. Here are a few quick examples:

It was the translation she had dreamt and that, upon waking, she had rushed to record she didn’t know why since she was still convinced it was nothing but a nightmare;

The only problem was that there was a performance only seldom;

Every time Fina goes to Salta to visit their daughter and the grandchildren, and fortunately she goes often enough that he does not fall completely silent, Cirito stop going to the Jockey Club and that is when a few friends of the kind who correctly interpret the signs go to the cold, dry house and play poker in the dining room.

But as I mentioned above, I don’t think you read this book for the prose style—it’s more for the playfulness of the ideas, the self-referential games (Kalpa Imperial is referenced in the final story), and the pleasure of seeing such a robust imagination at work.

It’ll be interesting to see if more of Gorodischer’s books come out in the future. Both Kalpa Imperial and Trafalgar are from the late-70s/early-80s, and I’m personally curious to see how her more recent titles measure up.

Here’s the beginning of Chad’s review:

The author of more than twenty works of science fiction—both story collections and novels—Angélica Gorodischer was first introduced to English readers in 2003 with Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, a patchwork novel that uses a variety of writing styles—fairy tales, oral histories, and political commentaries, among others—to depict the rise and fall of a nameless empire. Although Trafalgar works in the opposite direction—this book is a collection of intertwined stories wherein Trafalgar, merchant to all parts of the universe, tells stories about a cornucopia of strange worlds that he visits in his travels—the same literary touchstones are there: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick. And although Trafalgar fails to surpass the best works of its literary forebearers, it is a really charming book that highlights Gorodischer’s incredible world-building abilities.

Each chapter takes the form of someone (usually the narrator) listening to one of Trafalgar’s wild tales about some unique world or other while he pounds gallons of coffee and digresses all over the place. Like something dreamt up by Kilgore Trout, these worlds often have strange societal arrangements—like in “By the Light of the Chaste Electronic Moon,” which describes a civilization ruled by 1,000 women who retain their power in part by having sex only once a year, via a virtual reality creating machine—that illuminate something interesting about human nature.

For the rest of the review, go here.