I’m flipping the schedule this week, and instead of posting the results from Germany vs. Colombia today, we’re going with Canada, represented by the incredibly famous Margaret Atwood up against Australia, represented by debut novelist Hannah Kent. The Germany-Colombia match (which is incredibly close at the moment, by the way), will go up tomorrow, with the WWCOL Championship taking place on Friday.

Before we get to Atwood vs. Kent, here’s a new bracket for all of you keeping track at home:

Australia’s Burial Rites by Hannah Kent got to this point by first beating Sweden and Camilla Läckberg’s The Stranger and then upending Nigeria and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah before defeating Cameroon’s Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano by a score of 4-2.

Canada’s Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood made the semis by defeating Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain and then Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries by a combined score of 6-3, earning Atwood a bye into the final four.

So, here we go:

Hannah Chute: Canada

You know from the very beginning of both of these books that terrible things are going to happen to everyone, but Atwood manages her characters with a grace and humor that Kent just doesn’t have (yet). Plus, I’m a sucker for lushly imaginative world-building.

M. Lynx Qualey: Canada

Compared to Oryx & Crake, Burial Rites seems exceptionally ordinary.

Sal Robinson: Canada

Atwood’s tale of bioengineering gone very, very wrong handily beats out Kent’s turgid historical melodrama; any novel where a character says “But we are peasants” goes straight into my personal trash compactor. Go Canada!

Margaret Carson: Canada

The recent appearance of “pluots” (a merger of plums and apricots) at my local Farmers Market made me wonder: is this the result of grafting, forced seed fusion, DNA splicing? Fruit mash-ups still on my mind, I picked up Oryx & Crake and discovered with delight that Margaret Atwood has taken this all to the logical next level, i.e. dystopia, with pigoons (pig + human), wolvogs (wolf + dog), rakunks (raccoon + skunk), snats (can you guess?) churned out by OrganInc., the biolab from Hell. With its deep bench of interspecies players, Atwood’s wild, entertaining ride to Extinctathon triumphs over Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites.

Lizzy Siddal: Canada

You could say I have season tickets to both these teams, and I was very happy to reread both for the WWCOL. Both played as well as I had come to expect. Canada scores the winner though by being a spell-binding one-sitting read even on third outing.

Lori Feathers: Canada

Although I found Burial Rites to be a more enjoyable reading experience and its characters more relatable, the imaginative genius of Oryx and Crake is nothing short of stunning. Atwood’s original, rich storytelling skills are on full display.

And there you go. Atwood comes to the semifinals and destroys. She’ll meet up with either Alina Bronsky (Germany) or Laura Restrepo (Colombia) on Friday.

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

From here on out, multiple judges will be voting on each of the matches and the “score” will be an accumulation of these votes.

Just to recap, Burial Rites by Hannah Kent (Australia) got here by first beating Sweden and Camilla Läckberg’s The Stranger and then upending Nigeria and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah.

Dark Heart of the Night by Léonora Miano (Cameroon) is here by beating Switzerland and Noëlle Revas’s With the Animals and then sneaking by Ecuador and Alicia Yánez Cossío’s Beyond the Islands.

The winner of this match will go up against Canada and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake next Wednesday, July 8th.

Here we go!

M. Lynx Qualey: Cameroon

Both novels have a murder at the center. But while Burial Rites feels like an ordinary Anglophone novel set in nineteenth century Iceland, with ordinary plays at character, plotting, and change, Dark Heart of the Night—although flawed—moves through its material with power, ambition, and a twinned fear and fearlessness.

Rachel Crawford: Cameroon

I chose Dark Heart of the Night over Burial Rites because of Miano’s honest portrayal of the frightening human capacity to survive. More impressively, of its sheer slap in the face to anyone who thinks they have read Heart of Darkness, one of the canonical works we have all read, and finished it thinking they had any understanding of the affects of the colonization of Africa. A worthy winner of the quarterfinals in my opinion.

Lizzy Siddal: Australia

While Cameroon fields possibly the most shocking contestant in this competition, the storytelling is subservient to the polemic. There’s too much telling, not enough showing. After the—let’s just call it, harrowing—event at the centre, the pages thereafter lost any form of narrative drive or interest for me. The dilemma at the end is the same as at the start. While this may be true to life, it’s not my kind of literature.

Australia, on the other hand, fields one of finest debuts I’ve had the pleasure of reading. A way of life is recreated making the reader experience the entire discomfort of living in nineteenth century Iceland. The dilemma of housing a convicted murderess awaiting execution in the bosom of one’s own family is portrayed convincingly. Characterization of hosts, spiritual counselors and murderess possesses a subtlety that is entirely lacking in the Cameroon entry. The ending, no surprise given that it is a historical fact, is approached with such finesse that it nevertheless left me feeling a little teary,

Hannah Chute: Australia

While both of these novels are powerful tales of death and guilt in harsh lands, Burial Rites pulls ahead through the energy of its characters.

Lori Feathers: Australia

Both novels succeed in conveying a fully realized, unusual setting and interesting moral ambiguities

But with its wonderfully executed narrative and precisely drawn characters Burial Rites compels you to devour it in great, greedy gulps and as such, out-scores Dark Heart of the Night.

Margaret Carson: Australia

Grotesque crimes figure in both Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites and Léonora Miano’s Dark Heart of the Night, but Kent’s expansive narrative field and versatile storytelling, not to mention the knock-out first-person voice of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the convicted murderess who revisits her past while awaiting execution, give Burial Rites the edge over Dark Heart.

Australia! To be honest, I wouldn’t have given Australia much of a chance going into the overall competition, but whatever, Hannah Kent is now in the semifinals, ready to meet up against Margaret Atwood!

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

This match was judged by Meytal Radzinski whose writings you can find at and on Twitter @biblibio.

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!

The game looks mismatched from the onset. Nigeria comes with star power—Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a rising star in the literary world, not only for her powerful stories but also for her blatant politics (in Americanah especially). Australia meanwhile comes with a smaller, slighter team: Hannah Kent managed to comfortably sweep her first round competition, but can this debut author really stand up to the powerful politics of Nigeria’s team?

Adichie is the first to score, quickly and bluntly. Ifemelu is such a bold character, engaging and enticing from the start. In her portions of the story (since the novel is divided into Ifemelu and Obinze sections), Adichie tackles large social issues like race, racial identity, and feminism. It’s the sort of intelligent, honest storytelling you always wish you could find, but most writers shy away from. Not Adichie, who gives a nuanced and thought-provoking subtlety to her storytelling. However Obinze’s story is far less interesting—while Adichie stumbles around the implications of his parallel story, Kent snatches the ball and scores neatly with her own sharply defined Agnes Magnusdottir. Kent makes Agnes a complex, confusing and utterly entrancing character in about half the words spent on Obinze. 1-1.

Now the dynamics of the game have shifted somewhat. Kent employs use of both present and past tense in her storytelling (a personal pet peeve), yet the interplay between the two is practically flawless. Kent’s control of the ball is instantly recognized as better, as she manages to pull off character passes Adichie totally fumbles. The adjustment from Ifemelu to Obinze and back starts to feel tiresomely pointless and clumsy. Meanwhile the character shifts (accompanied by the tense change from Agnes’ narration to anyone else’s) flow comfortably. 2-1 Australia.

Adichie reclaims the ball quickly and slams another point with her hard-hitting commentary on being black in the U.S. and more importantly, being foreign in the U.S. The cultural impact rattles the goalposts. Adichie’s brilliant writing makes the fans tremble. It’s a book for the ages. 2-2.

But as the books near their end, it’s clear that one team can play to all its strengths and the other can’t quite. Despite the overwhelming importance and political strength of Americanah (and its lasting power), it fizzles out at the end into a very different sort of novel. It lacks the stamina of the quieter Burial Rites, which plays until the very end and scores a neat goal moments before the game ends. Burial Rites is ultimately the better novel, with a more controlled narrative and a truly inspiring elevation of a character mostly lost to history. The humanity of Burial Rites makes it a powerfully emotional read, while its writing is “contained” in the very best way. Americanah is big—big ideas, big writing, big stories—but it can’t quite control all of its different threads as nicely.

Australia: 3
Nigeria: 2

Well, that was a bit of an upset. Much like Australia knocking out Brazil in the actual Women’s World Cup . . . Hmm. Maybe a conspiracy is at work for the Aussies. Anyway, Hannah Kent marches on solidly, although given the goal differentials for Germany (+7) and Canada (+4), Burial Rites will be playing in the quarterfinals. (As will Dark Heart of the Night. The final two matches—tomorrow’s and Saturday’s—will determine which two books get byes and who gets ranked where.)

Speaking of future match-ups, tomorrow features Costa Rica’s Assault on Paradise by Tatiana Lobo versus Spain’s The Happy City by Elvira Navarro. Tough one to call . . . .

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 Rachel Crawford, graduate of the University of Rochester and former Open Letter intern. You can follow her rants online at @loveyourrac.

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!

Burial Rites

Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites is overall impressive. I try to avoid reading reviews before opening a book, and approaching it with an unbiased and fresh perspective. However, the plethora of reviews from The New York Times, Washington Post, and so forth, littered on both sides of both covers were unavoidable. In fact, they actually made it seem comparable to The Stranger––“compelling,” “gripping,” and other trigger words that imply “crime novel.” In fact, the novel does revolve around a bit of a mystery and a crime. Agnes Magnusdottir, whom Hannah Kent had researched extensively, was the last person to be publicly beheaded in Iceland, and Burial Rites is her story.

There are several notable aspects to be highlighted about that last bit. First, Hannah Kent, as you know is representing Australia and yet the novel takes place in Iceland. Burial Rites offers Iceland’s rich cultural history and takes place after the Treaty of Kiel (meaning, while it was still ruled by Denmark, but not Norway and not Sweden), a historical event I hadn’t known of until experiencing the novel. Second, the eloquent and yet bleak prose that I found to be near euphonious when read aloud––the beauty Kent portrays in the rapidly wilting hope for Agnes, is gently woven into the novel, her first novel. I might add, Hannah Kent is also under the age of thirty.

Yet, while the story of Agnes really is a fascinating tale, Kent’s imaginative ability isn’t eclipsed by the true events. The composition is clever, and the novel serves as a literary collage. Not only does Kent boldly write in the first person of the convicted woman, but she also writes in the third person (giving access to the family Agnes is housed with, the Assistant-Reverend, townspeople, and the District Commissioner), accenting with poems from the infamous Poet-Rosa, translated excerpts from the Supreme Court Trials, and even quotations from “The Icelandic Burial Hymn”.

I haven’t felt the kind of forlorn hopelessness in a novel since perhaps Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk. One forgets that Hannah Kent has no authorial control over Agnes’s fate, and yet our Agnes transcends to a fictional character through Kent’s pen. This looming despair is something that one who finds a home in Russian literature would find darkly familiar in Burial Rites. In the way that a setting’s harsh elements can often become like characters in a novel, the Icelandic winters are indicative of a grief that, like the snow-covered mountains, becomes nearly monochromatic.

The research and passion Kent has put into exposing Agnes empathetically makes Burial Rites a good enough competitor. The exposition, the beauty of countless diacritics dotting the pages, and a description of landscape that Whitman might have written had he resented it, are all bonuses.

*

The Stranger

James Patterson’s blurb on the cover of Camilla Läckberg’s The Stranger is initially a foreboding and disheartening start. The opening page is where I pull out a yellow card. Applying literary merit to a thriller doesn’t have to be a near impossibility, but The Stranger offers a particularly weak narrative and excessive, over-exuberant dialogue riddled with italicizations and exclamation marks (one of the devices attempted to evoke emotion). The backstories are rushed and vague. Fragments. Absent of literary purpose.

This all seems harsh, but when I begin reading a novel, I do so with the question in mind: There are many media that can serve to tell a story––why did this person chose to tell hers with language? Picasso’s Guernica is a good story. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a good story. Similarly, how did The Sound and the Fury revolutionize language––and doesn’t the Judas of literature, James Franco, understand that it cannot be translated to film?

What I’m getting at is the question we often ask: What makes a piece literature? Who decides what is canonical?

Well, Läckberg writes:

She loved the sight of her own blood. Loved the feeling of the knife, or a razor blade or whatever the fuck else she could find within reach that would cut away the anxiety that sat so firmly anchored in her chest . . . She also discovered that this was the only time [her parents] noticed her. The blood made them turn their attention to her and really see her.

I guess the answer to the question, why language, is lost on me here.

However, all is not lost on The Stranger. In fact, the novel may very well satiate the genre reader’s fixation of a different question, often more plot-based, begging: “What happens? What’s the point?” (Questions that hold as much weight with me as, “are the characters relatable?“––very little.) In its defense, The Stranger rather serves as a quintessential introduction to world literature to the Basic Reader in your life. For old Aunt Carol (assuming she can handle a few f-bombs), who perhaps seeks the page-turner for poolside, leisurely reading, The Stranger could be her portal out of the States. Perhaps a thriller with expectedly campy quips but dotted with umlauts and beautiful Swedish names is the gateway for this sort of audience. She might then add “the thriller” to the list of things she knows about Sweden––alongside wooden clogs, death metal, and vikings.

(This is no reprieve for Sweden, however.)

Australia: 2
Sweden: 0

Next up, Australia’s Burial Rites will face off against either Toni Morrison’s Home (USA) or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (Nigeria) on Thursday, June 25th.

Tomorrow’s match will be judged by Hannah Chute, and features Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake (Canada) squaring off against Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain (Netherlands).

Since the Women’s World Cup is kicking off in Canada next week, it’s time to do this all over again. Except that this time, only living female authors are allowed to participate. (And, as much as possible, the books included were published within the last ten years.)

Before announcing the participating titles, I have to announce that we’re still looking for judges. And, unlike last year, we want at least two-thirds of the eighteen judges to be females. So, if you’re interested—as a judge you read two books, write up the result of that “match” complete with soccer-esque score, then chime in on the final—just email me at chad.post[at]rochester.edu. You’ll have to do this fast though. The competition launches next week . . .

Tomorrow (or later today) we’ll post the new graphics and bracket so that you can see the first round competitions and debate which book has the easiest path to the final four, but for now, here’s a listing of all the titles that we’re including. (These are alphabetical in order of the country each is representing.)

Australia: by Hannah Kent

Brazil: by Adriana Lisboa, translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin

Cameroon: by Léonora Miano, translated from the French by Tamsin Black

Canada: by Margaret Atwood

China: by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

Colombia: by Laura Restrepo, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

Costa Rica: by Tatiana Lobo, translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz

Cote d’Ivoire: by Veronique Tadjo, translated from the French by Amy Baram Reid

Ecuador: by Alicia Yánez Cossío, translated from the Spanish by Amalia Gladhart

England: by Kate Atkinson

France: by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Sîan Reynolds

Germany: by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr

Japan: by Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder

Mexico: by Carmen Boullosa, translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee

Netherlands: by Dubravka Ugresic, translated from the Croatian by Michael Henry Heim

New Zealand: by Eleanor Catton

Nigeria: by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Norway: by Linn Ullmann, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland

South Korea: by Bae Suah, translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell

Spain: by Elvira Navarro, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey

Sweden: by Camilla Läckberg, translated from the Swedish by Steven Murray

Switzerland: by Noëlle Revas, translated from the French by W. Donald Wilson

Thailand: by Ngarmpun (Jane) Vejjajiva, translated from the Thai by Prudence Borthwick

USA: by Toni Morrison