Well, it took less than two months to run into a book that I just gave up on: The Neighborhood by 2010 Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.

I’ve got a lot to say about why I quit on this book, and how that reflects on readerly expectations, but I think the best place to start is by articulating my own reading history with Vargas Llosa.

Back in the 1990s, when I was working in bookstores and really starting to immerse myself in international fiction, Vargas Llosa was one of the Spanish-language giants you had to read, along with García Marquez, Fuentes, Cortázar, and Borges. There are other (better) Spanish-language authors from this same period (Onetti and Cabrera Infante come to mind), but these were the authors that I felt that I had to have some familiarity with if I was going to make any sort of claim to liking—and knowing something about—Spanish-language literature, especially what was coming out of Latin America.

Insecurity has played such a large role in my reading history. When I started at Dalkey Archive, I was greatly intimidated by the literary knowledge that everyone around me possessed. Not just John O’Brien—who, at that time at least, knew more about twentieth-century writing than anyone I knew—but also Martin Riker, Curtis White, Charlie Harris, Greg Howard, etc. (And that doesn’t even include David Foster Wallace, who was maybe the most intimidating/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/) The way they talked about the greats of the past century, from Céline to Gaddis to Gass to Queneau to Sorrentino to Ishmael Reed to Flann O’Brien to the wealth of undiscovered gems in the Dalkey Archive catalog (Stanley Elkin! Stanley Crawford! Nicholas Mosley! William Eastlake! Arno Schmidt!) really put into perspective how little I had actually read. I spent every spare moment of my first few years there catching up on the things I had missed. Granted, I had read a lot (someday I’ll write about the insane self-directed reading program I put myself through in preparation for the GRE English subject test), but not nearly as much as everyone else. This is how my personal canon was formed.

Before the Dalkey times though, I had read a couple Vargas Llosa books. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta was probably the first (and a good contrast with Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight) followed by Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, of which I remember nothing, and The War of the End of the World, which, assuming it still stands up, is one of those complete Latin American novels that’s political, harrowing, and all-encompassing.

Aside from personal insecurities, the other major motivating factor behind my reading choices was a desire to champion the more obscure greats. To find that incredible, transcendent book that wasn’t in every Norton anthology, that wasn’t being taught, that was rarely on display at the bookstore.

This has not changed at all.

Which is why, at that time, I respected Vargas Llosa more than I liked him. Too conventional. Too accepted. Not fringe enough. But then, at Dalkey Archive, John had me read The Green House and Conversations in a Cathedral and my opinion of Vargas Llosa skyrocketed.

These are both early books of his. (For those who don’t know, The Neighborhood is his nineteenth work of fiction to be translated into English.) And they’re fantastic. Conversations in a Cathedral is probably Vargas Llosa’s most experimental book that has a really intricate structure and requires a certain amount of attention and struggle for the reader to get into it. Exactly the sort of book I loved at that time! Too bad HarperCollins reissued these instead of letting us do them . . .

That said, I did have some conflicting expectations going into this book. First off, I expected it to be dense and intelligent, with labyrinthine sentences—like his books of old. For example, here’s a paragraph from part IV of The War of the End of the World (translated by Helen Lane):

When a servant informed him who was asking for him, the Baron de Canabrava, rather than sending him back, as was his habit, to tell the person who had appeared on the doorstep that he neither made nor received unannounced visits, rushed downstairs, walked through the spacious rooms that the morning sun was flooding with light, and went to the front door to see if he had heard correctly: it was indeed he, no mistake about it. He shook hands with him without a word and showed him in. There leapt to his mind instantly what he had been trying his best to forget for months: the fire at Calumbi, Canudos, Estela’s crisis, his withdrawal from public life.

The opening paragraph of The Green House is thirteen pages long, so I’ll just quote the first few sentences in Gregory Rabassa’s translation:

The Sergeant takes a look at Sister Patrocinio and the botfly is still there. The launch is pitching on the muddy waters, between two walls of trees that give off a burning, sticky mist. Huddled under the canopy, stripped to the waist, the soldiers are asleep, with the greenish, yellowish noonday sun above: Shorty’s head is lying on Fats’s stomach, Blondy is breathing in short bursts, Blacky has his mouth open and is grunting. A thick shadow of gnats is escorting the launch, and butterflies, wasps, horseflies take shape among the bodies.

Neither of these are “blow your top off” sort of quotes, but they’re both good for setting the scene while retaining a certain distance that compels the reader to try and figure out what’s happening. These are sentences written by a professional writer. A writer who knows what he’s doing. I expected that from The Neighborhood.

At the same time, I didn’t expect The Neighborhood to be anywhere near as great as these early books. My expectation is that Vargas Llosa is past his prime.

There’s no logical reason why an author’s twentieth book can’t be his best. But it rarely works that way.

(AuthorTalent(TAL) x CraftAwareness(CA)) / PublishedWorks(PW) = CurrentAbility(ABL)

This is a callback. But one that fits, even if that equation is garbage. Basically, authors have a certain amount of inherent skill. And as they learn their craft, they hone this skill more and more. But the more books they write, the less fresh the ideas and the inherentness really seem. The more books they publish, the more craft takes the place of pure talent, and the less interesting the books become. See: John Updike. See: Philip Roth. See: Joyce Carol Oates.

So I expected something really smart, written in a way that was as engrossing as it was challenging, but nothing that would rewrite my general assessment of what Vargas Llosa was.

And maybe that’s exactly what this book is. And maybe this weekend it will get a glowing review in the New York Times or win the National Book Award in Translation and I’ll feel compelled to pick this up again sometime and give it another chance. But for now, I’m done.

Granted, this makes more sense if you’re the type of reader who reads the type of books that are more about style than plot (how many people set aside a detective novel mid-mystery because they have a good enough sense of what the author is up to/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/), but still, it’s an intriguing—and liberating—idea. It’s probably a good approach for reading Knausgaard! You don’t need to know the ending to know what makes his writing particular.

For me, fifty pages of The Neighborhood was enough to feel like I get the style and structure, and that I just don’t care. Yes, I know this is slightly different from what Parks is talking about, but it’s not like I hated this book—it just doesn’t have anything more to offer me at this time.

1) It opens with a lesbian love scene that feels like someone who’s read about lesbians and thought it would be trendy to include something like this in their novel. It’s like reading a book by an old man (Tom Wolfe/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/) about teenagers (I Am Charlotte Simmons/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/) in which nothing sounds quite authentic.

I abide by the idea that writers should feel free to write about whoever and whatever they want, but the workmanlike prose in The Neighborhood mixed with the strange prudishness of all the characters drags this particular storyline into a realm of unbelievability. This is a novel in which all the parts of novel-making are laid bare. You can see it all being constructed, which definitely doesn’t help.

2) Fuck this dialogue. Sorry, I’m done pretending that I can sound smart. The real reason I just quit was because of paragraphs like this:

“Everything in this life has a solution, Quique, except death.” He encouraged him: “Go on, tell me all about it, as Luciana, my younger daughter, says.”

What the fuck is that/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Not only is “tell me all about it” not a phrase marked by youth or hipness, but why is one friend reminding the other of his younger daughter’s name. This is unnatural and dumb.

On the other side of things, this is probably my favorite bit:

“I finished the article, boss. One-Eye will shit fire.”

3) This “one-eye” thing bugged me so much though. It comes up in a chapter in which a muckraking journalist is trying to get dirt on a stage actress who shit on his paper on a nightly talk show. Here’s more crappy dialogue from when he’s berating a photographer he hired to get really unflattering pictures of her:

“It isn’t a question of giving her publicity of raising the one-eyed cow’s fees. It’s a question of sinking and defeating her, of discrediting her forever. It’s a question of their throwing her out of the show because she’s ugly and old and can’t move her ass. These pictures are going to illustrate an article where we say that the one-eyed cow is turning the show at the Monumental into a hodge-podge that nobody can stand.”

Admittedly, I’m totally going to incorporate “hodge-podge” into my active vocabulary/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ “Riverdale is such a hodge-podge!” (Damn it. That’s actually a good way of describing that show. WHICH IS AWESOME.)
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4) I had enough of the plot. A seedy reporter has pictures of a powerful CEO getting nasty at an orgy and wants to take him down. The CEO’s wife starts a secret affair with his best-friend’s wife. There is a guy they all know who has been kidnapped who they mention with near disinterest a few times. The reporter driving the plot is motivated by vengeance. Cool. I don’t know how this all develops or is resolved, but I’m good.

It’s just not the right book at the right time for me—possibly because of my expectations. I expected something different from Vargas Llosa. And I’d rather not have this book bitch up my personal feelings about his writing.

I know this is by far the most restrained and serious of these posts to date, and as tempting as it is to swerve back to the funny, I want to say two more serious things about expectations.

For anyone who knows anything about behavioral economics, they know how powerful they can be. If you have a certain expectation, you can overwrite what you actually experience so that it fits your pre-existing schema. You can come to believe in insane things based on small samples that happened recently. You can dispense with contradictory knowledge that would enhance your understanding of the world and its nuances simply because it doesn’t fit what you already know you know is what you know is right.

In the class I teach on world literature and translation, this came up in regard to Filip Springer’s History of a Disappearance (trans. by Sean Bye), a work of Polish reportage about a city in Western Poland that has a crazy history and that essentially collapsed in on itself and is now completely gone. It’s an interesting book that juxtaposes factual history with people’s warped recollections and pieces together a fairly depressing history of a place.

My students didn’t know what to make of this book at all. They had expected it to be a “novel,” which, in their world means a book with a main set of characters and a primary plot that’s developed from page one till the end. A book in which there isn’t a protagonist to follow was a bit baffling to them. They had no idea what to make of this book and it ruptured their idea of what a book could be in a few ways—the main one being that they simply didn’t like this because it didn’t fit their expectations.

This is my insecurity about the future of reading: That the way in which the market ends up taking popular books and making them MEGAPOPULAR (Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, to a lesser extent the Knausgaard and Ferrante phenomenons, whatever garbage BookMarks is tracking) will create a set of literary expectations in readers that will train them to look for a very small range of things to define a “good” book. This sort of blindered view of literature has always existed, but right now, thanks to our late-capitalist moment and the nature of aggregating websites online, there’s a crazy velocity to books that make it. It’s not like there are even twenty really popular books at any point in time nowadays—there are about seven. And these dominate all conversations, all the top spots on BookMarks as the “most reviewed” titles. They’re on every bookstore front table—B&N and indie—and promoted through every extant algorithm. If these books—which are usually pretty fine, if not using very predictable tropes with slight deviations, basically the NPR of fiction—are responsible for wiring readers’ expectations, there will be little space for the odd, the defiant.

I have a lot to say about expectations in relation to the Audible Original podcast/audiobook about the still-unsolved murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier.

Firstly, I know this will come as a shock to some, but Serial wasn’t the first podcast ever produced. That said, it would be ignorant to claim that it didn’t have a huge impact on the nature of podcasting. What used to be an audiospace for smart people to say smart things to each other about various topics turned commercial¹ and over-produced. And one that was based in a particular style of narrative.

The Serial model—a long-running story filled with reversals, shocking revelations, cliffhangers—spawned a million deviations. Suddenly, this was the way in which podcasts should exist.² This was all the rage. (For season one at least. You can’t go home again, can you Carol Sarah/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/)

And then there was Finding Richard Simmons and Shittown and maybe few other things whiskey is preventing me from remembering right now. My basic point though: These all work in a particular way. One hour. Cliffhangers to make the next episode seem like there’s going to be a big revelation. Ambiguity all the way down. It feels really comfortable to listen to these podcasts. They meet all expectations.

West Cork plays this game, but not exactly. There are revelations (for us who don’t pay attention to Irish news), a core mystery, reversals that mostly exist thanks to editing³, and ambiguity. But most episodes are 35 minutes. Most episodes don’t have a cliffhanger. Most episodes aren’t that revelatory. It’s a character piece that doesn’t quite one-up what came before. And can you really be bingeable in 2018⁴ if you’re not one step more HOLY SHIT than the last podcast/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/

I want to break this series down in more detail, but I highly doubt anyone reading this has actually heard it yet. It’s good! It’s not great! The horse did it! But my point: Do we have a market that can support a quiet version of Serial/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Or do we live in the arms race period of podcasting in which a murder has to be THE CRAZIEST MURDER WITH THE BEST CHARACTERS EVER to deserve a listen/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ What do we want/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ What are our expectations/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ And what does that mean about new start-up companies trying to make podcasts/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Past performance influences future innovation and yet . . . What’s new and interesting and not designed to tickle the expectations crafted by NPR + Blue Apron + Square Space/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/

¹ Where would Blue Apron be without podcasts/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ And podcasts without Blue Apron/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Can you imagine who would be fucking nuts enough to sponsor the Three Percent Podcast/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Is there a corporation trafficking in cynicism and middle-age/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Who like swearing and other unpopular things/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ To be honest, I would shill for anyone—including Blue Apron, which, really/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ This needs to exist/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ I hate 2018. (I feel better now that I got one joke into this post.)

² Sorry, now I just can’t stop. You should check out a podcast from the local Rochester paper about an unsolved murder from 1979. It’s pretty horrible! Not only is the title an absolute lie—they found Tammy Jo’s body, they just didn’t know who she was, so what is “finding” anyway—but the production is such an aping of Serial that its identity is subsumed behind an attempt to take a popular format and shoehorn an uninteresting story into it. Also: one episode is just 2 minutes of piano.

³ Someday I’ll write about the relationship between This American Life, MFA programs, and PKD’s Valis in relation to the idea of what you believe as truth and why.

⁴ I literally punched myself for typing “bingeable” in a non-ironic way. I may have to stop soon. My fat belly can not absorb my own drunken fist.

In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

In the Night of Time is a huge book. Six-hundred and forty-one pages of very mannered, wandering prose depicting the general chaos of the Spanish Civil War, and the personal chaos that architect Ignacio Abel undergoes during the war’s buildup. It’s more of an emotional book than a political one, with most of the “action” revolving around Ignacio’s love affair with a young American, and the harm this causes to his wife and family.

That’s all fine, but reason number one that I think this book should win the BTBA is for the way in which it depicts the terrifying ambiguity of the start of a war. Throughout the first 400+ pages of the novel, war is always on the horizon. Franco’s Fascists are nearby, moving toward Madrid, gathering support from the general populous fed up with the Republican Party. Molina’s presentation of the way in which the newspapers are completely unreliable at this time—several characters point out how the advances and retreats never quite add up—and that most people don’t think anything will come of the revolutionary uprisings around the country, is kind of terrifying. And then everyone starts carrying guns, “just in case” . . .

The sense of loss portrayed at the end of the book, once Ignacio is in America, working at a small liberal college and war has officially broken out, is incredibly powerful and saddening. I’ve always been interested in the Spanish Civil War and its craziness, and this novel reinforced my desire to learn more about the various nuances of the conflict.

But sticking with this novel, and why it should win, there are two more things that I want to point out. First, the prose itself. As I read this, I was frequently reminded of Javier Marias. Going back to an adjective from above, Molina’s writing is very “mannered.” Which is true of Marias as well. But where Marias tends to circle around and around a particular thought or action, Molina has a bit more forward motion.

He didn’t pretend. It was easy for him to talk to Adela and his children and not feel the sting of imposture or betrayal. What happened in his secret life didn’t interfere with this one but transferred to it some of its sunlit plenitude. And he didn’t care too much about the ominous prospect of immersion in the celebrations of his in-laws, usually as suffocating for him as the air in the places where the lived, heavy with dust from draperies, rugs, faux heraldic tapestries, smells of fried food and garlic, ecclesiastical colognes, liniments for the pains of rheumatism, sweaty scapulars. A sharp awareness of the other, invisible world to which he could return soon made more tolerable the painstaking ugliness of the one where he now found himself and where, in spit of the passage of years, he’d never stopped being a stranger, an intruder.

Also, this is translated by Edith Grossman, one of the most important translators ever. Her contributions to world literature—both in terms of her translations, like her Don Quixote from a few years back, and in terms of her own writing, like Why Translation Matters—deserve to win all of the awards.

Finally, from a reader enjoyment perspective, I finished this book in just over a week. Every chapter—each of which almost stand alone and little set-pieces advancing a couple parts of the overall story in a way that defies traditional, linear storytelling—was compelling and brought me right back into the world of this haunted man, on the run from the self-destruction of his homeland, where his betrayed wife and abandoned children are maybe still alive, and kept me reading. This is a shit argument, I know, but the fact that Molina’s writing has the power to keep me reading is some sort of internal proof that this is a damn good book—one deserving of the BTBA.

Tiffany, who is relatively new to the Three Percent contributors’ club, is an avid reader of literature in translation and runs the mouthwatering food porn and book-geeking Tumblr blog tiffany ist.

Here’s a bit from Tiffany’s review:

When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I could have not been more wrong. Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories makes no direct mention of religion or evil, instead consisting of four dark short stories, each focusing on isolation and detachment. What draws the reader to the characters of this work is that each of us has analyzed such a withdrawn individual in ourselves, or in another, with gross curiosity and misunderstanding.

The first story, “Hi This Is Conchita,” is a collection of telephone conversations, unrelated at first, but which over time magically and seamlessly come together to reveal a social network of underlying love, deceit, and irony among the callers. The conversations are stripped of all literary fluff, leaving only the dialog exchanged on the line. One conversation involves an obsessive-compulsive phone sex customer who cannot reach climax due to his concern of the placement of a green filing cabinet in the office in which he secretly makes the calls. Another conversation concerns an ex-boyfriend who obsessively counts the most mundane things about his past relationship on his ex-girlfriend’s answering machine, trying to attribute these tallies to meaning in their failed relationship. The third conversation concerns a customer who uses a customer service line as his only daily form of human contact. The last focuses on a hit man who falls in love with his target, only to find that he has misidentified the target after it is too late.

The first story, “Hi This Is Conchita,” is a collection of telephone conversations, unrelated at first, but which over time magically and seamlessly come together to reveal a social network of underlying love, deceit, and irony among the callers. The conversations are stripped of all literary fluff, leaving only the dialog exchanged on the line. One conversation involves an obsessive-compulsive phone sex customer who cannot reach climax due to his concern of the placement of a green filing cabinet in the office in which he secretly makes the calls. Another conversation concerns an ex-boyfriend who obsessively counts the most mundane things about his past relationship on his ex-girlfriend’s answering machine, trying to attribute these tallies to meaning in their failed relationship. The third conversation concerns a customer who uses a customer service line as his only daily form of human contact. The last focuses on a hit man who falls in love with his target, only to find that he has misidentified the target after it is too late.

“Despoiler,” the second story in the collection, is an intriguing and atypical example of fabulism where Carmen, an isolated women crossing the right of passage of turning forty, is reacquainted with the beloved stuffed animals of her childhood in human form during Carnival. Of course, these animals appear to be adults in costume, but as we all learned at a young age—looks, especially when masks are involved, can be deceiving.

The third and probably most disturbing story, “Butterflies Fastened With Pins,” is a compendium of individuals who have committed suicide and whom the narrator has encountered. What is most troubling about the recollection of the suicides is how detached the narrator is from the victims, but how vividly he is able to describe everyone else’s personal reactions to the suicides and their aftermath. The narrator always remains detached, calculated, and controlled in descriptions of the facts surrounding the suicides, but provides an almost poetic account of how the other observers succumb to grief, misunderstanding of death, and inability to cope with the suicides.

The collection closes with “The Passenger Beside You.” Although “Butterflies” was the most disturbing, “Passenger” is by far the most eerie in the collection. In this account, Roncagliolo explores a corpse’s last moment of intimacy during a final examination by a medical examiner mechanically performing his job function. What is most unnatural about the account is how closely the reader will experience these last moments of intimacy from the perspective of the corpse. The corpse narrator vividly describes the methodical carefulness of the medical examiner’s touch, starting from the outside surface of the body and moving to his calculated exploration inside the corpse’s body. The progression will cause you to shudder, but will also leave you almost invigorated and intrigued by the intimate connection between the corpse and her detached examiner.

Roncagliolo is an incredibly gifted storyteller who is able to execute many writing styles, as evidenced in the shock thriller Red April and the delicate and sensual exploration of the relationships between the connected and detached in Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stores. In each of these works, Roncagliolo reminds us that, although we are isolated by default, we are all connected to each other in some way. For this reason, in addition to Roncagliolo’s partnership with the translator, Edith Grossman, I urge everyone to actively follow the presence of Roncagliolo’s work in the English (and Spanish) language.

Let’s start with an interesting part about Grossman’s recent translation of Don Quixote:

Grossman fell in love with Spanish as a teenager, thanks to a Spanish teacher “who was very good.” She read Don Quixote for for the first time in Philadelphia, where she grew up, in Samuel Putnam’s classic 1949 translation.

The half-century gap between Putnam’s version and hers can be seen from the very first sentence of the book. Putnam translates the legendary beginning of Cervantes (“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme”) as: “In a village of La Mancha the name of which I have no desire to recall.” It’s an accurate translation, but somewhat clumsy, and that feels a bit dated. Grossman, less forced to follow the literality of the sentence and with an ear more attuned to capture Cervantes’ intention, writes: “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember”.

This “I do not care,” disdainful and conversational, reflects much better the mocking spirit of Don Quixote’s narrator, who from the first sentence introduces himself as an unreliable guy.

Is all these subtlety worthwhile/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ For Grossman, there is no doubt. “The importance of translation is self-evident,” she writes in her book. Maybe that’s why she feels bad about her battered professional colleagues, “poorly paid and with no job security.” She describes most of them as people “who do not look for fame or fortune but do their work out of love for literature.“

She sure is direct . . . and honest. Which can result in some rather discouraging statements, such as this:

In her book, Grossman mentions the well-known fact that only three percent of the books published in the United States, Great Britain and Australia are translations, while in Europe and Latin America this percentage number fluctuates between 25% and 40%. “We English-speakers are not interested in translations,” says Grossman. (An interviewer infected with translators’ jargon would have commented that Grossman said this “with a sigh”, or “shaking her head.“) “I don’t believe that this will change soon, since almost all publishers are part of large corporations and make their decisions under enormous pressure to be profitable.”

I mention then that a few small and medium US publishers have recently published translations of books by César Aria, Alejandro Zambra and Juan José Saer. “I love these publishers, and they have good people working there,” she says. “But they are too small, they have a lot of trouble getting adequate distribution and good publicity or reviews in the media.”

Well, OK. I was going to complain here about how difficult it is getting books into bookstores where the buyers won’t even take a call because “that sort of stuff doesn’t sell here on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.” (Or in Nebraska, the Mountain & Plains states, or wherever.) And I was going to point out that Juan Jose Saer’s Sixty-Five Years of Washington sold out its first print run and was reviewed in the New York Times and The Nation among other places. But whatever. She’s right.¹ Even at our best, the lousiest piece from crap from Corporate Publisher X will get more penetration into the marketplace, which is the slow sick sucking part of the business, and I’m not sure it will ever really change.

Obviously, Internet retailers have leveled the field a bit—all of our books are just as available through Amazon as anyone else’s—but in that case, when a reader is faced with an overwhelming number of choices (approx. 3 million new ones each year, including tons and tons of $.99 entertainments), it’s tricky for an unknown author from Peru to make it through. Ideally, when everything’s available, people would try new things and find some niche tastes, but in reality, we search for what we already know we want to find, and bust the Bieber while reading Twilight. But that’s a subject for another post and/or book . . .

Anyway, Edie definitely calls it like she sees it, and although I have to be more optimistic than she is (otherwise, this whole thing—getting up in the morning, working at a small press, writing this blog—seems pretty damn bleak), it’s true that our impact is at least partially handcuffed by economic realities.

All that said, I’ve been reading the new Saer book, Scars, and am BLOWN AWAY. Everyone needs to buy this—it’s absolutely incredible and the most compelling book I’ve read in a while. Not to overstate the point, but it reminds me why reading matters.

¹ At least about Open Letter. I think the presses distributed by Norton—Dalkey Archive and New Directions—and the ones distributed by Random House and Penguin—Europa Editions, NYRB, Melville House—do get into almost all the locations they need to.

Bill Martin and Sal Robinson are both involved in this, which guarantees (to me and everyone who knows them) that the series will be of the highest quality.

The first event is at McNally Jackson at 7pm, and features Edith Grossman (Why Translation Matters, translator of Don Quixote and dozens of other books) and Steve Dolph (translator of The Sixty-Five Years of Washington).

Click for all the details. And we’ll give better advance warning on all the future events . . . .

Grossman says she had a lot of fear when she began translating Don Quixote. She spent two weeks on the first sentence alone, because she felt everything else would fall into place if she could only do justice to Cervantes’ opening line.

The key to unlocking what the author intended, says Grossman, can always be found in the text itself.

“The text brings you in,” she explains. “I think one of the things that happens when you read carefully is that you feel as if you are looking at the world through the eyes of someone else.”

Not sure that I completely agree with this, mainly because I don’t believe in “definitive” anything, but it is interesting:

After finishing her first draft, Davis takes a look at the work of other translators, and develops a kind of partnership with them as well. “I would begin to feel that we were a group sitting in the room together wrestling with the same problems,” she says.

Davis says reading many variations on a single phrase gives her an even better understanding of how complex the process of translation is.

“I sense how hard we’ve all worked,” she says. “It’s not easy. Even a not-so-good translation is not easy to produce. Somehow, I think we maybe should have been all together . . . doing it together, and somehow achieved the final definitive translation.”

OK, now on to the fun part . . .

Not to get all up in NPR’s grill, because, yes, any article on translation is better than no article on translation, but I have a few issues with this piece:

1) The Title. “When Done Right, Little Gets Lost in Translation” implies, to me, that the majority of translations are somehow flawed, and by extension, only the few, perfect ones, which only “lose a little” of the original are worth reading. I call bullshit on this. First off, I’d love for Lynn Neary to write out some specific examples of what was “lost” in a particular translation. Yes, I know this is a cliche made all the more popular by Bill Murray Scarlett Johansson, and I know she probably didn’t really mean to imply anything by this, but still. (How about nixing “lost in translation” from all article titles for all of 2011/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ That’s a resolution I can get behind.) As Michael Emmerich has pointed out, any translation is basically pure gain, since you go from not having anything, to being able to read, enjoy, discuss, dislike, argue about, a work that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

2) Neverending coverage of the classics. It’s great that people are talking about Don Quixote and Flaubert, but I’m personally totally over these pieces on retranslations of the classics. Just reinforces my prejudiced belief that the mainstream media only really wants to write about translations that they’ve read in previous versions. Which is sweet. But doesn’t necessarily encourage the growth of a culture that appreciates literary translation of contemporary authors. And because I’m irrational like this, I blame Oprah for choosing P&V’s retranslation of Anna Karenina for kickstarting this bias.

Up today: Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo, whose new short story “Stars and Stripes” is included in this issue.

Last year, in the run-up to announcing the longlist for the Best Translation Book Award for Fiction, there was a bit of chatter about Santiago Roncagliolo’s Red April. This “chilling political thriller set at the end of Peru’s grim war between Shining Path terrorists and a morally bankrupt government counterinsurgency,” which was translated by Edith Grossman, centers around Associate District Prosecutor Felix Chacaltana Saldivar and his investigation of a gruesome, bizarre murder. It’s a very intriguing novel, one that having this to say:

Red April is an intriguing if somewhat messy thriller, with no easy answers and culpability (of different sorts) all around. Chacaltana is, for the most part, an appealingly clueless figure in this world gone bad, though his own transformation seems a bit much by the end; his relationship with Edith also strains some credulity. Nevertheless, it’s a solid portrait of a place steeped almost hopelessly in the completely corrupted, with little sense of hope for change or a better future.

A somewhat uneasy mix of political and crime thriller, Roncagliolo does paint some very vivid and powerful scenes—but it is of a dark and desolate world.

Fellow BTBA judge, Monica Carter, also and had this to say:

There are many disturbing things about this novel—the violence, the corruption and the religious overtones—which can all easily be filed under ‘amoral’ in the literary tricks rolodex of the thriller genre. But what makes this novel a little messier, a little more uncertain, is the narrator. Chalcatana is not necessarily unreliable, but for a reader, it’s difficult to overlook his peculiarities. It’s difficult to believe him. Chalcatana moves back into this childhood home where he lives alone except for the overwhelming eerie presence of his deceased mother. He keeps her room exactly the same, lays her clothes out as if she were still alive, talks to her pictures and even goes as far as behaving as if she were still alive by keeping appointments with her. Strange, yes. Criminal, no. Disturbing/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Slightly . . .

Roncagliolo’s other books seem to fit a similar interest in crime, violence, terrorism. According to the Granta bio, Roncagliolo’s non-fiction novel La curata espada “delves into the mind of the most dangerous terrorist in the history of the Americas, Abimael Guzman of Sendero Luminoso.” His book Memorias de una dama is about the origins of the Mafia in Cuba and “its publication is prohibited throughout the entire world.” (Again, Roncagliolo is only 35 and already has a book banned everywhere. I’ve been wasting my life . . .) Expanding on the Mafia & terrorism theme, his latest novel, Tan cerca de la vida, is about Tokyo’s sex market.

“Stars and Stripes,” also translated by the amazing Edie Grossman, contains a few connection to underworld dealings, but these moments are reflected through the more innocent character of Carlitos. This excerpt encapsulates the seediness underlying the story, along with the sweet sort of awkward and hints of nostalgia that color “Stars and Stripes”:

bq Though Carlitos wasn’t to blame for anything, I was furious with him. Simply put, his company reminded me of my failure with Mily. I stopped seeing him. I didn’t want him to interfere with my difficult progress towards a first kiss. Apparently this served only to make Carlitos want to see me more than ever. He rang my bell six days in a row. He asked my parents about me. He telephoned me at midnight. I never responded. It wouldn’t take me long to regret that. Mily’s kiss never came, but at the end of the summer, I learned from other neighbours about the tragedy that had struck Carlitos’s family while I was ignoring him.

That year his parents had sent his older brother to study in the United States. Manuel – that was his brother’s name – had begun to travel back and forth very frequently, too frequently, but no one thought it strange. After all, Carlitos’s father had been promoted to the rank of admiral. His house was filled with armed bodyguards, and in all probability he earned a great deal of money. Sending the boy back and forth wouldn’t represent a huge expenditure for him.

What did surprise everyone was that the police arrested Manuel at the airport, when he was about to leave on one of his trips. This time Manuel had spent barely forty-eight hours in Lima, going out to discotheques at night and sleeping during the day. His family hardly saw him, and even though they were beginning to suspect what was going on, nobody felt like asking questions. They were probably confident an admiral’s son would not be arrested.

At first, no one believed that Manuel’s detention would last too long. It had to be a mistake. Or the admiral would make certain it was a mistake. But it seems Manuel was carrying too much cocaine for the matter to be ignored, or even for him to be given a light sentence. And apparently his father didn’t tolerate that kind of behaviour in his family. He used all his connections to get him a decent cell in a maximum-security prison, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t do more.

Another boy in the neighbourhood told me all this, and when I heard about it, I felt guilty for having ignored Carlitos’s phone calls. I went to see him right away. His mother received me with a sombre expression that I didn’t want to interpret as a reproach for my absence. His father didn’t even know who I was.

I found Carlitos with his GI Joes, which were beginning to seem anachronistic in a boy his age, and his American footballs, which he never used because nobody knew how to play the game. I didn’t know what to say and sat down on his bed. He didn’t say anything either. His room smelled strange, but it always smelled strange.

After a time spent in silence, the clock struck five, the time when Mily walked her dog, and it occurred to me that I could do something to make up for my bad behaviour. I took him to the park and tried to organize some lively talk between the three of us. When I thought everything was off to a good start, I pretended I had to go to the dentist and left them alone. I never found out more, and Carlitos never talked about it.

Some six or seven years later, I ran into Mily at a discotheque. We danced, laughed and recalled the old days. In the end we spent the night together. It was fun, and a little nostalgic. Before I fell asleep, I remembered the episode in the park and asked: ‘Listen, do you remember the afternoon when I left you with Carlitos/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Did you do anything/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Even just a kiss/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I tried, that afternoon and many other afternoons, but he only wanted to show me his baseball cards.’

Not nearly as gruesome and disturbed as Red April . . . Hopefully more of Roncagliolo will make its way into English. (Especially that banned book . . . What’s freedom of speech good for if we can’t read books whose publication is prohibited “throughout the entire world”/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Just that line along would help sell ten thousand copies . . . And add in Cuba . . . This has the makings of a best-seller.)

And don’t forget, Granta has a special offer for all readers of Three Percent: if you you’ll receive this special issue featuring the “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” for free.

Tomorrow: An interview with Federico Falco.

Most often they deserve it for many of the same reasons that we like to make fun of book ads. I’m totally ripping off Richard Nash here, but if every company advertised its products the way book publishers do—a picture of the product with three quotes saying how great it is—capitalism would’ve crumbled long ago.

And just look at All the “You Might Also Like . . .” crap is annoying at best, especially since it’s followed at the bottom by “New Books Similar to This One.” And where’s the info about the book (ISBN, price, page count)/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Near the bottom of the listing in all italics. You’d never know it, but if you click on the image of the book cover, you get to read an excerpt! And what’s up with all the ads and “Hot@Harper” shit/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ My six-year-old daughter has better aesthetic sense than the people who designed this.

BUT, occasionally a corporate press gets it right. Like with FSG’s monthly newsletter/website. (Granted, this is apples to oranges in comparing to Harper’s trainwreck, but I’m willing to bet Harper’s monthly promo emails are as aesthetically confused.) Not only is this site elegant, it looks like something you’d want to read, and the marketing aspects of it are subdued and enhanced with interesting content. Such as between Marion Duvert and Richard Howard on Roland Barthes (Barthes/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ Can’t imagine another “big” publisher referencing him—AND Samuel Beckett—in their monthly promo-newsletter):

So he called me just to say hello, and say that he would like to come to New York, and could I show him around a little bit because he had never been here.

I said certainly, and that I looked forward to it very much. He arrived. He had the first copy of, I think, Mythologies in print. The first day was very proper and careful. But we got along very well. It was apparent that he had made the right choice, and that we were going to be friends. I suppose that means I met the man first. But he came carrying a book, and I think he knew that I was a translator; and he wanted me to see it. I did translate right away three or four of those pieces that were published in various periodicals here. That was the beginning.

I don’t think he ever again read any of my translations [of him]. I don’t think he had any . . . it isn’t that he didn’t have interest. He would say that he didn’t know English well enough to have it make any difference; it was just his satisfaction that they were in English. At the beginning I think there was some interest in that fact, but I never heard from him again on that subject.

I would ask him questions. I remember calling him up once and saying that he had referred to somebody inadequately or incorrectly, as I just knew. Did he want me to silently correct the mistake/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/ He said, “Oh, of course. Do whatever you want. I have no idea.” And then there was some question of some king or even Egyptian pharaoh, and he said, “Well, make it up. Make it up. I don’t remember the case myself. If it’s not correct in the French text, just make up something.” He had decided that I was trustworthy, and he could rely on me to take care of such things, and there was no further discussion about it. He was not an anxious author about his translations.

This month’s issue also includes with Edith Grossman and Natasha Wimmer on Mario Vargas Llosa, both of which are pretty interesting:

Chapman: You’ve translated a number of García Márquez’s novels—another Latin American Nobel laureate—who is lionized as much for his influence as for his writing. Do you also see the Vargas Llosa imprimatur in younger writers/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/

Grossman: I can’t really answer that question except in the broadest terms. Vargas Llosa’s influence may lie in the intertwining of the personal and the political. García Márquez’s influence is more stylistic, I think: the intertwining of fantasy and reality, perhaps. They both owe a great debt to William Faulkner and, most of all, to Miguel de Cervantes. On the other hand, the impact of the Latin American Boom on young writers everywhere was enormous, and I don’t think Toni Morrison or Salman Rushdie, for example, would write the same way without that older generation of Latin American writers.

Chapman: Speaking of the next generation, what was your reaction to Granta‘s “Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists” list/College/translation/threepercent/tag/edith-grossman/feed/

Grossman: I was very happy that Granta devoted an issue to young Spanish-language writers. In fact, I translated one of the stories, by a Peruvian, Santiago Roncagliolo. He’s a wonderful writer—I did a novel of his, Red April, a couple of years ago.

Kudos to you, FSG, for figuring out this interwebs thing and how 21st-century digital marketing can work. If you’re interested, you can