Jeffrey Zuckerman is an editor at Music & Literature and a translator from French, most recently of Jean Genet’s The Criminal Child (NYRB, 2020). A finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and a recipient of the French Voices Award Grand Prize, he is currently at work on Lutz Bassmann’s Black Village (Open Letter, 2021).

by Jean-Baptiste del Amo, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (Grove Press)

It’s the words that stand out first: guttering, hobnailed, eclose. Genetrix. Words unearthed from the archeological depths of our own language, some still evincing the crude rawness of their Anglo-Saxon origins, and others bearing the more finely wrought curlicues ported over by William the Conqueror and his Norman men from the Latin realm. Time, these words tell us, is a stubborn thing: the past is not easily washed away by the present; the long branches of past centuries can still jut unexpectedly into our own. The book’s very title underscores this: in French, Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s Rùgne animal simply means “animal kingdom”—in contrast to those of plants, fungi, protists, and monera. Not for many decades has anyone, in common parlance, used the original, deeply Latinate word, and yet no other word could fit so perfectly as the title Frank Wynne has chosen for his translation: Animalia.

Some authors use their vocabulary as a currency of sorts, a way of boasting that they have certain resources at hand, but what is remarkable about Animalia is how these words are there out of sheer necessity. I first read the book, in French, in 2017, and these same words leapt out to me: toussotant, łŠ±ôŽÇłÜłÙĂ©, Ă©łŠ±ôŽÇČő±đČÔłÙ, ȔéČÔĂ©łÙ°ùŸ±łŠ±đ. Literally: coughing, nailed, hatching, and the female counterpart to genitor or sire. In looking at the choices that Frank Wynne made, I am reminded of what he told me about how he grew up: in County Sligo, along the northwestern coast of Ireland, where his mother, a weathered and widowed matriarch now in her nineties, still tells him not to bother bringing in the coal during his visits because she can do it herself. And because of this life, he has a wealth of experience with which to fit these French descriptions to English phrasing: candles do not cough; they sputter, or are guttering. If benches have visible nails, they’re not nailed; they’re hobnailed. Insects can technically hatch, but eclose is more exact. Genetrix, though—why would such a word be deployed, whether in French or in English? Maybe because it strips away all the warm connotations of motherhood, maternity, and caring from the fundamental role that women once played and, in many places, still play: breeding, genesis, propagation.

Which brings us to what Animalia is actually about: the members of that strange kingdom, from insects to birds to mammals, including swine and humans alike. It is so vivid and coarse and unrelenting in its detail that one can hardly be surprised to learn that Jean-Baptiste is a member of . The wealth of attention that he bestows upon the natural world and the surroundings of the family whose trajectory he will follow over four generations and almost the entirety of the twentieth century is just as adroitly deployed on those bipedals peopling his text:

The pain gives Marcel only rare moments of respite. At best it fades to a dull ache that quietly throbs to the rhythm of his pulse somewhere in his devastated nerve endings. Even in his sleep he feels it lodged within him like a separate organism, a parasite, sometimes at the back of his patched-up jaw, sometimes deep in the empty eye socket, sometimes in his cervical vertebrae, patiently sinking its jaws into his bones, his tendons, his marrow, to feast on them.

It is moments like this, where the humans are barely described differently from the animals they raise and farm and slaughter, that I am reminded of when I learned the origins of the phrase “long pig.” And lest anyone should make the mistake that any degree of intelligence separates humans from swine, one of the most memorable boars, nicknamed The Beast, is made one focus of the narrative, with thoughts and memories and needs of his own fully articulated.

It may be a truism that every human has some bestiality, some animality in their core, just as each animal possesses something of the human in their heart—but that does not make the exposition of that principle any less fascinating in del Amo’s hands. Particular images linger long after reading (especially the repeated trope of describing the world as seen, or reflected, in the eyes of cows and crows and indeed pigs), and certainly the later descriptions of how Serge and JoĂ«l run the factory farm of pigs makes it as hard to look at a slice of bacon afterwards as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle once disgusted those who had bought mass-slaughtered meat. But Jean-Baptiste del Amo’s intention has never been to shock or to disgust: only to depict, without any hint of modesty, the full emotional breadth of the world in which his characters live.

If I had been asked three months ago to make a case for why Animalia should win the Best Translated Book Award, I would have pointed to how the text’s beauty of language is a direct outgrowth of both the author’s and the translator’s backgrounds, and of how it forces those of us who very rarely spend long stretches of time among other animals to realize how dependent we are on farming for our daily bread, how divorced we are from how these living creatures are transformed into shrink-wrapped slabs of meat on refrigerated, fluorescent-lit shelves.

But because we are in the middle of a pandemic, the mentions of fever and illness have taken on fraught significance, and that factory farm I mentioned feels even more unnervingly symbolic:

‘What the fuck happened?’ Serge asks, looking at the miscarried foetuses.

‘I don’t know . . .’ JoĂ«l says, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. ‘Two sows have miscarried. One of the gilts in the first pen, and a sow on her second farrowing in the third pen.’

‘Are they running a temperature?’

‘No, I checked both.’

‘In that case, it must be a coincidence.’

‘We have to tell him, though, don’t we?’

‘Absolutely not, not right now. I don’t think it’s anything serious,’ Serge says, staring at the bucket. ‘One of the crop fields on the Plains has been destroyed.’ . . .

They will say nothing to Henri. Why give him another reason to worry? It is not as though an epidemic is going to decimate the herd in the next couple of hours . . .

The sad truth, as we have come to understand on a social level, is that epidemics are always detected too late, and that their origins are all too often deeply rooted in our breeding and sale and consumption of animals, fostering the transfer of viruses from one species to another. Whether they come from fowl or swine or bats or pangolins, from the wet markets of Wuhan or the farmlands of western Kansas or the rural countryside of Guinea, our tangled and violent relationship with other species of Animalia underscores just how little we have to distinguish ourselves from the kingdom’s other species—and how willingly we put ourselves at risk for our own downfall.

No other book on this list so clearly lays bare the filth out of which we have risen over the past hundred years, nor how we have arrived at this moment—and how we, through our practices and our demands, have found the pestilence of the past still thrusting its brutality into our present moment, unable to be easily washed away by the breakneck pace of human progress. This book, like the Beast that comes every so often to the fore, is quite simply both beautiful and terrifying:

Three or four boars are sufficient to impregnate the breeding sows. One of them, the one they have nicknamed the Beast, is the result of years of selection and clever interbreeding. Never before have the men managed to breed such a specimen. The Beast weighs four hundred and seventy kilos, stands one metre forty hoof to shoulder, and measures four metres long. When they parade him past the stalls to check whether the sows are in their heat, the huge testicles swinging from left to right in his scrotum are like a sneer at the men’s impotence, while urine trickles from the vulvas of the sows as they smell his sour breath. Aware of his physical superiority, frustrated by the proximity of sows, his confinement and the competition from other boars, the Beast can be volatile. He has already managed to corner Henri in one of the aisles of the pig shed, pinning him against the bars of a stall, and would have ripped off the hand he was about to bite had Serge not intervened and beaten him viciously. Yet the Beast is the father’s pride and joy. Henri believed in him from the beginning. When he emerged from the womb of his mother, a first-class breeder, he was twice as heavy as the other piglets in the litter, four of which were so puny that the men had no choice but to destroy them.

‘We’ll not be castrating this one,’ Henri said, pointing to the boar.

Death by Water by Kenzaburu Oe
translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm
432 pgs. | pb | 9781101911914 | $16.00

Reviewed by Will Eells

Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe’s latest novel to be translated into English, practically begs you to read it as autobiography. Like The Changeling, as well as many other works not yet released in English, Death by Water is narrated in the first person by Kogito Choko, a septuagenarian writer with published works including The Silent Cry and The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away. If those titles sound familiar to you, it’s because those actually are real-life titles by Oe, The Day He Himself in particular being a part of the collection Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness.

As a matter of fact, Death by Water is in many ways a direct response to The Day He Himself, and few pages go by without it being mentioned. The reason? Death by Water is essentially the story of Choko (our Oe stand-in) trying to re-write the same dramatic event of his childhood as fictionalized in The Day He Himself, i.e. the sudden drowning of his father. However, while The Day He Himself is a deliberately grotesque and stylized dramatization of the event, Death by Water is a sort of metafiction, a writer writing about the act of writing.

The plot, such as it is, finds Oe’s stand-in Choko aware of the coming end of his writing career. Besides a monthly opinion piece for the newspaper, he hardly writes anymore. Ten years after his mother’s death, he suddenly gets the chance to retrieve his late father’s old, red leather trunk, containing his notes, diary entries, and evidence of his failed coup attempt after World War II and his escape from perceived authorities leading to his death by drowning. Choko feels he can finally write a definitive version of this turn of events, as in his old age he finds his previous effort, the aforementioned The Day He Himself, to be “an embarrassingly immature piece of work.” At the same time, he becomes involved with an avant-garde theater company The Caveman Group, who in the past has dramatized Kogito’s work for the stage, and is hoping to create a new work in tandem with the “drowning novel” Kogito now wants to write. The thing is, about a third of the way through the novel, Kogito discovers his mother has already destroyed most of the trunk’s contents, and Kogito finds himself unable to continue his work.

And yet, Death by Water continues to amble on for another three hundred or so pages, the ponderous middle section a more generous reviewer might call “reflective,” as Oe reconnects with his past, and reflects on the act of writing itself. The novel is absurdly self-aware, as Kogito/Oe reflects on his own quirks and failures as a writer. He even poses the question directly in a conversation with a friend, who complains:

“At some point, doesn’t it become overkill? I mean, can these serial slices of thinly veiled memoir really be considered genuine novels? . . . Why do you choose to write about such a solipsistic and narrowly circumscribed world?”

“Everything you say is true,” I said. “I admit that freely . . . but I always seem to come back to the sobering realization that if I hadn’t used the quasi-autobiographical approach I wouldn’t have been able to write anything at all. In other words, I’ve had to maintain this narrow focus out of sheer necessity.”

And while it’s true that there seems to always be a pretty strong basis of fact in even Oe’s early work, anyone who has read said work would know that Oe is capable of some fantastic, bizarre, and unreal stories. The contrast between Kogito/Oe’s early and late works becomes a major question of Death by Water, one that even Oe doesn’t seem to know how to answer. So what is better: youthful expressionism and raw creativity or the maturity, wisdom, and hindsight of experience?

It’s hard to say what Oe the writer or Kogito the character thinks on the matter. Are the late works, as Adorno says, catastrophes? Or, in the more hopeful interpretation of Edward Said, are the late works: “thrillingly catastrophic work that manages to overturn and surpass all the creations that went before?”

Oe seems to be hopeful of the latter, but I wouldn’t say that Death by Water is a successful example. The novel is overly long, disjointed, and aimless, particularly once the narrative thread suddenly revs up in the last hundred pages, and a more compelling story emerges when Unaiko, Kogito’s main liaison and friend in The Caveman Group, attempts to dramatize her own painful past via an abandoned script of Kogito’s to a conservative audience unwilling to deal with the issues it presents.

Oh, Unaiko, the true star of this show! One of the few characters in the novel who feels like a character and not simply a soapbox for Kogito to argue with, Unaiko has a story that needs telling, and a version of Death by Water two hundred pages shorter and more evenly split between Kogito and Unaiko’s creative relationship to their respective past histories seems like it would’ve made these questions of life influencing art and art influencing life much more entertaining and thought-provoking. Perhaps a younger writer would’ve dramatized her story directly. But even that raises the question: who gets to tell it; who is allowed to tell Unaiko’s story? Is Oe being respectful by not appropriating a woman’s more powerful and engaging story, one that could very well be more or less “true” for his own dramatic ends? Or is Oe, with his limitations as a writer, simply incapable of writing the story any other way?

Death by Water raises these interesting questions about mortality, political correctness, art cannibalizing life, and frankly, art cannibalizing itself, but comes up with few satisfactory answers. It is appropriately ambitious for a late work, but by being overly long, digressive, and didactic, Death by Water is more the bad catastrophic than the good. This doesn’t make Oe suddenly a bad writer—but a novel addressing your flaws as a novelist does not absolve you of said sins. Maybe just write a different novel.

This is Yan Lianke’s third book to come out in English translation, the first two being Serve the People! and Dream of Ding Village. (Interestingly, this is his third translator, with Julia Lovell having done Serve the People! and Cindy Carter having translated Ding Village.)

In terms of Brendan Riley, he was born in Dunkirk, New York in the Year of the Fire Horse. He holds degrees in English literature from Santa Clara University and Rutgers University. He has worked for many years as a teacher, translator, editor, and writer. An ATA Certified Translator of Spanish to English, he also holds certificates in translation studies from U.C. Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His translations include works by Juan Velasco, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Filloy, and Carlos Fuentes.

Here’s the opening of his very positive review:

A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China by turns traditional, modern, and fantastical.

The novel centers on the history and destiny of Liven, a remote village in northern China populated by invalids. To be a citizen of Liven, one must be disabled in some way great or small. But so sweetly harmonious is the bucolic life there, some even maim themselves to be allowed to take up residency. Liven’s origins lie in a mythical past of heavenly days before the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the convulsions of the twentieth century, including the Communist Revolution and Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward. Despite being a village of cripples, Liven is not a crippled village: symbiotic hard work ensures its people a life of plenty. As the shadow of modern times falls on China, Liven finds itself at odds with the world at large, populated by able-bodied “wholers.” From the first page, its fortunes take an especially strange turn with the onset of some paradoxical weather: “Look, in the middle of a sweltering summer, when people couldn’t liven, it suddenly started snowing. This was hot snow.”

High praise for translator Carlos Rojas’s discovery of the ideal English name for Lianke’s mythical Chinese village. In his concise, enlivening preface Professor Rojas explains that the Chinese verb shouhuo, which he translates as “to liven . . . is composed of two Chinese characters that literally mean ‘to receive life’, but in the novel’s regional dialect are used to refer to enjoyment, pleasure, or even sexual intercourse.” This pitch-perfect target-language key at the heart of Rojas’s translation—an impressive feat of lucid, flowing prose—provides an effective comic touchstone; the novel’s exegesis begins and ends with the village’s axiomatic name. It also raises the possibility for Liven, and its unforgettable story, to assume a permanent place in the popular literary imagination.

The novel centers on the history and destiny of Liven, a remote village in northern China populated by invalids. To be a citizen of Liven, one must be disabled in some way great or small. But so sweetly harmonious is the bucolic life there, some even maim themselves to be allowed to take up residency. Liven’s origins lie in a mythical past of heavenly days before the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the convulsions of the twentieth century, including the Communist Revolution and Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward. Despite being a village of cripples, Liven is not a crippled village: symbiotic hard work ensures its people a life of plenty. As the shadow of modern times falls on China, Liven finds itself at odds with the world at large, populated by able-bodied “wholers.” From the first page, its fortunes take an especially strange turn with the onset of some paradoxical weather: “Look, in the middle of a sweltering summer, when people couldn’t liven, it suddenly started snowing. This was hot snow.”

High praise for translator Carlos Rojas’s discovery of the ideal English name for Lianke’s mythical Chinese village. In his concise, enlivening preface Professor Rojas explains that the Chinese verb shouhuo, which he translates as “to liven . . . is composed of two Chinese characters that literally mean ‘to receive life’, but in the novel’s regional dialect are used to refer to enjoyment, pleasure, or even sexual intercourse.” This pitch-perfect target-language key at the heart of Rojas’s translation—an impressive feat of lucid, flowing prose—provides an effective comic touchstone; the novel’s exegesis begins and ends with the village’s axiomatic name. It also raises the possibility for Liven, and its unforgettable story, to assume a permanent place in the popular literary imagination.

Lenin’s Kisses divides its narrative into three essential areas of focus. The two main protagonists are Grandma Mao Zhi, matriarch of Liven, and County Chief Liu, a government functionary who presides like a minor deity over his district of Shuanghuai. Between them they represent the dangerous, unrelenting tension between traditional ways and modern bureaucracy. Caught within their powerful yin-yang vortex is the wonderful, absurd, and utterly hapless Liven Special Skills Performance Troupe.

A devoted revolutionary who sees her dreams turn to nightmares, Mao Zhi symbolizes the sufferings and endurance of twentieth century China. When communism arrives she discovers that her village is neither recognized by the government nor shown on any map; she petitions that it be allowed to join the world and, after grueling pilgrimages to various seats of government, Liven is welcomed into the new China.

But when Mao Zhi tries to govern Liven through common sense and traditional wisdom, especially when it comes to helping the village endure China’s cataclysmic famine which followed Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward, all of Liven is denounced for counterrevolutionary activity, simply because they sensibly stored up their harvest against impending starvation. Nevertheless, the villagers are accused of greed, and the rest of the country comes calling to appropriate all their grain, tools, and livestock. Ironies abound: to save her people, Mao Zhi, ardent daughter of the revolution, must accept the charges of her accusers in the new Maoist cadres.

As I write this I’m examining a grim black and white photograph from the Cultural Revolution: two suspected counter-revolutionaries are pinioned atop a farm truck packed with loyal Maoists; placards hanging round their necks declare their anti-revolutionary crimes; the truck is surrounded by a teeming crowd, all “struggling against” the offensive criminals. This picture is nearly identical to one of the more harrowing scenes of tribulation which Lianke describes, when Mao Zhi is forced to answer for the crimes of Liven. Summoned to the district capital, Mao Zhi prudently confesses to being a counter-revolutionary, and is spared, while the other “criminal” by her side has his brains blown out. Thus, despite the multiple positive implications of its name, Liven becomes a fallen Shangri-La, and Mao Zhi will spend the rest of her life trying to redeem it and restore its happy past.

Grandma Mao Zhi’s counterpart is County Chief Liu, who concocts an improbable scheme to purchase Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed corpse from a cash-strapped Moscow. His chuckleheaded assumption is that, once installed in a gleaming new mausoleum atop Spirit Mountain, the corpse will attract endless hordes of paying tourists, thus ensuring the district a livening mountain of money, more than it can ever spend.

This feckless communist-cum-capitalist party cog who, despite delusions of grandeur, is doomed to failure, provides the satirical alloy to the sombre tale of Grandma Mao and Liven. When Liu visits Liven during its annual livening festival, some of the disabled villagers honor him with a performance of their many unusual skills. Paraplegic Woman can embroider a butterfly on a poplar leaf with astonishing dexterity. Blind Tonghua can hear a feather land anywhere on the stage. One-Legged Monkey can outrun an able-bodied man and perform an amazing long jump. In their quaint freak show Chief Liu spies his golden goose: a special skills performance troupe to tour China and raise the millions needed to purchase Lenin’s corpse. Granda Mao Zhi bitterly agrees to his mad scheme with an equally quixotic proposal; in exchange for granting the troupe permission to tour China, she secures Chief Liu’s promise to allow Liven to once more withdraw from society in order to rediscover its heavenly days of livening.

The novel’s structure offers only odd numbered chapters which are meant, according to Professor Rojas, to signify Liven’s (and China’s) off-kilter progress through modernity. Most are followed by a variety of endnotes for “Further Reading”: some, with blunt-toothed sarcasm, constitute a simple, obvious gloss, while others go much further field, flowering out into complex, full-fledged chapters.

Liven’s saga is both moving and gut-wrenching as well as mordantly, brutally, bitterly funny; it spares neither its characters nor its readers the multitudinous disasters of human folly. The novel is a veritable Chinese Box of absurd tribulations, each one containing its own Russian matryoshka doll. But the figurine’s faces are painted in outrage, mirroring the reader’s disbelief at Liven’s seemingly endless misfortunes.

Sometimes the plot’s style reads like a modern fable of the kind found in Hesse’s Siddhartha or Flaubert’s Legend of St. Julian Hospitaler with its flat recounting of grief and endurance in the face of impossible suffering. During one particularly grueling episode, the special skills performance troupe finds itself held prisoner inside the splendid new Lenin Mausoleum, built with the profits from its hundreds of high-priced, sold-out shows. Their jailers are none other than the band of “wholer” roadies who’ve shepherded them around China for the past year. Jealous of the cripples’s vast earnings, they hold them ransom against themselves, extracting their every last yuan by selling them food and water at outrageous prices. And when the suffering cripples of Liven have, once again, given their all, the demands only become more outrageous.

Betrayed by every other social arrangement–feudalism, Marxism, communism, Maoism, bureaucracy, capitalism, show business, and the tenuous honor among thieves–Liven finally has nothing but itself, alone among the remote mountains of Balou with the blossoms floating on the spring breeze as in the famous 5th century poem “Peach Blossom Land” by Tao Yuan Ming. For a moment, the message seems to be that compassionate solidarity with our lowest common denominator might be the true path, but in the end Liven is no staging ground for revolution, simply a threshing floor, a harsh oasis, a lonely last resort. Lenin’s Kisses, however, offers an irresistible attraction for readers of powerful, uncompromising satire. So pucker up, buttercup.

This is Sarah Two’s first review for threepercent. Her introduction can be found here. Later this week, both Sarahs (Sarah Two and Quantum Sarah) will be featured in a review that they co-wrote.

Here is some of Sarah Two’s first independent review:

Like the two protagonists of his most recent novel, Second Person Singular (translated from the Hebrew by Mitch Ginsburg), Sayed Kashua is a Jerusalem-educated Arab Israeli. He is a columnist for Haaretz, a liberal newspaper, and the creator of the hit sitcom, Arab Labor. Kashua’s work is often controversial, especially among the Palestinian population of Israel, both for his humorous use of cultural stereotypes and presentations of Muslims engaging in drinking and pre-marital sex. His writing for Arab Labor was described by The New York Times as irreverent toward Jewish and Arab Israelis alike – a style that is subtly present in Second Person Singular.

Contrary to what the title might lead us to expect, half of the book is written in the third person and half is written in the first person singular, but none of it is written in the second person singular. The third person thread chronicles the story of a nameless man identified only as “the lawyer”; the other thread is told from the perspective of a social worker whose name is eventually revealed, but withheld for much of the novel. The lawyer’s drama hinges on his discovery of a note in his wife’s handwriting and the consequent paranoia that she might be cheating on him, while the social worker’s conflict centers on his experience as a caretaker for a paralyzed, vegetative Jewish young man. The two plot lines, if not exactly intertwined, are related, yet the stronger connection between the narratives lies in the two characters’ painstaking efforts to blend in with their Jewish colleagues.

Click here to read the entire review.

Contrary to what the title might lead us to expect, half of the book is written in the third person and half is written in the first person singular, but none of it is written in the second person singular. The third person thread chronicles the story of a nameless man identified only as “the lawyer”; the other thread is told from the perspective of a social worker whose name is eventually revealed, but withheld for much of the novel. The lawyer’s drama hinges on his discovery of a note in his wife’s handwriting and the consequent paranoia that she might be cheating on him, while the social worker’s conflict centers on his experience as a caretaker for a paralyzed, vegetative Jewish young man. The two plot lines, if not exactly intertwined, are related, yet the stronger connection between the narratives lies in the two characters’ painstaking efforts to blend in with their Jewish colleagues.

In the passages following the lawyer, the narrator strikes an almost satirical tone. The lawyer’s every action seems calculated to raise his esteem in the eyes of his family, peers, and even perfect strangers. Whenever a friendly rival upgrades his sports car, the lawyer must buy a new one that is even better; he keeps an office in an expensive Jewish neighborhood despite the fact that all his clients are Arab Israelis; when he goes to buy a book that embarrasses him, he asks the cashier to giftwrap it. Once a month he and his wife take part in a couples’ night, complete with overpriced sushi and post-dinner discussions of predetermined topics.

Yet just when you think the book could be a mockery of the lawyer for trying too hard to conform to Western culture, it careens off in another direction. When the lawyer irrationally concludes that his wife is unfaithful, he assumes a more convenient ideology to suit his rage:

Experience had taught him that he was a conservative. Yes, a conservative, and from now on he would not be apologetic about it. What an idiot an idiot he had been when he spoke out, time and again, against the treatment of women in the Arab World, saying that it was widespread misogyny that held these societies back.

His outbursts, while disturbing, seem less like genuine expressions of feeling and more like attempts to react the way that he thinks people in his situation should react. I appreciated the dark comedy in this half-instinctive/half-intellectual neurosis, particularly in small moments, such as the time the lawyer googles “why women cheat.”

There is less comedy present in the sections detailing the life of the social worker, in part because his first person narration provides fewer opportunities for satire. Unlike the lawyer, he does everything he can to fade away from notice, positive or negative. His ethnically ambiguous name and physical appearance, as well as his fluency in both Arabic and Hebrew, allow him to slip between cultures and witness more of the ugly prejudices present in Israeli society. Van drivers rant to him about Zionist “collaborators”; Jewish university students joke to him about the “token Arabs” in their programs; modern Muslim Jerusalemites scorn conventional women that wear hijabs. It is no wonder that he feels embarrassed wherever he goes. In a crowded Jewish nightclub he expounds:

I want to be like them. Free, loose, full of dreams, able to think about love. . . the who felt no need to apologize for their existence, no need to hide their identity. Like them
 To feel like I belong, without feeling guilty or disloyal. And what exactly was I being disloyal to?

The last question of the passage comes across both as a genuine inquiry and an attempt by the narrator to justify his behavior. This ambivalence runs through the entire novel as the two men take great measures to feel comfortable within Jewish circles of the Jerusalem community, yet feel uncomfortable about having taken those measures. The implication seems to be that they lose something un-nameable – maybe even unrecognizable – in the process of assimilation. Still, it is unclear whether or not this ineffable sacrifice is worth grieving.

Sharon Rhodes is a Ph.D. candidate here at the University of Rochester who wrote this as part of an assignment so far back that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she not only had her degree, but that she’s already tenured somewhere. But seriously, I’m a bit behind in posting reviews . . .

Here’s the opening:

Dream of Ding Village tells the story of a village destroyed by unregulated blood selling. Gloomily enough, the novel is narrated by a 12 year-old-boy who died without ever having sold his blood; instead, the narrator, Ding Quiang, was murdered by villagers with a grudge against his father, Ding Hui, the local blood head. Quiang goes back in time to the beginning of the blood boom in Wei County of Henan province, detailing how government officials first set up blood banks and then, how his father found a niche in the market. Ding Hui bought blood from the inhabitants of Ding Village as well as those of other nearby villages, and sold it for profit. At first this brought great prosperity, although those who sold blood frequently were weakened by the practice, but then, roughly ten years later, people started coming down with what Quiang and the villagers called “the fever.”

Nearly everyone who sold blood to Ding Hui or his subsidiary blood heads, about one person in each household of Ding Village, got “the fever”: AIDS was passed from person to person through re-used needles. This puts an end to the blood boom in Ding Village, though not before Ding Hui’s financial success enabled him to build a three story tile house in a village of one room mud huts. A few villagers who worked for Ding Hui were also able to build tile houses; but after the blood boom most of the villagers were no better off than before, and many had contracted HIV.

Despite the tragedy that resulted from his actions, Ding Hui refuses to apologize to the inhabitants of Ding Village. Instead, taking advantage of government subsidies for those infected with AIDS Ding Hui continues to turn a profit at the expense of those already injured by his actions. First he sells the government-provided food for profit, then coffins (a commodity in high demand), then he begins to profit from matchmaking—helping families find dead husbands and wives for their dead daughters and sons.

Click here to read the entire review.

Nearly everyone who sold blood to Ding Hui or his subsidiary blood heads, about one person in each household of Ding Village, got “the fever”: AIDS was passed from person to person through re-used needles. This puts an end to the blood boom in Ding Village, though not before Ding Hui’s financial success enabled him to build a three story tile house in a village of one room mud huts. A few villagers who worked for Ding Hui were also able to build tile houses; but after the blood boom most of the villagers were no better off than before, and many had contracted HIV.

Despite the tragedy that resulted from his actions, Ding Hui refuses to apologize to the inhabitants of Ding Village. Instead, taking advantage of government subsidies for those infected with AIDS Ding Hui continues to turn a profit at the expense of those already injured by his actions. First he sells the government-provided food for profit, then coffins (a commodity in high demand), then he begins to profit from matchmaking—helping families find dead husbands and wives for their dead daughters and sons.

Unfortunately, like most stories of corruption and tragedy, Ding Hui cannot be blamed for all of the problems of Ding Village. As Quiang’s story unravels, it reveals the superficiality and selfishness of the villagers who—faced with death after death, whether their own or that of loved ones—come to value coffins and funeral preparations and even the wedding of two dead children over living. Because Ding Hui has sold the government subsidized coffins elsewhere, and straw mats are no longer fashionable containers with which to bury the dead, the villagers strip the local school of desks, doors and window frames and then, needing still more material for coffins, begin cutting down the village’s venerable trees. When they’ve finished, Ding Village has no school and no shade. Having no future themselves, those infected with AIDS cease to think of the future at all.

Despite the pettiness of many of those faced with an early death, two characters, both infected with AIDS, find solace in each other’s love. Of course, they, like all of the other infected villagers, eventually die painful deaths.

Although the author, Yan Lianke, does not end the tale with much if any hope, he does write the story well, weaving poetry throughout and using repetition in a way I’d not previously seen in a novel. The beauty of the poetry somewhat relieves, though in no way diminishes, the horror of the story.

In addition to being well-written and engaging, this book illustrates the real and continuing problem of disease spread via blood-selling in China. And, as the novel shows, the repercussions of HIV continue for decades after an initial outbreak because the virus takes so long to make itself known. Even were blood-selling eradicated today, families, especially poorer ones, would suffer for generations. Indeed, one man interviewed by the BBC in 2001 was in a very unfortunate predicament: his son sold blood to make ends meet and contracted AIDS, in response, the man spent all of his money on medicine leaving nothing with which to send his soon-to-be-fatherless grandchildren to school.

Further, according to a ChinaDaily article from September of last year, the Chinese government banned blood selling in 1998, but the practice continues in the guise of compensated “donation.” Rather than being paid for their blood, the poor and desperate receive a “nutrition fee” and “traffic fare.” The government could crack down harder on blood “donations,” but the real problem is oppressive poverty; for the fictional characters of Ding Village as well as many real people in China—as well as the United States—selling blood is a last ditch effort, something one does out of need. While clean blood for transfusions is an important aspect of modern medicine, taking advantage of the poor is morally questionable and, without strict regulations, dangerous for everyone. However, until the poor are less desperate, those that stand to profit will easily take advantage of them.

Secondly, this novel illustrates important aspects of human nature: Ding Hui becomes single-minded in his pursuit of money, not only is he largely to blame for the spread of AIDS in his county and, as he sold blood wherever it was wanted, in his country, he then profits from the government’s feeble efforts to help those infected with AIDS. Faced with their own deaths, the villagers stop caring for each other and the future of the uninfected, instead, they care only for coffins and “face.” Indeed, one of the only instances of solidarity exhibited by the villagers once the AIDS epidemic is in full force, occurs when a young man, infected but not yet fully sick, is able to marry an uninfected woman because the inhabitants of Ding Village assured her and her mother that the man in question was not sick.

Although literature often examines the short comings of humanity, it is only by constantly reevaluating ourselves and exploring the possible repercussions of our actions that we can avoid becoming monsters. Dream of Ding Village is an excellently executed reminder of the negative consequences of putting financial gain first as well as the long-lasting results of selfishness: when we put ourselves first—whether because we stand to profit or because we have no chance of ever profiting again—we risk robbing not only our neighbors, but our posterity.

Lian Law was an intern and in my “Intro to Literary Publishing” class last semester, which is when she wrote this review. (And yes, we are that far behind in running all of these.)

Marcelo was actually in Rochester for an event last spring in connection with PEN World Voices. You can watch the full event below, or skip forward to see the reading and interview with Marcelo:

And here’s the opening of Lian’s review:

Kamchatka: a remote peninsula in the Russian Far East. However, to the ten-year-old narrator in Marcelo Figueras’s novel Kamchatka, it represents much more. It is a territory to be conquered in his favorite game of Risk, it is “a paradox, a kingdom of extremes, a contradiction in terms,” and it is the last thing his father ever says to him.

Kamchatka is Marcelo Figueras’s English novel debut, translated by Frank Wynne. A novelist and screenwriter, Figueras has published several other books including El espía del tiempo, La batalla del calentamiento, and Aquarium. He was born in Argentina in 1962 and similar to the narrator of Kamchatka, he was a young child at the start of the Argentina’s Dirty War in 1976.

Kamchatka chronicles the life of a young boy during this time of political instability and its suffocating climate of fear and violence. When he, his brother, and his parents, are suddenly forced to flee to a safe house, they must assume new identities. The boy renames himself “Harry,” after his hero and famous escape artist Harry Houdini while his five-year-old brother rechristens himself “SimĂłn,” after Simon Templar in the TV show The Saint (although Harry continues to refer to him by his nickname, the “Midget.” Despite all the disruptions, fear and sudden disappearances of friends and family members, Figueras’s main goal is not to write another somber novel about the Dirty War.

Click here to read the entire review.

Kamchatka is Marcelo Figueras’s English novel debut, translated by Frank Wynne. A novelist and screenwriter, Figueras has published several other books including El espía del tiempo, La batalla del calentamiento, and Aquarium. He was born in Argentina in 1962 and similar to the narrator of Kamchatka, he was a young child at the start of the Argentina’s Dirty War in 1976.

Kamchatka chronicles the life of a young boy during this time of political instability and its suffocating climate of fear and violence. When he, his brother, and his parents, are suddenly forced to flee to a safe house, they must assume new identities. The boy renames himself “Harry,” after his hero and famous escape artist Harry Houdini while his five-year-old brother rechristens himself “SimĂłn,” after Simon Templar in the TV show The Saint (although Harry continues to refer to him by his nickname, the “Midget.” Despite all the disruptions, fear and sudden disappearances of friends and family members, Figueras’s main goal is not to write another somber novel about the Dirty War. By retelling the events through a child’s perspective, Figueras explores the impact this situation had on personal and family dynamics. In the face of this situation, Harry remains a typical young boy, reluctantly attending school, obsessed with TV shows, comic books, and superheroes. He spends his time playing Risk with his father and aspiring to learn the secrets of Houdini.

In addition to Harry’s ten-year-old perspective, the adult Harry is often a companion voice, reflecting upon and filling in information that his younger self was incapable of comprehending at that time. Harry reflects on the information he gathers about the political situation.

For a long time I thought that my parents told me these little things because they believed I wouldn’t understand the bigger picture—whatever it was they were not saying, whatever they were hiding from me. Now I think that they did it deliberately, knowing that by the time I put the pieces together and could finally see the picture in the jigsaw puzzle, I would be safe, far from the danger that, right now, threatened us all.

The novel is uniquely bookended by the same moment in time as Harry and his father see each other for the last time. The interior brings the reader back to the beginning and up until this specific moment. While the end scene contains much of the same wording as the opening, the father and son’s encounter and the parting words of “Kamchatka” are full of new meaning and significance. While the opening was distinctly told in a ten-year-old voice, the final retelling is much more reflective, informed by the adult Harry’s brief interjections throughout.

Harry’s voice is most impressive, creatively and perfectly interweaving the ten-year-old and his older self. The novel is structured in five main parts, all around school subjects. In doing so, Figueras brings attention to how children, Harry and his little brother included, learn and decode meaning from their own experiences. Figueras favors short chapters, each paint their own small portrait of Harry’s life. The 81 chapters reflect how a ten-year-old breaks down his life into small episodes, much like the way his favorite television show The Invaders does. These short chapters provide vivid and beautifully colored portraits of his family and the children’s humorous exploits and adventures. The novel is filled with small touches of childhood reminiscence; Harry practicing holding his breath in the bath tub, Harry learning to slip out of knots, Harry and his brother’s attempt to save toads from drowning in the safe house swimming pool by creating a “reverse diving board” and arguments over who is better: Superman or Batman.

In telling the story from Harry’s point of view, Figueras is able to highlight the importance of family, courage and sacrifice within the context of fear, separation and ultimately loss. In the end, Harry realizes that in order to survive you need to “love each other madly.” In retelling his story, he has brought the characters to life once more. Through this act of storytelling, he realizes that “I don’t need Kamchatka any more, I no longer need the security I once felt being far from everything, unreachable, amid the eternal snows. The time has come for me to be where I am again, to be truly here, all of me, to stop surviving and start living.”