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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While Egyptian authors embraced social realism in the 1960s and 1970s, many Libyan writers shied away from it. Some authors did write in a realistic style, such as Abdallah al-Ghazal in his “Toyota War.” But many others continued to rely on symbolist techniques, from metaphor to animal fables. Unlike the 1990s generation of Egyptian authors that rebelled against social realism, in Libya “the 1990s generation literature was born from fear of punishment. They just needed to…[avoid] putting themselves in trouble with the regime,” says author Mohamed Mesraty.

It was only in 2003, Mesraty said, that young Libyan authors began to re-emerge, adding that Libyan authors who live and write abroad have experienced greater creative freedom.

But even novelists who write in English seem to have been affected by a fear of Qadhafi. Hisham Matar’s second novel, “Anatomy of a Disappearance” released earlier this year is a deftly written realist work that foregrounds a kidnapping by the Libyan regime. Still, there is something exceptionally careful about the way “Anatomy” is written, as though the narrator were afraid of turning over too many stones, naming too many names, asking too many questions. [. . .]

Things are clearly changing for Libyan letters. In the months since 17 February, new newspapers and poetry have appeared. But Mohamed Mesraty says that there is still a long way to go.

“Even after the fall of Qadhafi’s regime, we still need to fight for freedom in a society that never had it,” Mesraty said. “The fear starts from the family, neighborhood, and general readers. … The liberal Libyan author in Libya is also afraid of the other authors who won’t understand his writing.”

Revolutionary poetry has been the first post-Qadhafi writing. But Gheblawy feels that this sort of poetry will die out relatively soon, making way for a new style of poetry, which, he has predicted, “will become more descriptive, with a sense of narrative and detail of the daily life of Libyans, and less focus on language and style.”

Gheblawy hopes that many authors will also bring out works they’ve been unable to publish during the Qadhafi years. Gheblawy and Mesraty both lauded new, more realist tendencies in Libyan fiction. Younger authors – such as Beirut39 winner Najwa Binshatwan and Razan Naim al-Maghraby, who was longlisted for the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction – have begun writing scenes of ordinary city life.

Gheblawy believes the general trend will be away from short symbolist works and toward longer poems and novels.

It will be interesting to see what develops—and hopefully some of these works will make their way to the U.S. . . .