—William Poundstone,

It probably goes without saying, but publishing international literature is a precarious business in the best of times. On average, sales for translated works of fiction tend to be about one-third of the average sales for a mid-list author writing in English. There are additional costs—not just in terms of paying the translator, which is baked into the idea of publishing books from around the world and shouldn’t be something publishers complain about—such as increased expenses to tour an author, the mental stress of having to work approximately ten times as hard to get the same level of attention given to books written by Americans, the fact that most translation-centric presses are non-profits, which means that in addition to all the normal publishing tasks, you also have to spend a significant amount of time filling out grant applications and final reports, running fundraising campaigns, cultivating major donors, and working with a board of directors.

Richard Nash used to say that all indie press publishing is two fuck-ups away from collapse. Presses specializing in international lit? We might only be one fuck-up away. Or one COVID-19.

Just because I have the tendency to ramble, I’m going to drop the lede right here, then circle back: Open Letter needs your support more than ever before. Everyone’s struggling, there are hundreds of worthy causes and orgs to donate to, but if you like our books, our free content, our role in the translation-ecosystem, please consider to us. I don’t want to sound alarmist—or at least not more than is warranted—but we need a lot of things to break our way to continue operating like we have for the past thirteen years.

Last post, I shared a graph of how our sales fell off the ledge in April, seriously jeopardizing our chances of having our best year ever. (Which we were on pace for through March!) But, in a way, that chart is misleading. The numbers are all accurate, it’s just that this chart is basically everyone’s chart. (Unless you work in the booze industry! According to an ad on Instagram, liquor sales go up 243% during quarantine. Which, well, um, that data �󲹲���to be a sample size of one, so . . .)

The long-term consequences of lockdown, of having 20% unemployment, of dealing with uncertainty and fear of a future outbreak will be screwing things up for the foreseeable future, no matter how much Trump and protestors want to wish that away.

Which brings me to my actual point: Open Letter isn’t just suffering because it’s hard to sell a lot of books right now, but because more than a third of our revenue comes from the University of Rochester. The education crisis is so pervasive and terrifying—and impossible to address as a whole—but thanks to sending students home, refunding room & board fees, having worries about fall enrollment, and employing large numbers of people whose jobs don’t���徱���𳦳ٱ�����generate revenue, higher ed is in some massive trouble.

I don’t have/won’t share the specifics about the University of Rochester, but I was forced to furlough Kaija for two months and Anthony for three weeks, and every division on campus is taking a hit to their budget. It doesn’t help that the UR Medical Center is and is furloughing 20% of its staff.

All of this is to say that things might be evolving at Open Letter over the next months and years. In the current environment, the model we’ve been operating under doesn’t seem sustainable. What will this mean? Nothing drastic right now, but we’re going to have to reassess how we allocate our resources. Which may include having to cut back on the altruistic things we do for the larger community (from posts about other press’s books, to podcasts, to running weekly translation workshops, to speaking with whomever asks for advice), since these are all unfunded.

Again, if Open Letter is at all a meaningful part of your literary life, I hope you’ll consider to us. The U of R’s donation site is a bit clunky, since you have to “select a designation” choose “other-write in” and then write in “Open Letter,” but it can be done. Or you could mail us a check directly if that’s easier. For worse, these appeals from us are going to become much more commonplace—even after “all this.”

*

OK, now that that’s out of the way—sorry, but if you knew the level of anxiety and uncertainty I’m dealing with in regard to the press you would know just how restrained those above paragraphs really are—let’s get to the fun stuff!

So, this week’s post is actually three posts, a triptych of posts. (If you’ll forgive a bit of pretentiousness.) There are linkages between the three, and I’m actually experimenting with writing all three simultaneously, but, to be honest, they’re each pretty separate from one another.

I want to start this one by recommending����by Mónica Ramón Ríos, translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers. This was our April publication, officially releasing on April 14th, which isn’t great for a book that was positioned to take off thanks to bookseller love and recommendations . . . Just check out this quote from a *starred review* in��: “Ríos’s themes are unwaveringly contemporary—LGBTQ and feminist issues; immigrant life; politics—but it is artistry, not dogma, that guides her prose. This is art house literature at its best: provocative, alluring, and uncompromising.”

These stories are��fierce. As mentioned above, they’re uncompromising in both their stylistic approach and political aims. They’re fun, yet unnerving. They’re playful in form, without fear of experimenting. (“Invocation” is told in two voices running in parallel down the pages.) They are, in short, fire.

This is going to be the next Two Month Review book (official schedule to come, but we’ll be talking about it live on June 3, 10, and 17, and both Mónica and Robin will be honored guests), so I’d highly recommend ordering it so that you’ll have it in time.

To celebrate the release of��COF, the��Southwest Review��ran this incredible conversation between Ríos and Myers, which I wholeheartedly recommend . But here are a few fantastic bits:

Robin Myers: I’d like to ask you instead: how did the collection come to be structured for you? And in what ways did you feel, as you wrote the stories, that they were speaking to each other? As I translated, I sometimes imagined them as a kind of song series: one completely different musical experience after another, jarring and thrilling in their contrasts, their color-scapes. But sometimes I thought of them more as a chorus: all speaking up at the same time, all claiming their place in a kind of riotous multiplicity. I’d love to have you discuss the relationships among the stories as they revealed themselves to you.

Mónica Ramón Ríos: The urge to write these stories emerged, among other things, from a localized, experiential, desire-based knowledge/belief that the self is a perilous fiction that has been imposed on us both by very good literature and by very poor books. And I say this not because I read all the poststructuralists (which I did) or the postmodernists (which I ditched), but because I rebel against the idea of fixity, of borders, walls, names, or any supplementary tools to define being, voice, or even our work as anything more than fiction­­. I learned to write at a time when Chile was plagued by very bad neoliberal realism, which coincided with the most treacherous moments of Chilean politics: when the left sold the country and settled with the dictatorial right to create a new transactional structure of power—this is the order we are trying so hard to remove right now in Chile. In terms of literature, the transparency and immediacy of neoliberal realism was not only trying to oppose the literature of the ’80s (a dense oppositional, feminist, queering, literature of protest against univocal dictatorial violence, but also of military stupidity, embodied by the Ministry of Censorship). At the same time, in fact, neoliberal realism was trying to hide those power transactions. And it meant wanting to write like the��gringo��literature exported to Chile��because the whole country wanted to enjoy their fucking McDonald’s. What came out of that was not literature, but a new writer who was a vendor, a new literature that was a product. It wasn’t even entertaining, because it made you lethargic, like the joints mixed with glue we’d buy on the cheap as teenagers to pass days that felt eternal and useless. This was a literature without consequences. But even back then, we still craved those moments of intense understanding that made us become��trabajadores de la letra,��writer-workers.

So, yes, the voice of��Cars on Fire��is a riot. I wrote all of the short stories, except one, after moving to the United States. And in many ways their voice also riots against the inherent racism in this country, especially the one concealed behind niceness. I aim my pen at those people who abuse us saying they are helping us, saying they are our friends.

RM: It seems to me that two of the central forces at work in the book are, on the one hand, the human thirst for revenge (explored especially in part one, “Obituary”), and, on the other, the exhilarating multiplicity of love and desire (which particularly characterizes part two, “Invocation”). Part of what fascinates me about the book is how your ventures into the intentionally exaggerated or even the fantastical—I’m thinking of the comical distortedness of the academic administrator in “The Head,” the amorphous creature in “Extermination,” or the sinuous human-animal metamorphoses in “Invocation”—affects the dynamic between your characters and their environments, or with each other. Or would you object to my use of the word “fantastical” here? Maybe what I’m really asking is how you see, and like to channel, the slipperiness of place, time, and form in your work.

MRR:��I would rephrase it as Mónica Ramón’s thirst for revenge and their desire for the exhilarating multiplicity of love. I see the stories you’ve mentioned as pure realism. I say this with a mischievous intent to contend the possibilities of the real and to subvert the straitjacket that has constricted our experiences.

Again, read the whole thing .

Also, check out this that’s part of Caroline Alberoni’s “” series;

CA: Besides being a translator you are also a poet. Does being a poet help as translator and vice-versa? If so, how?

RM: It absolutely helps. Both poetry and translation (and by this I mean the translation of anything, not just poetry) are practices rooted in the materiality of language. If you write poetry or translate anything, you are in the business of dealing with words as stuff, as resources, as concrete elements you shape and combine to form certain structures and spark particular effects in the reader. Of course, in translation, you’re using language in response to—in relation to—language that already exists in the world. You’re writing (because translating is also writing) in the service of and in complicity with that language. In this sense, too, translation demands both that you saturate yourself with the original text and that you distance yourself from it. That doubleness has helped me write my own poetry, I think, at least in the sense that it’s made the experience of writing poetry much more interesting. For one thing, it’s made me more conscious of the artifice of whatever I’m doing (and I mean “artifice” not as an insult but as a fact). For the same reason, it’s also made me feel freer to experiment: to think with more curiosity and more gratitude about language as “tools” and how I might try them out. I do feel that writing poetry affects my translations as well, or my approach to translating. For example, I care a great deal about sound when I write poetry, about what happens to words when we string them together and speak them aloud, and I feel a similar need to “hear” what language does in translating both poetry and prose. That said, I don’t mean to talk about this obsession with sound as if it were strictly the domain of poetry, much less of poets, because that’s not the case at all! I’m just musing about what it��feels��like for me in going about things as I go about them.

Also, you can purchase Robin’s most recent poetry collection, , in a beautiful bilingual edition from Antílope Press in Mexico.

Final thing! On Wednesday, May 13th at 7pm eastern, you can see Mónica Ramón Ríos in conversation with Carmen Boullosa via .

*

Sticking with the idea of these biweekly posts being some sort of quarantine reading diary, I have to take a paragraph to praise Zulfikar Ghose’s . This isn’t coming out until September, but it’s a truly beautiful book. I mostly know of Ghose from the issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction that featured him (together with Milan Kundera), but his life and career are fascinating.

Born in Pakistan, he lived in London in the 1950s and 60s, then moved to Texas in 1969. He’s written a dozen novels,��and an equal number of poetry collections and works on nonfiction. He even co-authored a book of short stories with personal favorite B. S. Johnson. ( sounds particularly interesting to me. Especially in combination with Patrik Ouředník’s (trans. Alex Zucker), which is near the top of my to-read pile.) He’s been praised by T. S. Eliot!

For whatever reason, the books that have worked best for me in quarantine have been British. Or at least set in London. Escapism + mid-50s British charm works for me. Which is why I plowed through��Kensington Quartet��in just a couple days.

It’s a tricky book, a book of memories and nostalgia in which the narrator is wandering around London, remembering earlier versions of himself as if they still physically exist. It’s a short novel of memory and landscape, an ode to London that will appeal to lovers of Esther Kinsky or other meditative, geography of memory type, flaneur writers.

It also opens in Kensington Gardens following almost the��exact same path��I walked when I was there on March 10th, before the world completely fell apart.

I am here now, just inside Kensington Gardens.

To the north the pebbled concrete expanse of the Broad Walk slopes up towards a pale blue sky above Bayswater. Two women with bundled-up toddlers and another pushing a pram, and farther up shadowy figures of three men in charcoal-grey coats, there is a scattering of ghostly bodies on the Broad Walk, the light so unusual, almost too bright, aglow in my mind, a surprisingly illuminated London. Glancing back in the direction of Palace Gate, I observe that you are striding up in that jaunty walk of yours, always so enthusiastically eager for the grass under the elms and a view of the Long Water. There are no shops to distract you, only consulates of foreign lands across the road you have no interest in, one displaying a flag, green and white, of indistinguishable nationality, hanging too limply. Your step always quickens in Palace Gate when the distant green blur of Kensington Gardens first catches your eye and even when the day is overcast and grey you see a sudden green shiver in the sky, for you it’s the pulse of London, throbbing, as if it were your blood that surged with a sudden passion and made your breath come hard and loud—as that first time, that April, which then became the loveliest of months, when the first of English green you saw was here—all those prints of Constable’s landscapes in the Blackie readers coming alive in the grass at your feet—and your blood bounded in amazement. Another three minutes and you will be coming into the Gardens, inflating your chest when you enter, as is your habit, taking a deep breath and holding it a long moment as when the doctor, his stethoscope’s cold disc on your chest, says, Breathe in and hold, listening to your heart.

Ghose’s writing is simply delicious. The more grounded moments—of the narrator’s first experiences in school, when he nearly has a fling with a gay friend of his teacher’s, when things don’t work out with his various girlfriends—are conventionally compelling and well-crafted, but it’s in the long descriptions, the meanderings, the way that he constructs a palpable sense of London that the prose excels. In a way, this book is a throwback. The narrator’s life resembles Ghose’s in some superficial ways, but it doesn’t feel like the “I” fiction so predominant these days. It’s an attempt to create something beautiful and heartfelt, an archeology of emotional memories tied to a very specific place.

*

Last bit of self-promotional stuff . . .

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve participated in two virtual events to support ��by Sara Mesa, translated from the Spanish by Katie Whittemore.��Since neither space nor time really make sense anymore, I thought I’d share both of them here.

First up was the Wordplay event with both Sara and Katie. This one is bilingual in a fun way, mostly about the book and Sara, and features one of the funniest event moments I’ve seen, when Katie flees her daughter and her daughter’s “Let it Go”-playing birthday card.

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Designed to be a complement to that event, the one Katie and I did for the Transnational Series at Brookline Booksmith is all about translation, crafting voice, interesting challenges Katie had to deal with, and a fun “mercenaries vs. soldiers” bit.

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I hope you enjoy both, and please buy a copy of the book from one of the two organizations that hosted us!

The Teacher by Michal Ben-Naftali
Translated from the Hebrew by Daniella Zamir
138 pgs. | pb | 9781948830072�� | $14.95

Review by Kira Baran

Michal Ben-Naftali’s background in philosophy shines through in her debut novel, The Teacher. Originally published in Hebrew in 2015, the work was awarded the 2016 Sapir Prize and is set to be published in several other languages, and is forthcoming from Open Letter Books (tr. Daniella Zamir) in January 2020.

Packing a philosophical journey into a modest 135 pages, The Teacher is not told from the perspective of Elsa Weiss—“the teacher”—but from that of one of Weiss’s former students. This student sets out to pen an engaging, albeit fictionalized, conglomeration of scenes that strive to piece together the story of Weiss’s actual life—and death.

Grounded in the universally relatable context of the teacher-student relationship, the author rises above this to address topics of not only interpersonal conflict, but the ongoing impact of the Holocaust generations later on people’s everyday lives. In doing so, Ben-Naftali challenges the equally relatable idea which every student seems to share at some point: that history, the classroom, and one’s personal life are parallel realms that never actually intersect. She disproves this notion through her soul-searching account of one teacher’s impact on one student’s life—and vice versa.

Like navigating a maze of mirrors, perspectives get distorted and turned upside-down as we learn more about Elsa Weiss. And, like a mirror, the novel forces us to reflect—not just on the characters, but on ourselves in relation to them. As the characters drift in and out of focus, strangers become familiar, while those we think we know best become unfamiliar. Like the narrator, we find ourselves looking behind us to see and clearly understand our present selves.

At its heart, The Teacher is a tender tale that delves into the significant way in which our seemingly insignificant acquaintances impact our lives and legacies.

Now, onto the book itself! We’ll be posting a excerpt from this later today, but in the meantime, you can read “” over at Electric Literature.

It’s already received a��*starred*��review from����(“Acerbic, playful, full of quick-witted philosophy, and unstintingly original, this is a varied and unsettling reader for our varied and unsettling times.”), and a nice review from����as well (“Bán marries Rabelaisian scholastic satire with a cerebral lyricism, resulting in a fanciful, if occasionally baffling, curriculum.”), but the most complete piece is from Michael Orthofer over at��, who gave it an “A-“:

The pieces vary in style and approach, though a common aspect to many of them is their foundation in textbook-subjects such as historical episodes and literary texts: Bán rips riffs off culture with abandon. In some, she offers her own reïmagining of historical events—Flaubert and Du Camp in Egypt, for example, or space-pioneer dog Laika telling her story (“I’m only whispering because I’m making this recording in secret”) in “On the Eve of No Return (archival recording)” (“Teacher’s Edition/Russian”). In others, she creates new fiction on old: there’s a “Fidelio (a blog opera)”; “What Is This Thing Called the Exchange Reaction? (destructive affinities)” (in: “Chemistry/Physical Education”) features the quartet from Goethe’s��Die Wahlverwandtschaften��(Elective Affinities) competing in a ping-pong doubles match, while “Mme de Merteuil Shakes Herself” (a “Geography/Biology/History” entry) is a beginning-of-the-new-millennium continuation (of sorts) of Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary novel,��Les Liaisons dangereuses—“an edited version of the subsequent correspondence,” now conducted as an e-mail exchange, beginning with letter 176 (and finding its conclusion in horrible-fascinating fashion in one final spectacular encounter that readers recognize will go off entirely differently from what the correspondents had in mind—though this is the one story that is arguably a bit too obvious (and sensational) in what it builds to).

This book is an incredible amount of fun, with stories that are incredibly imaginative and unique. The stories are mind-bending in the sense that the overall context isn’t always immediately apparent, and as you deduce the larger situation in which the story is taking place, the meaning and nature of the story tends to alter in surprising and fun and unsettling ways. (I understand that description isn’t the most clear, but I think you’ll get a sense of what I mean when you read one of the stories.)

If you want to forgo the contest entirely, you can buy a copy from your , online or or , or via .

But if you want to win, just email Anthony with “Night School” in the subject line ASAP!

Well, ten years and one hundred books later, we’re coming back! A week from Thursday we’ll be at the Goethe Institut at 30 Irving Place to celebrate how far Open Letter has come. There will be a few short speeches from some of our translators and authors, a good deal of wine and hors d’oeuvres, a display of some of our titles, special edition tote bags (our first ever), and a great deal of fun and interesting conversation.

Space is limited, so if you’re interested in attending, I’d recommend

It’s going to be a fantastic, fun event, and I hope to see you there!

by Antoine Volodine, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman (France, Open Letter Books)

In Radiant Terminus, we have a novel that disturbs and enthralls, sucking us in to a nightmarish void of a world that might be Purgatory or the Buddhist “Bardo” or some dystopian point in the near/far future. Needless to say, in this moment when the “Second Soviet Union” has fallen and nearly all mammalian life on Earth has died, one wonders if such a distinction even matters anymore.

Antoine Volodine, author of “post-exotic” works, has created a cast of characters who move across this wrecked yet lush landscape, seeking some sort of (radiant?) terminus where they can finally find shelter and rest. They converge on a small commune that is slyly named “Radiant Terminus,” run by a man named Solovyei, who spins and declaims his own epic narrative prose poems that tell of his malicious capacity to bring people back—but only partly—from the dead. And then there are people like the Gramma Udgul (and Solovyei himself?), whose exposure to high levels of radiation have rendered them, in some sense, immortal.The title itself suggests a terminal that emits radiation (e.g., energy unleashed by nuclear reaction)—thus an end point that is always in flux.

Often, the narrative itself starts sounding like Solovyei’s strange and haunting prose poems (or vice versa), the sentences building up momentum as they amble along toward a terminus:

The time did come when those who had the talent declaimed epic chants, invented poetic or comedic monologues, or recited propaganda texts that had stuck with them in their earlier life, or parts of communist, post-exotic, or feminist romances. The audience accompanied them by approving or voicing speeches, as we did in the old days during Korean pansori performances, when Korea still existed and we still believed in beauty, the future, and the impossibility of death.

Volodine’s deft manipulation of irony and careful weaving together of narrative perspectives and voices, all stage-managed, perhaps, by Solovyei, makes Radiant Terminus worthy of the BTBA prize. By the end of the book, you’ll feel like you’ve wandered across the bewildering landscape of Volodine’s own mind, and how many authors have you read who can do that? Exactly.

by Guðbergur Bergsson, translated from Icelandic by Lytton Smith (Iceland, Open Letter Books)

Writing why Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller should win the Best Translated Book Award is like trying to describe a bizarre, exhausting dream that felt important but wound up buried too deep in your subconscious for words to make sense of now that you’re awake. As I was reading this beautiful mess by Iceland’s Guðbergur Bergsson I kept thinking to myself, how is this even a book? And how did translator Lytton Smith not descend into madness bringing it into English? This isn’t hyperbole, the book is that much. It’s a monumental piece of work in a meta sort of way, and that’s why it should win the BTBA.

Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller is ostensibly a collection of fictitious notebooks written by a cranky old man with a mind full of literary brilliance and egotistical bitterness, a man with a lot of opinions who is generally ticked off about everything. Even though the book is printed in a standard typeface, it reads like journaling. It’s full of errors, has a haphazard page layout, and its elderly ramblings are often barely penetrable as they weave in and out of the fragmented Iceland stories and intellectual manifestoes. Sometimes the narrative switches recklessly from one topic to another without warning—I swear it switched mid-sentence at one point, but now I can’t find that part to tell you about it. As I was looking for this passage I did, however, find a page on which Tómas is complaining about the cat and right in the middle of his anecdote for some reason is written, “(something is wrong with the text here).” I also found another funny section where he’s unhappy about the kitchen habits of his tenants and says, “This is ugh and yeuch, Bubbi.” A big part of reading this book is noticing these foibles, laughing and baffling over them, and usually not finding a clear explanation for them. Instead, you just accept their absurdity and recognize that they are weirdly wonderful. Your own personal collection of these odd buried treasures is, I’d say, what you can look forward to taking away from your reading of this strange book.

I’m sure fictional character Tómas Jónsson, who is very much concerned with his literary image (the title tries to claim itself a “bestseller” after all), would not have wanted these notebooks published in the state of shambles they’re in. And that’s part of the book’s wild charm: it’s one of Iceland’s twentieth-century literary masterpieces, and yet it captures the exact opposite of, say, a poised and polished tale of Vikings or fairies (as an English-language reader might try to expect out of Iceland). Iceland is sloppy, frustrating, and grotesquely authentic in this book. It’s the literary equivalent of sneaking away from the tour guide taking you past all the tidy and respectable historical monuments in Reykjavik and instead venturing into an apartment building on a side street and peeking through a keyhole into the gritty, authentic domestic life going on in there, with its chamber pots, chipped dishes, laundry messes, and smells of soup. But that metaphor doesn’t go far enough—you’re looking not just inside an apartment, but deep into the mind of the man who owns it, which becomes a rare glimpse into the psyche of Iceland itself.

In trying to describe Bergsson’s book, I feel I’ve written an inevitable word salad, perhaps not dissimilar to the salads of Tómas Jónsson himself. I don’t think I’ve really gotten to the crux of why this book should win the BTBA, which aims to award both the book and the translation. So on that point: imagine what a labyrinth of rabbit holes and mayhem this book was for a translator to contend with. How did he even know what was happening from one sentence to the next!? How does one faithfully translate a text that borders on impenetrable into something that can be even be read? Lytton Smith not only got the job done, he did it with humor, nuance, and beauty. He let the crazy stuff be opaque and difficult, but also depicted those scattered moments of poetic beauty and philosophical wisdom with the artful language necessary for a reader to discover them amid the textual chaos. He also made sure the silly parts about cats, chickens, and chamber pots came through with the punchy cadence they deserved. So the translation is a feat in and of itself, and the book finally finding its way into English is a triumph of Iceland’s literary community, which has kept Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller, originally published in 1966, from slipping off the radar and into obscurity all this time (as you might expect such a loose baggy monster in a relatively obscure language to do).

I’ve not read all of the finalists, but I’m confident no other translation vying for the Best Translated Book Award in 2018 simply is what it is with as much vigorous impossibility as Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller. Not even Fever Dream. Even if this paragraph amounts to more word salad, let that vigorous impossibility be the reason this book should win.

This week’s music is “Young Lady, You’re Scaring Me” by Ron Gallo.

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The Island of Point Nemo��by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
translated from the French by Hannah Chute
450 pgs. | pb |��9781940953625 | $17.95

Reviewed by Katherine Rucker

The Island of Point Nemo is a novel tour by plane, train, automobile, blimp, horse, and submarine through a world that I can only hope is what Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s psyche looks like, giant squids and all.

What begins as a seemingly simple case of jewel-thievery affecting a high-class widow takes a twist for the dystopian and absurd as the heroes chase severed limbs and diamonds the size of your fist across the globe. Every clue toward the recovery of the jewels is another knot in the storyline, and every character they meet is a new disaster, a new twist in the road.

On the advice of hookers, sword-swallowers, and train car strangers, always dandily dressed to the nines, Martial Canterel, our hero, races toward Point Nemo (the place in the ocean geographically farthest from land) in search of the stolen diamond while Point Nemo (the book) barrels deeper into a world that, every time you think it’s gotten too fantastical, you’re reminded how real it is.

The book’s English translator, Hannah Chute, says she likes the book for its particularly dark brand of absurd. “I like books,” says Chute, “where the world is quietly ending in the background.”

The state of reality in the Point Nemo world is certainly casually crumbling, from mobs of mercenaries hijacking trains to islands of circus-troupe rejects. But what seem like some of Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s more absurd creations aren’t actually creations: grotesque models of the human body displayed as art (), guerrilla groups out to save the world one good deed at a time (), and bicycle-powered e-readers (Christmas 2017?).

The good news is that all of this is just a story we’re being told! Or, rather, it’s the story being read to factory workers to quell their boredom as they build e-readers the whole monotonous day long. This novel encasing the novel isn’t a bit fantastical: Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès shows us the lecherous boss peeping into the locker rooms, the sexless marriage (complete with creative, cringe-worthy, porny attempts at reawakening desire), the long hours working for nothing, and the beloved dying wife inspiring the author.

In the end, of course, the world is still in chaos around all of them. Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès’s novel ends up not so unlike the riveting story-within-the-novel told to the enraptured factory workers to keep them on task: an entertaining yet haunting distraction from a world quietly crumbling around the reader.

The Invented Part��by Rodrigo Fresán
translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden
552 pgs. | pb |��9781940953564 | $18.95

Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols

Imagine reading a work that suddenly and very accurately calls out you, the reader, for not providing your full attention to the act of reading. Imagine how embarrassing it is when you, the reader, believe that you are engrossed in a work only to have the work identify and criticize your lack of attention. Yes, my phone was next to me at all times while reading Rodrigo Fresán’s The Invented Part, and often I was tempted to dash off 140 character reactions to the work, only to be shamed by it a few lines down in the text. This is part of the charm that is The Invented Part. Weaved throughout it are reflections and criticisms of our shift from the written word on a page to a screen. The timing of the publication of the English translation is perfect in light of the behaviors of our current news cycle, the relationships our elected officials have with Twitter, email, the methods used to inform themselves of “reality,” and our current dilema of phrasing through what is real and what is fake.

The Invented Part can be summarized as creating a discourse around the question: How do writer’s view their craft, reality, and relationships with readers and with those individuals who play a role in their lives? The response is addressed through distinguishing the invented part—the part that is created by a writer—and the real part—the reality leveraged by the writer. Through this work, the protagonist, The Writer, draws or focus to the question of our relationship with writers, books, and technology and the literary industry, which frustrates The Writer and causes him in turn to question the role and future physical presence of literature. The Writer is disillusioned with the state of the literary industry and thus decides to travel to CERN and merge with the Higgs boson, resulting in a transformation into invisibility and omnipresence. The publication of the English translation of The Invented Part also coincided with the five-year anniversary of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson particle, also known as (to the dislike of most physicists) the God Particle and largely believed to provide matter with mass.

My only disappointment came in reading the summary of the work on the book’s cover, as I approached the work with excitement believing that it would tackle such a complex physics concept within the literary sphere. As I worked through this quite long piece of literature with this expectation, I reached the end with great disappointment on the topic of the Higgs boson. It appears that the transformation into the Higgs boson was merely an anthropomorphism for omniscience. Being that most people would likely believe that something called the “God Particle” would explain the entire universe, the reference works in this sense because The Invented Part’s main tool is omniscient narration (with the ability to change reality).

Divided into seven parts, The Invented Part begins with a section entitled The Real Character, which is focused on a family (The Young Man, The Young Woman, and The Boy), which is formed due to a common love for a writer’s work and ends in separation, although both parties continue to read the same works by the writer. Part Two focuses of the unusual experience of The Young Man’s and The Young Women’s stay at the home of The (disappeared) Writer during the making of their documentary film on The Writer’s life, accompanied with an excursion through the early life of The Writer’s eccentric sister, who marries into a family (based in the land of Abracadabra) that is hard to distinguish from the Kardashians, or a family with many company brands (think steak, hotels, failed universities) and vast amounts of property, but with no indication of how the money is really made. Part Three focuses on The Writer’s experience at a hospital as he approaches the age where pain is now a matter of death or a non-issue and is no longer something that can be casually ignored. Part Four contains The Writer’s personal notes for a work in development concerning the relationship between the Fitzgeralds and the Murphys, written in the biji style and defined as “curious anecdotes, nearly blind quotations, random musings, philosophical speculations, private theories regarding intimate matters, criticism of other works, and anything that is owner and author deems appropriate.” The focus in Part Five is the relationship between a father, a friend of The Writer, and his son through the father’s relationship with music during his teenage years. Part Six brings us back to The Young Man and The Young Woman during an encounter after their separation, where they meet on the stairs to a museum. Finally, in Part Seven, the reader experiences The Writer’s motivations, insecurities, and what appear to be the beginning of his first work after the disillusionment and transformation.

It was no easy task to get through The Invented Part, mainly because the work presents life experiences in a way that the reader cannot help but reflect on each example, instance, and occurrence presented in the work in real-time. Fresán does this by presenting the reader with familiarities—Pink Floyd, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, Mary Shelley, David Bowie—and uses those references to call upon reflection of these bodies of work to explore both our relationship with literature and books surrounding us and the writer, and the writer’s relationships with the same, and with the feeling of actual experience rather than that of a college lecture. Fresán awards the reader who is not only well-read but also well-aware of music originating between the 1960s and 1980s. For example, the following is a list of the literary references by author I noted while reading the work, but I am self-aware enough to know that I did not catch them all.

Borges
Faulkner
Fitzgerald
Dostoyevsky
Mann
Bronte
Nabakov
Burroughs
Beckett
Lovecraft
Tolkien
Quinn
Delillo
Dante
Shikibu
Updike
Conrad
Vonnegut
Hemingway
Wolfe
Lowry
Bradbury
Shelley
Huxley
Gaddis
Flaubert
Amis

Further, Fresán has a special way of describing (inventing) the normal and mundane. For example, airports in The Invented Part are not just airports:

Airports are like enormous and devouring leviathans run aground on the shore of all things, too heavy to be pushed back out to sea. Airports are like cathedrals of an always late and retarded faith . . . and airports are the sanctuary where everyone prays and begs that their flights leave on time, and that they arrive on time, and that their luggage doesn’t disappear in some wrinkle in space-time, and that everything that goes up does come down but doesn’t fall amen. Airports are like hospitals: you know when you go in but not when you’ll come out and you sit there like something patient, something passing.

And oversharing and not just oversharing:

Being missed has gone missing. Being familiar with so much doesn’t mean knowing more. There was a time when the definitive proof of success was the very ability to disappear, to be impossible to find, to have nobody know where you are. To be unreachable. To be outside everything.

Lastly and importantly, The Invented Part contains warnings for the future of the book in our age of technological screens and our inability to be disconnected. For example, it is stated that:

E-readers, supposedly, help to facilitate and accelerate the reading experience, but actually it seems, end up removing the desire to continue readings. But—breaking ancient news, stope the presses—we still read at the same speed as Aristotle. About four hundred fifty words a minute. So, all that external electric velocity at our disposal ends up colliding with our more deliberate internal electricity. In other words: machines are faster and faster but we are not. We haven’t gained much and, along the way, we’ve lost the exquisite pleasure of leisure, which is how and where the stuff of hopes and dreams is made. We live and create, determined to increase out machines’ capacity to store a number of books that we’ll never be able to read. . . . It seems to me that the paper book is nearer out rhythm (there are nights when I deeply envy the environment of the nineteenth century when it comes to reading nineteenth-century novels by candlelight).

In closing, The Invented Part is a work that I will repeatedly refer to, interact with, and re-read as it captures and questions my relationship with literature in magical and embarrassing ways that will continually change as I refamiliarize myself with the classics, expose myself to new works, and go through the process of aging. This tome will be proudly placed next to my copies of 2666 and People of Paper, both of which also relay the same essence, but through vastly different methods.

We’ve never done anything like this before, but since it’s the weekend of the it’s the perfect time to bring some great international literature to the people.

And to celebrate all of this, we’ll be selling the books at a pretty significant discount: any title you want for $10, any two for $18, or, any three for $20. That’s basically a 60% discount.

Another incentive: We will raffle off a year’s subscription to Open Letter (ten books!) at 6pm sharp. So swing by before then and enter the drawing!

Not really an incentive, but still: I’ll be there the whole day eating some amazing and probably drinking some beers from one (or many!) of the great local breweries that they stock. While doing this, I’ll happily (if not tipsily) answer questions about Open Letter, publishing, translations, our books, authors, traveling to countries to find titles to publish, and baseball.

Hope to see you on Saturday!