{"id":256,"date":"2018-07-09T14:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-07-09T13:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/?p=256"},"modified":"2018-07-09T14:00:04","modified_gmt":"2018-07-09T13:00:04","slug":"laia-jufresa-umami","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2018\/07\/09\/laia-jufresa-umami\/","title":{"rendered":"A bittersweet novel with enormous heart: Laia Jufresa, Umami"},"content":{"rendered":"

Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (OneWorld, 2016).<\/h2>\n

There are very few books that I love completely, unconditionally, evangelically, and Umami <\/em>is one of them. It\u2019s one of a handful of \u201cmust-reads\u201d in my virtual bookshelf<\/a>, and you\u2019re not going to read a bad word about it in this review. Umami <\/em>is set in and around Mexico City, and tells the story of a group of people living in the five houses of Belldrop Mews, during a particular period of their communal lives when \u201cthe dead weigh more than the living.\u201d The construction of the narrative is innovative: there are five different perspectives from which the story\/ies are narrated, and each section works back through the years from 2005 to 2001, with each year being recounted from a different perspective. The stories are beautifully told: Laia Jufresa\u2019s writing is immensely skilful, and Sophie Hughes\u2019s translation feels close to symbiotic.<\/p>\n

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Image taken from oneworld-publications.com<\/p><\/div>\n

For some reason, the reviews on the book jacket made me expect something different from this novel. I was expecting it to be dramatic, psychedelic, bursting out of the pages. In the end, though, I liked Umami <\/em>better the way it was: quiet, gentle, with beautifully developed characters who fulfil narrative functions while resisting stereotype. The protagonists all felt very real: you don\u2019t have to look too far in \u201creal life\u201d to find the private sorrow of involuntary childlessness, a loss that happened while everyone was looking the other way, a \u201cnew start\u201d that cannot shake off the old life, and a merciless cancer that entirely disregards carefully laid plans for a long and happy life.<\/p>\n

I found I took very few notes as I was reading Umami<\/em>, but it wasn\u2019t because there was nothing to say. I simply couldn\u2019t unglue myself from the story as it unfolded, and I wanted it to go on forever: when I was 50 pages from the end I started reading very slowly and re-reading almost every page, because I didn\u2019t want it to end. There are some books that you can appreciate for their deconstruction of reality or their subversion of genre, for all you can read into them and analyse, and there are some books that are just a joy to read because they have heart. From the stark, poignant \u201cLuz turns three years dead today\u201d to the hilarious admission from an ageing academic that \u201cfor the first time in forty years, I\u2019m daring to write without footnotes\u201d, Umami <\/em>has heart.<\/p>\n

The translation is so beautiful that I want to read Umami <\/em>in its original Spanish. If that sounds like a self-contradiction, hear me out: there are clearly some passages in this book that resist translation, such as \u201c\u2018Bah, let\u2019s drop the formalities\u2019, says the woman, drying her hair with her scarf\u201d which I assume was a simple switch from the formal word for “you” to the informal one in Spanish, and a subversion via wordplay of the Lord\u2019s Prayer, which necessarily has to be different in English to make any sense to its reader. Indeed, Jufresa has said that she worked with Hughes to create new sections, because Hughes felt that her first drafts simply didn\u2019t work in English; Jufresa says of this collaboration<\/a> that \u201cI think it, in a way, is a better book because it had two authors in a way\u201d. This collaboration between Jufresa, Hughes, Spanish and English works very well: for example, Luz explains that \u201cEmma gave us baskets and plastic bags and told us which mushrooms we were looking out for: black trumpets. In Spanish they\u2019re called las trompetas de la muerte<\/em>, death trumpets, even though black and dead isn\u2019t the same thing. You just can\u2019t trust English: it translates stuff all wrong.\u201d I would imagine that \u201cdeath trumpets\u201d doesn\u2019t appear in the original novel, and therefore that the sentence \u201cYou can\u2019t trust English: it translates stuff all wrong\u201d might be an addition. But it fits in so well with Luz\u2019s narrative voice that it is not identifiable as an addition, and simply works to enhance the novel in translation: Hughes has clearly locked horns with every fragment of this text, and produced a book that will make you forget you\u2019re reading a translation. Even the sections which reflect on the English language or on translation do not seem forced; in fact, the entire translation subtly subverts a claim within it that \u201ctranslation simplifies, it schematizes: something that seemed potentially profound falls from grace and lands on its head, turning out to be nothing but a doodle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jufresa writes all five main characters sensitively: each has their own distinctive voice, and each is consistent throughout (compare, for example, two views of the same event: \u201cBack when there were still four of us, we didn\u2019t all fit in one row\u201d; \u201cThere used to be four siblings in the Perez-Walker clan, but the youngest died a couple of years ago\u201d). This is equally true of the translation: perhaps the most clearly distinct voice is Luz, the dead girl, who speaks with a child\u2019s voice and makes sense of the world in her child\u2019s way. Then there is Alfonso, a grieving widower writing his wife\u2019s story on his new computer, and who is able to articulate his emotions on a keyboard in a way that he cannot do verbally; Ana, Luz\u2019s older sister, with her brittle teenage pseudo-wisdom, Marina, the fragile new arrival at the mews, always voiced in the third person, and Pina, Ana\u2019s best friend, also voiced in the third person, and striving to come to terms with her mother\u2019s disappearance. All of the characters in Umami <\/em>are quietly struggling with grief and loss, and trying to put their lives back together. They interact, though not constantly, and when they do, their common grief is never far from the surface. As Alfonso says of Linda, \u201cif we do talk it\u2019s about old times: her gringo childhood, my Mexico City youth, our lives before our lives with the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the narrative there are two strands of mystery: who are \u201cThe Girls\u201d? And how did Luz drown? The identity of The Girls sums up so many things about Umami<\/em>: it is uncomfortable because it strips bare the deepest sorrow of one of the protagonists and presents it to every character she meets and every reader who meets her. And as for the revelations about Luz\u2019s death, these are left until the very end, and unless your heart is either made of stone or incredibly well fortified, prepare for it to break a little. It is no exaggeration to say that I have been carrying Umami <\/em>inside me since I read it. Paradoxically, though, I have found this review difficult to write, as my words just don\u2019t seem to do it justice. So let me use Alfonso\u2019s words, writing about his deceased wife: \u201cA couple of days ago I gave the document a title page. In big letters, in the middle of the page, I wrote, Noelia. <\/em>Then I added her surnames, and then I deleted them again. <\/em>Her name isn\u2019t big enough for her. I wrote, Umami<\/em>. [\u2026] Trying to explain who my wife was is just as necessary and impossible as explaining umami: that flavour that floods your taste buds without you being able to quite put your finger on it.\u201d Trying to explain why this book affected me so deeply is just as necessary and impossible as explaining umami: I can only recommend that you read it for yourself.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (OneWorld, 2016). There are very few books that I love completely, unconditionally, evangelically, and Umami is one of them. It\u2019s one of a handful of \u201cmust-reads\u201d in my virtual bookshelf, and you\u2019re not going to read a bad word about it in this review. Umami is set in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2429,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[529,615,707,861,997,1019,1055],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA bittersweet novel with enormous heart: Laia Jufresa, Umami - Translating Women<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2018\/07\/09\/laia-jufresa-umami\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A bittersweet novel with enormous heart: Laia Jufresa, Umami - Translating Women\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (OneWorld, 2016). 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