{"id":650,"date":"2019-03-04T16:01:58","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T16:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/?p=650"},"modified":"2019-03-04T16:01:58","modified_gmt":"2019-03-04T16:01:58","slug":"3-books-reviewed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2019\/03\/04\/3-books-reviewed\/","title":{"rendered":"Historical horror, supernatural stories, and a gentle gem: three books reviewed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation<\/em>, tr. Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books)
\nMariana Enriquez, <\/span>Things We Lost in the Fire<\/em>, tr. Megan McDowell (Portobello Books)
\n<\/span>Leonard and Hungry Paul<\/em>, R\u00f3n\u00e1n Hession (Bluemoose Books)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation<\/em>, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books, 2015)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"I started the year\u2019s reading with a book I felt sure would be a safe bet, Jenny Erpenbeck\u2019s Visitation<\/em> (translated by Susan Bernofsky for Portobello Books). I\u2019d greatly enjoyed Erpenbeck\u2019s two other books in translation, the magnificent The End of Days <\/em>and Go Went Gone<\/em>, and so completing the Erpenbeck\/Bernofsky\/Portobello trilogy seemed like a good way to get my 2019 reading off to a stellar start.<\/p>\n

And yet\u2026 I was disappointed. I simply didn\u2019t connect with the story or the characters in Visitation<\/em>. There are many themes in Visitation <\/em>that are echoed in The End of Days<\/em> \u2013 most notably, the progression of German history through the 20th<\/sup> century \u2013 but whereas in The End of Days <\/em>this is viewed through a single character who lives (and dies, and lives again) through the events, in Visitation <\/em>the focus is on a house by a lake in Brandenburg, which sees inhabitants (including a family of Jews and a regiment of soldiers) come and go throughout the years, and stands as a silent witness to the atrocities of the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Visitation <\/em>is as beautifully written and consummately translated as The End of Days <\/em>and Go Went Gone<\/em>, with many instances of Erpenbeck\u2019s brutally poetic minimalism, such as in this extract: \u201cTwo months after Arthur and Hermine get into the gas truck in Kulmhof outside of \u0141odz, after Arthur\u2019s eyes pop out of their sockets as he asphyxiates, and Hermine in her death throes defecates on the feet of a woman she\u2019s never seen before, all their assets, together with the assets remaining in Germany that belonged to their son, Ludwig, who has emigrated, are seized\u2026\u201d The house with its specially designed walk-in closet is also suitably spooky, and there are some understated one-liners brimming with personal and historical tragedy (\u201cthen she takes off her shoes forever and goes to stand on the board to be shot\u201d) and lyrical comments on 20th<\/sup>-century German history (\u201ceven this dutiful German official had known that home would never again be called Bavaria, the Baltic coast or Berlin, home had been transformed into a time that now lay behind him, Germany had been irrevocably transformed into something disembodied, a lost spirit that neither knew nor was forced to imagine all these horrific things.\u201d) So it\u2019s not that I disliked Visitation<\/em>, but it didn\u2019t engage me in the way that The End of Days <\/em>and Go Went Gone <\/em>did. I found it hard to maintain interest in (and thus enthusiasm for) the story\/stories, and the house itself failed to move me. It\u2019s always worth reading Erpenbeck, so I wouldn\u2019t advise against reading Visitation<\/em>, but I did feel that it had almost been a practice run for the utter brilliance of The End of Days<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire<\/em>, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Portobello Books, 2017)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"Two things that don\u2019t normally appeal to me are horror stories and the supernatural, so Things We Lost in the Fire<\/em> (a collection of supernatural horror stories) wasn\u2019t an obvious choice for me. Yet it has received consistently excellent reviews, and with good reason: Mariana Enriquez writes characters and situations that are universally recognisable, and twists them deftly yet mercilessly into your worst nightmares. You\u2019ll know from my reviews of Samanta Schweblin\u2019s Fever Dream<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and Mouthful of Birds<\/em><\/a>\u00a0how much I admire Megan McDowell\u2019s translations, and her translation of Enriquez\u2019s short stories is perfectly controlled and dark, showcasing her own admiration<\/a> for \u201cwriters who can combine the transgressive joy of horror with literary depth and original style\u201d.<\/p>\n

Things We Lost in the Fire <\/em>is about as perfect an example of the art of short story writing as I\u2019ve seen. Each story is exquisitely crafted: the details are full while being minimal, the characterisation impeccable, and the descriptive sections vivid yet concise. I\u2019m going to focus on the two stories that I enjoyed the most: the first was \u2018Under the Black Water\u2019, with its themes of environmental pollution, deformed children, and the monsters we unleash on the world. A female district attorney known for her integrity is following up leads on a slum murder case when the victims seem to rise from the dead \u2013 indeed, from the depths \u2013 and we are invited not only to see a grotesque reality we might prefer to ignore, but question our own complicity in this reality for the fact of having ignored it. If this doesn\u2019t reel you in, perhaps a quotation will: \u201cShe had no time to react; the priest was drunk, but his movement when he grabbed her gun was surprisingly fast and precise. She couldn\u2019t even fight back, nor did she see that the deformed child had turned around and started screaming mutely. His mouth was open and he screamed without a sound.\u201d You\u2019ll have to read it to find out what fate awaits the priest, the DA, and the child.<\/p>\n

The other story that really stood out for me was the title story, \u2018Things We Lost in the Fire\u2019, in which women protest against their life of silence and suffering by setting themselves on fire. Self-immolation spreads as if by contagion, women burning themselves to confront male violence and a society that tells them how they should be. But this is not necessarily presented as a positive thing: while one burned woman describes it as \u201ca new kind of beauty\u201d, the pain \u2013 and deaths \u2013 resulting from this macabre struggle for control and agency are also detailed. And when the \u201cbonfires\u201d become commonplace, society simply accepts the shift, the protagonist\u2019s mother so chillingly committed to the cause that she would offer her daughter up in sacrifice. Nothing is straightforward or black and white in Enriquez\u2019s stories, and that\u2019s why, though I wouldn\u2019t have expected to be championing a collection of horror stories, I found Things we Lost in the Fire <\/em>to be excellent.<\/p>\n

Leonard and Hungry Paul<\/em>, R\u00f3n\u00e1n Hession (Bluemoose Books, forthcoming 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"And now for something completely different\u2026 my Twitter friend, R\u00f3n\u00e1n Hession<\/a>, is releasing his debut novel this month with independent publisher Bluemoose Books<\/a>, and I had the joy of reading an advance copy of this anthem to gentleness and quiet humour. I first encountered R\u00f3n\u00e1n during Women in Translation month last August, when we both read and loved Margarita Garc\u00eda Robayo\u2019s Fish Soup <\/em>(translated by Charlotte Coombe for Charco Press, and reviewed here<\/a>), and we\u2019ve exchanged many comments about our women in translation reading ever since. I was slightly nervous about reading his own work (if I wasn\u2019t crazy about it, wouldn\u2019t it be terribly awkward?) but I didn\u2019t have to deal with that, because it is a SUPERB debut. Through his two main characters (the eponymous Leonard and Hungry Paul), Hession finds pathos in the everyday, turning the humdrum into something magical.<\/p>\n

We meet socially awkward Leonard just after his mother\u2019s death, at a time when the family of his best friend (Hungry Paul) is preparing for the wedding of Hungry Paul\u2019s older sister, Grace. Hession combines instances of the unsaid (we never find out why Hungry Paul got his nickname, and he may or may not be autistic, but the word is never used) with others of great detail (I never thought accounts of board game marathons could be so compelling, and just wait for the moment when an irate Hungry Paul takes a past-its-use-by-date tin of Roses chocolates back to the supermarket), and writes every page with immense warmth; to read Leonard and Hungry Paul <\/em>is to live a while in their world. I love that R\u00f3n\u00e1n was unafraid to write a book where nothing \u201chappens\u201d as such \u2013 because life is happening on every page, and this is one of the most life-affirming books I have read in a long time. Its gentle tone harbours some profound insights (\u201cIt may well be that if you truly want to open a heart, you need to break it open\u201d; \u201cWe are never entirely outside of life\u2019s choices; everything leads somewhere\u201d), and by the end I had tears streaming down my face. I didn\u2019t want to say goodbye to these characters, I cared about them: I wanted to tell Hungry Paul that the \u201cstrange pocket-within-a-pocket that denim jeans have\u201d is called a coin pocket (this knowledge would have saved him from a great childhood humiliation) and hug Grace when she realised that \u201cit was possible to make someone feel so loved at the very moment you are letting them go.\u201d Gentleness and kindness are under-rated qualities, and they abound in Leonard and Hungry Paul<\/em>: the characters may be fictional, but a real person wrote them, and that makes me feel just that bit better about the world.<\/p>\n

As always, thank you for reading, and I\u2019ll be back on Friday for a special International Women\u2019s Day post!<\/p>\n

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

Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation, tr. Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books) Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire, tr. Megan McDowell (Portobello Books) Leonard and Hungry Paul, R\u00f3n\u00e1n Hession (Bluemoose Books) Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books, 2015) I started the year\u2019s reading with a book I felt sure would be […]<\/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":[153,491,539,597,613,783,879,981,1033],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHistorical horror, supernatural stories, and a gentle gem: three books reviewed - 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\/2019\/03\/04\/3-books-reviewed\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Historical horror, supernatural stories, and a gentle gem: three books reviewed - Translating Women\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jenny Erpenbeck, Visitation, tr. 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