Month: February 2023

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century

Another book club book, this time the Discord book club. Turns out if you let me show up once, I never leave. (Well, except that time I dropped in to discuss Solaris and then didn’t attend another meeting until Light From Uncommon Stars.)

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is a snappy little collection of short stories from Kim Fu. They all go pretty quick, making this book another member of the illustrious One-Sit Read Club for me. I’m struggling to remember any others except The Crying of Lot 49, but I know there’s at least one more besides. Possibly Kokoro? Honorable mention: The Seep.

As a short story collection, there’s not really any plot to recount. Around half of the stories flirt with science fiction, or speculative fiction, however you want to call it, whether by relying on technology beyond what’s currently available or by inventing scientifically plausible monsters, illnesses, or mutations. Regardless of genre, all of the stories share a deft, light touch that in the end is possibly a bit too light. Few of them have a closed or definitive ending; a bit like Weasels in the Attic, they all have the sensation of a kind of literary show and tell. “Here’s this weird idea I had. Sure is weird, isn’t it? Anyway…” Sometimes this works for the subject matter, but other times it feels a little bit like a cop-out, like Fu couldn’t figure out what the logical conclusion of their idea should be. This was maybe the most frustrating in “#ClimbingNation,” which has enough paydirt drama and conflict set up in just one post-funeral scene to fuel an entire novel (hidden stashes of gold bars! unresolved guilt! mysterious pasts!) but instead simply ends. On the other hand, it works well in “Doll,” where that kind of unresolved tension works because the story is classic, old-school horror straight out of Weird Tales. Then there’s a third class of story where the lack of conclusive ending renders the entire story forgettable. Like, very literally forgettable—in the hour between finishing the book and starting this post, I still had to look up reviews to remind myself of what I had just read.

My personal favorite out of the collection was “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867,” the first story in the collection and which maybe doomed the other stories by setting expectations too high because it is really, really good. I might have even choked up a bit. And while I don’t know that “Twenty Hours” is necessarily a great story, it perfectly encapsulates a particular mood and dynamic that I recognize from being in a long-term relationship so I’ll credit Fu with that much.

Overall I’m not mad I read it, because Fu has a way with words and it’s a delight to reside in their world, even for those too-brief moments. I expect it’s a bit hard to track down at the moment due to new release hype, but if you come across it in the bookshelves in a year or two it’s worth the browse.

Axplock ur idéhistorien II

I guess the theme so far in 2023 is “reading other people’s books.” I closed out 2022 with The Power of the Dog and then ended up reading Stick (twice! for translation’s sake!) straightaway in 2023, both at the recommendation of a friend. In between those, Axplock ur idéhistorien II arrived on my doorstep—a book I’d promised to babysit for a digital nomad friend who wanted to order it off Adlibris but had no Swedish address to ship to.

And one does not ask me to babysit a book without expecting me to read it.

It’s a tidy little collection spanning just about two hundred years of Western thought, with a focus on the major social ideas that continue to leave their mark on politics today. (This is a polite way to say that a few of the selections are nothing less than noxious.) The selections are abridged when necessary, with context for each selection as well as a short biography of each author:

  • Kant, “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”
  • Hegel, “Reason in History”
  • Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
  • Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
  • Marx & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”
  • Gobineau, “An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races”
  • Bremer, Hertha
  • Darwin, On the Origin of Species
  • Mill, “The Subjection of Women”
  • Spencer, The Man Versus the State
  • Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morality
  • Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
  • “Program of the NSDAP”
  • Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism”
  • Beauvoir, The Second Sex
  • Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  • Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

If you took the above table of contents as a reading list it would probably keep you busy for a year, so collections like these with just The Hits and the central theses are great to have on hand and are much cheaper than, say, a first-year philosophy survey course textbook. (Did I keep mine because I knew I would want to revisit it later? Yes. Have I done so? Actually, also yes.)  I might buy my own copies of both volumes just to have around for reference, who knows.

Do I have a similar English recommendation? Not really. Passion of the Western Mind has a similar, if broader scope, but it’s entirely a secondary source. I had Ten Great Works of Philosophy in my library for years and kind of wish I still had it.

Stick (and Einar Heckscher)

Back in January I was having a few beers with the same friend who recommended The Power of the Dog and we got on to the topic of Elmore Leonard.

“Stick! There’s one for you. Classic Leonard.”

Elmore Leonard is a legend and there’s nothing interesting I can add to the conversation about him. What’s noteworthy is that I read Stick in English (available from the good people at archive.org) and then, immediately thereafter, the Swedish translation by Einar Heckscher. Unlike the last time I became fixated on a translation (Gösta Berlings saga), there’s only one translation (so far as I’m aware?) and thus no comparisons are possible.

My drinking companion was adamant that no Swedish translation of Elmore Leonard could possibly work. I didn’t really have an opinion one way or another, maintaining neutrality as a professional courtesy to a fellow translator. Nonetheless, I’m a hyperactive golden retriever when it comes to talking about books, and once I cracked open the Swedish version he was subject to a slew of random WhatsApp messages, complete with screenshots and photos, whenever I thought a particular translation choice was interesting. Which, despite heroic efforts on my end to practice at least a modicum of restraint, was still pretty often. Sorry, Richie!

This translation of Stick came out in 1987, essentially contemporaneously with the 1985 original, as I guess is usually the case with popular commercial fiction. My biggest takeaway from the book, just viz a viz translation, was, “The internet is a life-saver.” How many times a day do I dump a term into Ecosia, Linguee, Folkets, Google ngrams, whatever else, just to wrap my head around it? How do you handle running up against the brick wall of foreign slang when you don’t have instant answers at your fingertips? If you can knock that one down, how do you dig through the slang of your own language beyond the scope of your personal usage? This is how I ended up asking my sambo and coworkers and bilingual friends how they would translate the recreational drug term “mainline” into Swedish.

My second thought was to wonder what a new translation would look like if it came out today. I think a lot more of the English would remain as calques, or be only moderately “Swedefied,” and I think there’d be a fair amount of förortssvenska. (Förortssvenska was already a thing when the book came out, but I don’t think the nearly-50-year-old Heckscher was spending a lot of time with teenagers in Rinkeby.)

My third thought was to go down a rabbit hole on the topic of Einar Heckscher himself, just because there’s actually information about him online. There’s a whole back catalogue of Swedish culture that I can’t ever hope to catch up with, and Heckscher is one of many, many items in there. I only learned about him, and by association the rest of his highly accomplished family, because I was curious about who translated this Elmore Leonard novel—judging by at least a couple Flashback posts,* though, I should have already been acquainted with Heckscher as a 70s prog rock figure from bands like Sogmusobil and Levande livet. A couple of interviews in Svenska Dagbladet and Socialpolitik got me up to speed, as did a couple of obituaries. Son Björn is hard to track down anywhere online, but his daughter at least followed in her father’s footsteps and translated? contributed to? a Swedish collection of Bukowski. Hard to say, since her father was also celebrated for his Swedish translations of Bukowski and that appears to be her only published work to date.

Incidentally, the Swedes on Flashback seem largely to share my drinking companion’s spitting rage at Heckscher’s translations, which can roughly be summed up as:

Han förvandlar allt till buskis och pilsnerfilm och förvränger allt han kommer över.

*Apologies for linking to The Bad Place, but as Flashback threads go it’s pretty innocuous.

Another point in favor for those left-field, organic and algorithm-free random book recommendations. Without the prompting and social context, would I have bothered to dip back into Elmore Leonard after a twenty years’ absence? Would I have gone down this weird little rabbit hole of Swedish prog rockers, politicians, and pundits? Absolutely not. But now I have, and so have you, and knowing is half the battle. G. I. Joe!

Weasels in the Attic

All told I’m in three different book clubs, to whom I have varying levels of allegiance. At one end of the spectrum there’s the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club, to which I am more or less firmly committed and which accounts for around 25% of my annual book consumption. One step below that is the neighborhood dinner and book club, which I abstain from attending during The Season at work, but whose selections I often read on my own because I’m otherwise not plugged in to new, or at least recent, Swedish releases. At the other end of the spectrum is the ultra casual “buddy read” group in one of my Discord servers, which I usually ignore unless I’ve already read the book. Such was the case with Light From Uncommon Stars, which was an Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club pick for November and then a Discord buddy read for December, meaning this was the rare occasion I was part of the Discord book chat and witness to the process of selecting the next buddy ready book.

That was a long preamble to say, “I read Hiroko Oyamada’s Weasels in the Attic because it was a book club read for a book club I don’t normally attend.”

I also read it because it was short, because as a translator I appreciate reading works in translation, and because it sounded intriguing. It’s hard, even, to decide between classing it as a novella or as a short story collection. We have the same characters throughout, all riffing on the theme of indifference, or even antipathy, towards parenthood, but their only common thread is the same narrator. Each story? chapter? on its own feels a bit unearthly: deliberately flat and almost imagist, where the point isn’t a clever plot or character development but just the mood of the scene.

The word “sinister” comes up in different reviews of the book, but maybe a better word would be “uneasy.” You get that horror movie knot in your stomach, but the other shoe never drops. The narrator’s friends, Urabe and Saiki don’t come across as great husbands, or even decent men, but the narrative doesn’t stick around long enough to confirm or deny those allegations. It’s possible that the young, vulnerable girl Urabe caught eating his stock of fish food is now his wife, but then again, maybe she isn’t. We don’t find out either way. Both of them boss their (significantly) younger wives around and do very little to help in entertaining their guests, but things fail to rise about the level of the inconsiderate to demeaning or abusive. Likewise, the infants in the story are not particularly cuddly or even robust creatures, and in the stories where they appear you have the sense that they’re not going to survive until the end of the chapter (but they do).

If great art, according to Aristotle, is supposed to elicit some sense of catharsis in its audience, then he would have hated this book. (We’ll pretend for a minute that he would have understood the context of modern suburban Japan.) Oyamada shows you a few uncomfortable scenes and then leaves. The result is unsettling.

Did I like it? Hard to say. But it’s so short and goes so quickly—I read it cover to cover before I rolled out of bed one Saturday morning—that I’m not mad I read it, either.