Category: Periodical Recaps

Karavan: Alla dessa trådar

The theme for issue 2/2024 of Karavan was “text och textil,” which led to an interesting mix of fiction focused on textiles as well as how textiles have functioned as vehicles of meaning and narrative.

This issue’s author interview was with Nicaragua’s Sergio Ramírez, and as a result two more books ended up on my TBR (Margarita, How Beautiful the Sea and The Sky Weeps for Me). You don’t usually see commercial genre fiction like mystery thrillers get a lot of discussion space in fancy literature circles (unless they’re Raymond Chandler) so I’m especially curious to see what The Sky Weeps for Me is like. Maybe an exception was made because Ramírez was very clear in the interview that the genre was the best tool he had for conveying political upheaval as he wanted to. Who knows! The other big author feature was a memorial piece on Maryse Condé, who passed away earlier this year. Luckily for me, several of her books are available at the Stockholm library, including a few in the original French.

This issue’s Diary of a Translator feature was from Anna Gustafsson Chen, who is at work on a Swedish translation of Liu Qing’s History Through Words. History is a sprawling novel of political upheaval in 1920s and 1930s Manchuria, so Chen describes her dive into Chinese advertisements, propaganda posters, and the numerous anti-Japanese resistance movements of the time.

The long-form reviews included  a pair of novels from Benjamín Labatut, Shehan Karunatilaka’s extremely hyped and much-lauded The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, and a few novels from César Aira. The Labatut review was pretty lukewarm, but I’ve heard a lot about Seven Moons in a lot of different places, so I could be tempted into picking that one up. Aira’s novels were also pretty well reviewed and the one that sounded the most interesting ended up on my TBR. Less a review and more of a news item was a brief piece on the publication of letters between some of the titans of Latin American literature in a collection called Las Cartas del Boom. Interesting to note but currently only available in Spanish, so not much I can do there!

None of the shorter reviews caught my interest, though apparently The Three Body Problem has finally come out in Swedish! (Translated by Anna Gustafsson Chen from the earlier “Diary of a Translator” segment.) The state of science fiction and fantasy published in Swedish, whether originally or in translation, is a bit anemic so it’s encouraging to see huge titles like this get a Swedish release. Less encouraging that it only came out in 2024 (the original was published in 2006; the English translation came out in 2014), but more encouraging again that it’s a translation directly from Mandarin rather than indirectly via the English.

The themed selections took a surprisingly wide and educational tack. The first was a revised and expanded essay from Maria Küchen, originally broadcast on OBS P1, on weaving, stories, and memory: the Andean record-keeping knots known as khipu that we no longer know how to interpret, Malian bógólanfini, the core rope memory that helped send American astronauts to the moon, death shrouds from Windover pond.

The next piece was another author memorial, this time in the form of an interview with author Ericah Gwetai about her late daughter Yvonne Vera, also a writer. Karolina Jeppson visited Gwetai at her home in Zimbabwe to discuss Vera, sewing her own clothing, and the similarities between writing and weaving. Vera’s The Stone Virgins also ended up on my TBR.

The third piece finally delves into literature, with a short story from Karavan favorite Xi Xi, translated into Swedish as “Blusen”: a fantastic monologue from a cotton blouse to its new owner. Karavan features a lot of poetry from Xi Xi that I’ve struggled to enjoy (including this issue), but this little story was a gem and I loved it! Unfortunately, it’s unclear if the collection it was taken from has been translated in its entirety yet, so…that’s all, folks. The final Xi Xi piece in this issue was a collection of teddy bears Xi Xi designed and sewed herself, based on figures out of Chinese history and stories, selected from The Teddy Bear Chronicles.

Back to nonfiction, this time with an essay and artist statement from Marcia Harvey Isaksson. She combines weaving with performance art, and I’m disappointed that I’ve missed some of her most interesting installations.

Some more poetry, this time from Tamer Fathy’s poetry collection Yesterday I Lost A Button. All of the poems are from the perspective of clothing; one of the ones featured in Karavan is available in English: “When Clothes Were Small.”

The next short story was “Mattan,” from Narine Abgarjan, which was so good that I immediately put Abgarjan’s full-length novels on my TBR.

More weaving and multimedia art, this time from Eva Vargö‘s collection of paper weaving. It shouldn’t surprise me that people weave with paper, but there you go. Vargö goes into some detail about the differences in different kinds of paper, and focuses a lot on traditional paper materials from Japan and Korea.

Usually I skip the children’s literature sections, but this time it caught my eye: an interview with Christian Epanya about his latest book, Les rois de la sape, a picture book about sapeurs and La SAPE (Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes). La sape is a cross between a fashion trend and a social movement originating in Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville that has become a part of the larger African diaspora, usually compared to dandyism. It’s even been codefied (somewhat) into, for example, ten commandments of La SAPE.  While I don’t have any particular reason to read the book, the article did send me down a fascinating rabbithole and I learned something new.

The education continued with an article from Tina Ignell on different forms of dying and patterns in textiles, from shibori in Japan and bandhani in West Bengal to grave goods in Peru and neckerchiefs in Mora, Sweden.

The next short story from Irenosen Okojie was a Swedish translation of “Synsepalum” by Birgitta Wallin. I don’t know that I cared for it much, but that might have been a matter of translation, so I’m glad that Minor Literature has the English original up for free for comparison.

The final piece on the textiles theme was an essay by Lars Vargö on costumes in kabuki and noh theater, and how their use reflects the different theatrical styles and traditions.

Solid issue! Too many books! Can’t hug every cat!

Historiskan 1/2024

My airport read ahead of my trip to the US in May. What did this issue cover?

      • An interview about a feminist history podcast, whose name now escapes me
      • A biography of Aphra Behn
      •  Svenska Norgehjälpen, Sweden’s aid project for Norway during Nazi occupation
      • Holomodor, which seems highly relevant these days
      • Tehuanas: Zapotec women from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico who have long enjoyed a relative independence from, and equal standing with, men
      • And, on the flip side of history in the new world: a biography of Inés Suárez, conquistador
      • St. Vitus’ Dance
      • A fascinating biography of Maria Enquist, a notable “beauty expert” (and probable grifter) at the turn of the twentieth century who offered some of the first cosmetic surgery in Sweden (paraffin injections)
      • Queen Christina of Saxony, the reigning queen during the Siege of Tre Kronor
      • Sweden’s first theater, a project put together by two noblewomen but which no longer stands today because it was torn down soon after its construction
      • Brief little bios of women long-distance swimmers
      • And of course the cover story on Amelia Earhart

Karavan: Minne

The theme for 2024’s first issue of Karavan was memory, and included a fair number of biographical essays from Julie Otsuka, Maaza Mengiste, Ann-Marie Tung Hermelin, and Nona Fernández. Otsuka’s The Swimmers and Mengiste’s The Shadow King went on my TBR as a result.

This issue also featured rising stars within Brazilian literature. In addition to Jeferson Tonório, who was the subject of a feature length précis by Balsam Karam in the previous issue, Isi de Paula highlighted several other names: Geovani Martins, Itamar Vicira Junior, Luciany Aparecida, Stênio Gardel (The Words that Remain), Micheliny Verunschk, Carla Madeira, Aline Bei, and Mariana Salomão Carrara. de Paula also sat down for an interview with Tatiana Salem Levy (The House in Smyrna).

“Kino Karavan,” the recurring movie column, highlighted the animated film adaptation of Sultana’s Dream, El sueño de la sultana.

The translator’s diary column focused on Meta Ottosson’s work on Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor‘s Dust. I always find this segment to be an interesting peek into the lives of others, since literary translation is such a different beast from what I do. Ottosson chronicles her attempts to find the right words for things like buses, pole dance terminology, and Kenyan state officials and legislation; meanwhile, I’ve never had to cold email Nordiska Afrikainstitutet to answer a terminology question for me. The diary was followed by Ottosson’s translation of Owuor’s story “These Fragments.”

And then the grand finale, the reviews. The author interviews are always interesting, but the downside is that authors can be a lot more interesting than their books. Reviews, on the other hand, are always about the experience of reading a particular personality rather than conveying the personality, making them better indicators of what I might like or not. From this issue I took note of:

  • Rien ne t’appartient, Nathacha Appanah
  • Hardly War, Don Mee Choi
  • The Naked Eye, Yoko Tawada

The pile grows higher faster than I can read through it!

Karavan: Mikronovellernas universum

I guess magazines are the only thing I read anymore?

My third and final subscription (though Med andra ord looks interesting, and we won’t count Asymptote since I don’t send them any money) is Karavan, a literary magazine that focuses on literature in translation, primarily from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. The theme for this issue was “micronoveller,” or microfiction. That makes this the first issue I’ve read where all the literature featured was self contained, i.e. no extracts from novels.

What did I learn? In brief, that microfiction is a rich tradition in Iraq, a popular new form of content on apps and websites in China, and that Ana María Shua is Argentina’s reigning microfiction queen. In addition to the (very short) stories and poems translated from Arabic, Mandarin, and Spanish, this issue featured interviews with Pilar Quintana and Monique Ilboudo, a précis on Jeferson Tonório by Balsam Karam (whose novel Singulariteten I recently finished) and an essay by Mariana Enríquez on journalism and Argentinian cuisine. Out of the new releases reviewed, this is my note to myself that Samar Yazbek‘s Where the Wind Calls Home (Swe: Där vinden vilar) sounded the most interesting.

Karam and a Palestinian poet from Gaza featured, Somaya el Sousi, were both featured at Stockholms litteraturmässan this past weekend. I was unable to attend el Sousi’s reading, though I did pick up her volume En flöjt av mörker. Karam’s panel discussion on libraries was much later in the day, however, and fit nicely into my schedule. She was very funny and very light, not at all what I would have expected from her writing here in Karavan or in Singulariteten, but those are separate thoughts.

Historiskan 4/2023

Since I’ve made such a deliberate point of trying to summarize what I’ve read in the Delayed Gratification magazine that I subscribe to, I thought I would do the same for Historiskan, another periodical I subscribe to.

1. A brief essay from Cecilia Nordlund about founding Popkollo.

2. A highlight on three women—Gerda Meyerson, Maria Forsell, and Emma Anstrin—who were part of fighting for Deaf rights alongside an article about plans for a Museum of Deaf Culture that will open in 2026.

3. An interview with Eva Dahlman about her upcoming book about women photographers in Sweden from 1848 to 1968.

4. The cover story: Eva Bonde writing on basically A League of Their Own, aka the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Bonde points out that part of the post-war decline of the AAGPBL was the advent of television and televised games: people who enjoyed watching the sport no longer had to actually attend games, but could watch from the comfort of their homes. An interesting point I didn’t think much about before, though I also never thought much about women’s baseball in the US except with respect to, well, A League of Their Own. And it was of course segregated, so Black women weren’t included and instead played alongside men in the Negro Leagues. (I remember reading about the Negro Leagues in elementary school but not finding it all that interesting as a ten-year-old; it’s since become one of those things that I feel like I should read about now as an adult, in part because I’m more interested in baseball now than I was as a ten-year-old.)

5. A bio of author Maria Gripes by Lisbeth Håkansson Petré in honor of the centennial of her birth. The headline called her one of Sweden’s most read authors of children’s and young adult novels but I’d never even heard of her until this, so I guess that’s another cultural gap filled. A big part of the reason I subscribe to these kinds of magazines.

6. A history of political protest music in South America by Bella Stenberg. A lot of it focuses specifically on nueva canción in Chile and the women involved with the movement: Violetta Parra, Margot Loyola, Gabriela Pizarro, and Mercedes Sosa.

7. A brief biography by Karin Tegenborg Falkdalen of Kristina av Holstein-Gottorp, a queen of Sweden. Not my favorite Drottning Kristina but still an interesting read nonetheless.

8. A brief on the “tickle torturers” (les chatouilleuses) of Mayotte by Victoria Machmudov. It’s kind of wild to read about a colony rejecting independence, but maybe my brain is melted from being American. Some of the major players in the movement to break away from the rest of the Comoros archipelago and retain a connection with France were women, including Zéna M’déré. Unsurprisingly, things aren’t going great in Mayotte at the moment. Their wealth relative to their neighbors in the archipelago has led to a lot of immigration, but they’re still the poorest departement in France.

9. A look at the women in the animal rights movement by Camilla Bergvall: Lizzie Lind af Hageby, Leisa Schartau, Princess Eugénie, Elna Tenow, Ellen Börtz, Birgitta Carlsson, and Ruth Harrison.

10. Another historical biography, this time Olga of Kiev, by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson.

11. A look by Pauliina Räsänen at what the circus life entailed for women at the turn of the 20th century and its role as a space of relative liberation: a break from gender norms, the ability to travel freely, being able to support one’s self (and out-earning a lot of men, at that). Too many names for me to bother listing but I thought Laura Madigan was interesting if only because of the tragedy surrounding her and her family.

12. Mette Hardenberg and her encounter with a demon, as summarized by Julia Håkansson. It’s a mildly interesting story, certainly moreso than that skeletal Wikipedia entry makes it out to be, so I’ll summarize the summary here:

Hardenberg got married off, as women tended to do back in the 1500s. Her husband published an account, in which he claims that his wife is unwilling to share the story herself but that he thinks it’s worth telling. For a period of six weeks, she was tormented by an evil spirit that beat the shit out of her if she mentioned God. Then she had a vision (in a dream?) of God, who told her to make a pilgrimage from Totterupholm to a tower in the Vallø castle. It was a trip of thirty kilometers and she went disguised as a beggar, and then at the end she had a showdown with the demon in said tower, where she won thanks to her knowledge of the Bible.

It’s hard to know what to make of the account today. The go-to explanation is that it was some kind of mental health struggle, and historians point to similar problems that had afflicted other members of her family. Others have more recently suggested that it could have been a form of marketing as a show of Hardenberg’s spiritual strength in conquering a demon—and modesty in not wanting to talk about it—that would win her esteem in the eyes of the church.

13. And finally, a longer piece by Sari Nauman on the first refugees in Sweden: from then-Swedish Latvia to Sweden proper during The Great Northern War which lasted over twenty goddamn years, what a grim thing to consider. (People were already fleeing religious persecution before The Great Northern War, of course, but the first time the Swedish word for refugee—flykting—appears in text it’s in connection with a woman fleeing Russian aggression in the Great Northern War.)

Delayed Gratification No. 52

One of the reasons that my book reading is taking a temporary dip is because I had some magazines to catch up on. Since I think those are just as important as books—and just as prone to otherwise getting lost in the void—I decided it was worth summarizing them. For posterity’s sake, and also to help me retain what I read.

Background: Delayed Gratification is a UK publication put out by an organization called Slow Journalism. It was recommended to me after I mourned the loss of the English language arm of the incomparable De Correspondent, a news project that is unavailable to me because I don’t read Dutch. De Correspondent features long-form stories focused on underlying causes or trends rather than rapid-fire news updates, and after a successful launch in the Netherlands they expanded into the English-language market as The Correspondent in 2019. Things went well until the economic fallout from the pandemic kneecapped their “pay what you want” subscription model, and rather than selling adspace or short shrifting the writers and graphic designers, they closed the project down. All of the English-language stories they published are still available on their website if you’re curious.

Enter Delayed Gratification! It scratches a similar itch and carries a mix of longer form journalism and shorter interviews/explainers (called “Moments that mattered”), along with more infographics than I really would care to read. Nobody’s perfect!

Every issue features a different artist on the cover, and opens with an interview as well as some of their other work. This quarter it was Robin F. Williams, with “Matched.” None of her other pieces are really a….match…for the painting featured on the cover (pictured above), nor was hers the most interesting or insightful artist interview I’ve read:

Starting a fire with a match requires precision, care and timing. It’s an individual action with the potential for a profound impact.

“Skill issue” was a friend’s glib response to that quote. “Grant for writers to take a wilderness basics course…”

Longer pieces

1. “Nahel Merzouk is buried amid riots in France.” The article by Rob Orchard highlights the work of French journalist Valentin Gendrot, who went undercover as a cop and wrote about it in the book Flic. French cops seem to resemble their American counterparts, is my takeaway, though perhaps they aren’t quite so heavily militarized (yet). Flic also ended up on my TBR: a French language and non-fiction two-fer!

2. “The coming storm.” Joint reporting by Matthew Lee and Rob Orchard on the bankruptcy crisis for many UK councils, whether current or looming. In some cases, poor decisions were made (going all-in on commercial real estate investment in the name of “development”). In others it’s just bad luck—shifting demographics is one reason highlighted in the article, where national funds are allocated to councils at the local level based on population data that is wildly out of date. Upon reflection, maybe that’s less bad luck and more “this is what happens when you kneecap actually-useful parts of bureaucracy.” Some areas are full to bursting with families with young children, for example, but not seeing the national funding to provide schoolingfor them because demographics statistics at the national level haven’t been updated.

3. “Metropolis now.” Marcus Webb, with photos by Nick Hannes. Projects to move national capitals: Egypt, South Korea, Nigeria, Kazakhstan. The people designing and paying for these new cities all gush about Dubai,  striving to emulate it in their city planning. This story, in combination with the previous article about bankrupt councils and a later one in this issue about rich people who want to live forever, is rich grist for the dystopian science fiction mill: wealthy, powerful people trying to build self-sustaining isolated little enclaves for themselves, away from unwashed masses, for all eternity.

4. “What lies beneath.” James Montague. Last July the loading ramp from the MS Estonia was pulled out of the Baltic, sparking renewed interest in assorted Scandinavian and Baltic conspiracy theories about why the cruise ship really sank. I didn’t know much about the topic going in, since it’s never come up in my life here—just that the MS Estonia had been a cruise ship that sank with absolutely catastrophic fatalities, and that there are a whole raft (if you’ll pardon the pun) of conspiracy theories about it. Montague interviewed several people with different relationships to the disaster: a Swedish survivor, a former Swedish politician from the Green party who remains convinced that Russian espionage was involved, the Estonian son of a couple who were lost in the sinking, and another young Estonian guy who was so fascinated with the sinking he grew up to become an expert in analyzing shipwrecks.

5. “Who wants to live forever?” Matthew Lee. This one touched a nerve with me. I can’t find the topic of “eccentric billionaires who want to live forever” interesting or entertaining—all I can think about is the tremendous exploitation and waste of resources involved. It also seemed clear that Lee doesn’t have the requisite background in science to really contextualize “longevity research.” (I’m directly quoting their language but I’m also making the scare quotes gesture with my fingers.) The project is painted in a mostly optimistic, friendly light and most of the people Lee interviews are of basically the same opinion. This is in contrast to the article on the MS Estonia, where Montague included a variety of perspectives that kept the speculation distinct from what could be asserted based on facts and data. To Lee’s credit, he also made sure to speak with a noted critic of the movement along with its cheerleaders, but the bulk of the article is concerned with the longevity research’s possibilities and proponents.

The last thing worth mentioning about this one is that one of the longevity companies Lee discusses is The Methuselah Foundation, and he makes a point of drawing the explicit (inoffensive and even vaguely favorable) connection between the foundation and its star backer, Peter Thiel. Yet nowhere does Lee see fit to mention this interest—not only longevity research generally, but Thiel’s participation specifically—has become one of the richest veins for Qanon conspiracy theorists to tap: tall tales about wealthy elites preying on children in pursuit of eternal youth, Thiel shooting up adrenochrome, God knows what else. Nor does Lee mention Thiel’s more unsavory, anti-democratic activities, which include limiting journalistic freedom as best he can. Is that relevant for a journalist to bring up in an article about longevity research? Do I just have a particularly strong personal antipathy towards Peter Thiel? Maybe it can be both?

6. “A wolf at the door.” Harriet Salem. The reintroduction of wolves to Europe is tricky going. Most frustrating seems to be that the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, could just unilaterally decide to undo years of wildlife preservation work by greenlighting wolf culls.

In absolutely, definitely, for sure unrelated news, der Leyen’s prize pony was killed by a wolf a few years ago.

The thing I noticed in this article was how many of the concerned farmers who want to bring back wolf culls are self-described “hobby farmers.” It reminds me a bit of Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid at Versailles, though to be fair, maybe hobby farming is how we slowly start to decentralize food supplies so that we have more food ready at hand. (But then maybe it’s more practical to grow grains, fruits, and vegetables than to raise livestock? In which case wolves are irrelevant?) Plus, left to their own devices with a normal mix of population, cattle (and I assume sheep) are a pack animal that have interesting strategies for surviving attacks from predators. There’s really interesting material about how cattle fared after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, which I don’t have the time to look up right now. Not to mention that, as Salem also points out, domestic dogs are more of a threat to livestock than wild wolves.

7. “Derna is a city drowning in sorrow.” Interview by Marcus Webb with photographer Mohamed Nabil, Zainab Chamoun interpreting. An on-the-ground look at the flooding in Libya. Hopefully they’ll put at least the photos from this story up and I can come back and link to them because I think it’s difficult to understand the scope of this flooding—especially considering other huge geopolitical crises going on at the moment—without seeing pictures of the damage.

Moments that mattered

1. “Lahaina is destroyed by wildfires.” Interview with Crystal Mitchell, Lahaina resident and business owner, by Matthew Lee. It seems that incompetence was a huge contributing factor into the fires becoming as bad as they were, as well as the scope of the damage. Unlike previous wildfires, the Mitchells (and many others) received no warning to evacuate and had no time to prepare. The escaped with their lives, but they lost two pets in the fire and Mitchell’s husband suffered pretty serious burns. Lots of events in the last few years, including the Lahaina fires, have me thinking about the inherent fragility of tourism-based economies.

2. “Luis Rubiales forces a kiss on Jenni Hermoso.” Interview with Verónica Boquete, former Spain women’s national football team captain, by Harriet Salem. A short summary of the state of misogyny in women’s football in Spain. Spoiler: it’s pretty awful.

3. “Azerbaijan takes control of Nagorno-Karabakh.” Interview with Laurence Broers, co-founder of the Caucasus Survey, by James Montague. Speaking of stories that get swallowed in huge geopolitical crises, how about this one? I had a vague sense of violence in Azerbaijan at some point recently but that was about it. This wasn’t a huge in-depth explainer of the history of the relationship between Azerbaijan and Armenia, but still informative. The major takeaway from me was how much Turkey’s support made a difference, especially as Russia’s presence in the region is basically nothing now that they’re caught in the quagmire of Ukraine.

Other

1. “Saddam and the supergun.” Marcus Webb with art by Carol Adlam. A sort of graphic novel visual narrative of the life of Gerald Bull. All the conspiracy theory talk with the MS Estonia and Qanon when there’s much more fertile (and likely) ground right here, with briefcases full of cash and assassinations and everything!