novels – Page 4 – Koba English

Translation State

Ann Leckie’s Translation State was the only book I finished in October. Good thing I read enough during my trip to the US to balance that out!

Translation State is…fine? It’s hard for me to be fair in my evaluation because I recognize that I read it in A Mood, and I also went in with incredibly high expectations because Ancillary Justice was one of the top tier Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club picks not only of the year, but of all time.

In short: everyman Reet Hluid learns that he isn’t entirely human, but actually the offspring of a wayward member of a terrifying and vaguely cannibalistic alien race, the Presger (or rather, their test tube baby science experiment race, Presger Translators, humanoids cooked up to help the ineffable Presger interface with humans). This entirely accidental revelation of his ancestry rips Hluid from his otherwise unremarkable life to be matched with Qven, another Presger Translator who is on the outs with their society.

What do I mean with that nebulous word “matched”? I mean something akin to “set up with.” Presger Translators are casually cannibalistic, or at least sadistic—we learn from Qven that dismemberments and eviscerations are standard fare schoolyard games among Presger Translator children—but then when adulthood hits, this turns from cannibalism into a merging that no matter how much Qven insists isn’t “doing the sex” still reads as “sex,” where the two parties consume each other? physically merge with each other? and then become some kind of new entity split across two bodies that are now a kind of average of both of them.

Hluid and Qven bond over a cheesy space opera, only to get called up before a tribunal to discuss their legal status under the prevailing galactic treaty drawn up between the Presger and the other races within the galaxy (are they human or not?). Violence erupts and chaos ensues, and we learn a little bit more about what the Presger (or Presger Translators?) can do: muck around with spacetime. Hluid and Qven, after nearly an entire book of misunderstanding-through-an-abundance-of-caution, merge and become a more fully realized Presger Translator Adult in order to save the day. You can’t be mad about that being a spoiler, either, because what we’re reading is essentially an alien romance with neopronouns and political intrigue slapped on for good measure; the happily ever after is a given.

The fact that it’s a romance that snuck in through the back door to a more straightforward and high-concept space opera series like Ancillary Justice is maybe why I don’t like it. I don’t enjoy romance. I don’t watch a lot of TV, trashy or otherwise, so I don’t find it qUiRkY aNd sO rELaTabLe when sci-fi characters do. (Love you, Murderbot, but you’re also guilty of this sin.) And despite the neopronouns and the antagonizing, on both ends, about consent and BUT THEY PROBABLY DON’T WANT TO MATCH WITH ME ANYWAY, the relationship between Hluid and Qven still feels pretty normal and straight, and also not particularly believable. Whatever important conversations they have where they bare their souls to each other seem to mostly happen off-screen, while their on-screen (on-page?) courtship seems to consist exclusively of watching TV together.

The comparison didn’t occur to me while I was reading it, but in summarizing the book just now Translation State has pretty strong echoes of The Gods Themselves, at least in terms of Presger biology. Leckie, at least, has a better handle on gender than Asimov.

If you’re thirsty for more Imperial Raadch adjacent content, Translation State scratches that itch. But I wouldn’t hand it off to anyone as an introduction to the Imperial Raadch books or to Leckie generally. Save it for later.

Berries Goodman

Like Emil and the Detectives, Emily Cheney Neville’s Berries Goodman was another parental library inheritance that was always just around the house, never fully absorbed either into my books or my brothers’. It made for a nice break from dusting bookshelves, as it turned out.

We start off in a conversation between teenage Bertrand “Berries” Goodman and his childhood friend Sidney Fine, who Berries hasn’t seen since he moved out of the fictional suburbs of Olcott Corners to New York City. Sidney is playing truant and heading off to New Jersey for the day, for reasons unknown, and has called on Berries in New York for help and to catch up.

Then we flash back to one year in Berries’ and Sidney’s elementary school lives, right after the Goodmans’ relocation to Olcott Corners from New York. Berries quickly befriends Sidney, while jokes and comments from the adults around him make it clear that there is a not-so-subtle strain of anti-Semitism in the neighborhood. When other children, like Berries’ neighbor and frenemy Sandy, repeat similar talking points, Berries reacts in anger and confusion: anger at the insult to his friends (and by now it’s no spoiler that this includes Sidney as well as his friends back in New York) and confusion over the fact that anyone would even believe such stupid things. Everything comes to a head when the trio go ice skating and the bossy but well-meaning Sandy dares Sidney into a stunt that leaves him hospitalized. Sidney’s mother fears that the latent anti-Semitic attitudes are going to start escalating and pulls him out of their school in favor of the school in the nearby Jewish neighborhood and forbids Sidney from playing with Berries. For a while the two meet in secret, but after their fathers catch them out, they’re separated for good.

Not long after, Mrs. Goodman decides she’s tired of the suburban life and the Goodmans move back to New York. Years later this is where we catch up with teenage Berries and Sidney, who is trying to get a bus out of the Port Authority. Berries goes with Sidney back to Olcott Corners and things are eventually smoothed out between the two families.

The condensed version sounds like an anvilicious after-school special because I left out all of the slice-of-life incidentals. Everything in the actual book unfolds more carefully and casually than that and is interspersed with nostalgic unsupervised kids in suburbia shenanigans, and rather clear-eyed observations and criticisms of middle class American standards and parenting.

There’s an interesting comparison to be made just by looking at the difference in covers between Berries Goodman and another one of Neville’s young adult novels, It’s Like This, Cat. There are essentially two different covers for Berries Goodman, neither of which have been updated at all.

Screen shot of a Google images search for Berries Goodman. Only two cover images dominate: one with abstract color bars and one with an illustration of a boy on a bicycle in front of a house. — Berries Goodman

Meanwhile, It’s Like This, Cat seems to have been continuously updated and repackaged for a new readership.

Screenshot of a Google images search for "It's Like This, Cat." It shows a variety of covers in different art styles, seven in all. — It’s Like This, Cat

It’s Like This, Cat was on reading lists in my school years. I saw it in the library. But the only time I’ve ever seen Berries Goodman is in my shelves at home. Of course, I haven’t read Cat so I can’t make the comparison or even begin to guess at why that one has remained so popular and Berries hasn’t. But if you happen to stumble across Berries Goodman, you should pick it up. It’s a fun read and Neville has a fantastic ear for dialogue, especially between kids.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Hands up who read “The Lottery” for English class at one point.

Yeah, me too.

And that’s about where all of my Shirley Jackson reading stopped off. The Sundial was a selection for the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club a while back and I didn’t really care for it. Even now I barely remember it (which is why I like to keep this little book blog going). But We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a title people mention all the time; moreover, it was esteemed enough a book to remain in one half of my Austin hosting couple’s library after several years of purging and downsizing. Based on that, I figured the odds (please insert your own joke about odds and lotteries here) were pretty good that I’d enjoy the book. If nothing else, reading it would allow me to partake of a very particular moment of a friend’s life and a specific facet of their personality, and that alone is worth it.

A Tweet from @lastpages_ that says "'I read this book you recommended' is a love language." — Verily it is.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle did not fail to deliver!

Following the death of their family from an unsolved case of arsenic poisoning, Mary Katherine (Merricat) and Constance Blackwood, sisters, have secluded themselves in the ancestral home together with their Uncle Julian. Constance no longer leaves the property beyond her garden, leaving Merricat in charge of going into the village—whose residents have long been hostile to the Blackwood family and who are all convinced of Constance’s guilt in the arsenic case—to fetch groceries and items as necessary. This comfortable norm is interrupted by the arrival of cousin Charles, who has decided to reach out to this estranged branch of the family after the death of his father (brother to Uncle Julian and to the late patriarch of the Blackwood family). Charles and Constance strike up a relationship while Merricat immediately dislikes this interloper and does everything she can to drive him away.

Now that I’ve finally read the book once, I’d love to read it again and chart exactly how Jackson manages to ratchet up the spooky and the tension. (How appropriate that this review is going up as we gear up to enter Spooky Season!) I think the two hardest things to write are comedy and horror, because what people find funny and what people find terrifying are pretty personal at the end of the day. When a book succeeds in one of those genres, I think it’s worth paying extra close attention to figuring out why.

Turkish Tag Team: Requiem över en förlorad stad during Cold Nights of Childhood

I was debating whether to make this one post or two, and in the end decided to make this a single post for a variety of reasons:

In terms of sheer practicality, my posting schedule and reading schedule are such that my usual rate of posting will have me bleeding 2023’s books into 2024, which I emphatically do not like.
These are authors that are in a kind of dialogue with each other, or rather one of them is clearly inspired by the other.
The books themselves were even very similar in terms of mood, themes, structure, etc.
I didn’t have much to say about either book on their own.

So, first of all, which books are we talking about?

The first was a Swedish translation of Aslı Erdoğan‘s Requiem över en förlorad stad. I read an interview with her in an old issue of Karavan that I brought with me on vacation for airplane reading; in the end I was so taken by how insightful and interesting and brainy she was that when I got back to Stockholm I immediately grabbed what book of hers I could from the library.

The second book was a recommendation from a American friend now residing in Turkey that served to underscore an author I had apparently added to my Storygraph TBR (probably mentioned in the same issue of Karavan): Tezer Özlü. An English translation of her Cold Nights of Childhood was published this year, which I was able to track down at the Stockholm library.

My process was something like this:

Read Erdoğan
Solicit an opinion on her from a bookish American friend in Turkey, who recommends Özlü
Read Özlü

As you might guess from that turn of events, I wasn’t entirely taken with Requiem. It’s a lot of mood and imagery and lovely turns of phrase, but nothing I could really sink my teeth into (or that I can remember now, at the time of writing, a week or two later). Trying to summarize the book is a struggle: “unnamed woman wanders around an unnamed city at night”? I guess?

My best explanation is that Requiem functioned as a sort of literary therapy for Erdoğan, and therefore concrete experiences are abstracted into an etheric dream world rather than relived in all their terror. Art as a process rather than a product, written for Erdoğan and not for an audience. The end result is that I would finish each chapter unsure of what happened and without any sense of the human being behind the words, and that last point is ultimately the make or break thing for me.

As Bookish American friend in Turkey tactfully put it, Erdoğan’s literary reputation might be overstated due to her (obviously important and brave and impressive!) political activism. But I also get the sense that Requiem is a very different beast than her earlier books, so perhaps I don’t have an entirely fair picture of her work. The same bookish friend also tipped me off that Tezer Özlü had finally been published in English for the first time, in an off-the-cuff follow-up to her estimation of Erdoğan that implied a comparison in Özlü’s favor.

What bookish American friend couldn’t have known, or maybe she did, was that Requiem reads like a riff on, and a response to, Cold Nights of Childhood. Both books ground a woman narrator in a city (or several cities) as she wanders not only through space but also through time, emptying their memories on the page the same way you empty your pockets before throwing a pair of pants in the wash. But if Requiem is an etheric and abstract dream world, then Cold Nights is waking life, or maybe better put a lucid dream. Instead of fuzzy, surreal abstraction, Özlü names everything with precision and clarity: people, streets, cafes, flowers. The same clarity holds throughout, even as the narrative skips through time or across space; she eschews poetic metaphor and favors stark depictions of her external circumstances and experiences, whether it’s stays at psychiatric wards or adolescent sexual desire or family gatherings in their cramped rural home. I might not have learned anything about Özlü by the end of Cold Nights, but unlike Requiem I still felt like I had met her. All of the English summaries make comparisons to The Bell Jar and it’s honestly a pretty apt one.

Both of these books raise the question of I’ve been taught to expect in stories, not only through school and writing advice, but also in the kinds of stories available for consumption in popular culture. Building expectations through repetition is another way of teaching, after all, and the stories in most conventional media usually have story arcs, character arcs, conflicts, changes, a sense of narrative unity. By the end of the story, situations and characters should be different from how they started, and we should be able to clearly trace the progression of those changes. How many of these expectations can go unmet and a story (a book, a movie, a TV show) still be satisfying? How else can we look at stories? What other shape can they take? What other purpose can they serve?

State Tectonics

State Tectonics marks the first time I’ve finished an entire new trilogy since I finished The Obelisk Gate back in 2017? 2018? (And we’ll overlook, as well, A Desolation Called Peace, which is so bound up with A Memory Called Empire that I’m pretty sure the two novels started as one gigantic tome.) Genre fiction as of late has the bad habit of turning everything into series of some kind or another, and when my reading life is already navigating the tension between the scope of my ambitions and the limits of my time, series are the last thing I need. But I was so taken with Malka Older’s cyberpunk-y political thriller and the complex electoral near-future she had imagined that I went ahead and finished the next two books, though at this point if she comes out with further installations I will declare myself done. Not because I doubt they’ll be good, but because I only have so much time on this earth.

Like she did with Null States, Older jumps ahead to a few years after the previous book left off. It’s election time again, the same as in Infomocracy, and this time the sprawling tech giant Information itself is under attack. Rogue physical assaults are being launched against Information servers and hubs around the world; unsanctioned communications channels designed to go undetected by Information have been figuratively as well as literally unearthed; mysterious individuals are roaming around cities and handing out self-destructing paper copies of “local guides” that claim to be better sources of information than Information itself. Who is responsible? What’s their end game? Is it an inside job? How will all this affect the upcoming election? Again, like in Null States, Older expands perspectives to include secondary characters we haven’t spent much time with before—Maryam, a Muslim lesbian techie who first appeared on the side in Infomocracy; Amran, a young and inexperienced Sudanese Information employee introduced in Null States—while touching base with previous perspective characters like now-married, now-pregnant Roz from Null States and Mishima from Infomocracy.

I would recommend reading all three books in pretty close succession, if only to keep the rather large cast of characters straight in your head, particularly the side and secondary ones. My timing didn’t quite work out, so while I read Infomocracy and Null States back-to-back, I took six weeks off in the middle of State Tectonics to go on vacation (and I wasn’t about to bring a hardback library book with me in my carry-on luggage). Whatever nuance I failed to grasp because I forgot who was a member of which political party who had broken up with whom wasn’t enough to make the broader strokes of the action impenetrable to me, and quite frankly I just plain have fun spending time in the world to which Older has obviously given an incredible amount.

Without getting into serious spoiler territory, I will say this: State Tectonics is an incredibly satisfying ending that is on brand with how the geopolitics in the series have developed and shifted across all three books. People who are better at intrigue than I am might be able to guess where the story is going, but for me the ending was well-earned. Older sticks the landing, no doubt about it.

Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia

One of the pitfalls of my English education is that I ended up with a huge blind spot when it comes to contemporary authors. It’s not anyone’s fault in particular; it’s just how my course load worked out. Though, I don’t know if Marguerite Duras would have ended up on my English curriculum. Maybe French, if I’d taken more than two semesters.

Duras didn’t even become a familiar name to me until a couple of features over on LitHub. Then, browsing a small (and predominantly Farsi?) international bookstore in Stockholm, back in the before times, I noticed a Duras title in the French section: Moderato Cantabile. It also looked mercifully short, something that I could probably manage with my limited French. Manage I did, and so I began scouring Stockholm library for other books by Duras. Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia was the first to meet my requirements of being available in Swedish as well as French.

Not a lot happens in Les petits chevaux. We have five Parisians on vacation together in a sleepy Mediterranean village, two couples (Sara and Jacques, Ludi and Gina) and the freewheeling Diana, stuck in their rut of swimming, bocce, and endless Camparis until they’re knocked out of their orbits when a new vacationer shows up with a boat. Sara is immediately attracted to him, their flirting eventually leads to a tryst, but then in the end Sara decides to go on a trip to Tarquinia with Jacques and Diana rather than to stay behind and have an extended affair. At the same time, they’ve all become involved in looking after an elderly couple in the village who have arrived to claim the remains of their son. He was killed in the course of his work to decommission leftover landmines and now everyone is waiting for the mother to change her mind and sign the death certificate. There’s also a forest fire at some point?

It sounds like a literary Seinfeld episode (“She wouldn’t sign the death certificate, Jerry, would you believe it?”), which is also how I’d describe Moderato Cantabile, but somehow it works. Maybe because of the undercurrent of “will they, won’t they” sexual tension that appears in the first conversation between Sara and Boat Guy and persists throughout the entire book. Maybe it’s because Duras lets her characters have pretentious philosophical conversations that are usually the purview of stoner insights. Maybe it’s because even though on one level, nothing happens, there’s also a lot of nothing that happens: people go on boat rides, go swimming, have dinner, hike up and down the mountain to visit the mourning couple. If everyone just sat around in the bar drinking, it might come off entirely differently.

At any rate, this kind of slow, ponderous, talk-y book is exactly my jam. Which is good since I essentially read it three times (French first, then Swedish to fill in the gaps, then French one last time). I don’t know that I have any quibble with Suzanne Palme’s translation, either. Palme also seems to have passed away, but since her obituary is paywalled at DN I don’t know more than what journalisten.se has to say:

Suzanne Palme
26 OKTOBER, 2000 | Oslo, har avlidit vid 73 års ålder. Hon arbetade en tid som vikarie på Göteborgs Handels- och Sjöfartstidning innan hon övergick till förlagsbranschen.

I assume that’s the right Suzanne Palme, at any rate. According to boksampo, she has just half a dozen or so translations to her name. They’re a rather scattershot collection; De små hästarna is the only Duras novel there.

Emil and the Detectives

Both of my parents moved at least part of their childhood libraries into our home where they became the foundation for my collection (and my brother’s, for that matter). Some of these ended up being my own favorites while others simply hung about the house, in various common area bookshelves, forever unclaimed and unread by either me or my brother. Not for any particular reason, either; I think I would just forget about them as soon as I left the room or hallway. Such was the fate of Emil and the Detectives, which I finally sat down to read because sometimes the world is a bummer and you just want to read children’s books from a happier time.

Young Emil from the small town of Neustadt is sent off to visit his grandmother in Berlin with a not insubstantial sum of money, but is robbed en route. A local gang of plucky young boys come to his aid, hijinks ensue, and Emil and the detectives get their man. It’s very wholesome without being cloying, which would explain why there are approximately one million (or just five) movie adaptations of it. It’s cute, it’s a fast read, it’s fun, there’s not much else to say.

For such a slim book, Emil and the Detectives invites a bit of a Wikipedia rabbit hole. The author, Erich Kästner, was the odd duck who was able to remain a vocal critic of the Nazis without being sent to a camp or having to flee the country. While his much more risque and controversial adult novel, Fabian, was the subject of Nazi book burnings, his children’s work was popular enough to keep him more or less out of trouble. Another one of his children’s books, Lisa and Lottie, eventually became the basis for The Parent Trap.

The English translation is another rabbit hole, though a murkier one. It was published thanks to the efforts of legendary children’s book editor May Massee. By all accounts, in addition to her publishing and editing work, Massee also produced the first English translation of Emil and the Detectives, though a later one by Eileen Hall is purportedly the most readily available one in Europe. And yet there’s not much to be found online or in Massee’s biography about any other translation efforts. Was this the only translation she ever produced, a la Alexandra Dick and The Dwarf?

There is lively discussion (read as: this blog post) around the subsequent translations of Emil and the Detectives, and how English translators have approached the question of slang and dialect in the story. My German is several years out of use by this point, though all of this is tempting enough for me to dive back in.

Severance

Ling Ma’s Severance was the Austin Feminist Sci-Fi Book Club’s pick for August, a meeting I was lucky enough to attend in person for once!

“Here’s a question for everyone,” I announced during an early lull in the conversation. “Describe this book as a mash up of two other works.”

My own answer was Station Eleven and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Other names that came up included The Last of Us, Girls, The Road, Dawn of the Dead, and Sex and the City. A pattern emerges, but to spell it out more clearly:

Candace, our protagonist, is part of a group of zombie apocalypse survivors led run by a cult-guru-in-the-making named Bob escaping New York City to a shopping mall in Illinois. Why a shopping mall in Illinois? Through some weird happenstance, Bob happens to be part owner of the property. Don’t think about it too much.

The zombies, meanwhile, are not only slow zombies—they’re not even particularly hungry or aggressive ones. Spawned by a fungal infection that can sit dormant for ages until it’s triggered, these zombies are entirely docile and stuck in loops of activity until their bodies give out. We see a family in a dining room go through countless iterations sitting down to an imaginary dinner; another character keeps on trying clothes from her closet. Interspersed with the zombie apocalypse narrative, we get flashbacks to Candace’s life right up until the killer fungus: her family’s contentious move from China and lifelong strain it caused, her father’s unexpected death, her mother’s rapid decline into dementia, her lackluster relationships, her job in publishing various glitzy and gimmicky editions of the Bible.

That’s pretty much it. Some people get infected, some people die, and the narrative eventually just…peters out.

Everyone at the meeting agreed that a lot of the public health responses to the fictional virus (or well, fungus) in Severance felt very Covid-y despite the 2018 publication date; my hypothesis is that Ma drew from how epidemics like bird flu and swine flu were handled in Asia when it came time to write about how an actual pandemic would unfold. We were also all in agreement that the book felt very gimmicky with a lot of vague ideas that were only half explored and that at the same time felt like pretty heavy-handed critiques and observations of Our Current Society. Candace is passive to the point of frustration, making poor decision after poor decision, and none of the other characters really have a distinct personality (except Bob the cult leader). To me it read like a novel of the Chinese Immigrant Experience but then someone suggested to Ma that she examine it through the framework of a zombie story instead and…I don’t know. I’m not mad I read it, but it never really coalesced into something coherent.

Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann

Jonas Jonasson’s novels are hard to miss in Sweden, with their striking and consistent titles and cover designs. Yet at the same time they’re nearly invisible, fading into the background, precisely because they’re everywhere: the books that everyone’s read, to the point where it feels not at all urgent because at this point you’ll pick it up via cultural osmosis. So I never gave much thought to Hundraåringen beyond rescuing it from the junk pile at a friend’s apartment just to have it around—just in case—but promptly forgot about it, except to periodically confuse it with A Man Called Ove. What finally got me to pick it up was 1) a personal recommendation from a friend and 2) its appearance as Sweden’s entry in the EuroVision book contest.

“Finally, we’re releasing more than Nordic noir into the world,” I thought.

An SFI classmate years ago described Hundraåringen to me as “a Swedish Forrest Gump” and that just about covers it: 100-year-old Allan, as the title suggests, climbs out the window of his room at the senior home on the morning of his birthday because he’s just utterly fed up with living there. (If I’m reading later subtext correctly, it’s more an act of depression than adventure.) Things start happening as soon as he encounters a young man with a suitcase at the nearest bus station, and the adventure afterwards is interspersed with his life story, which is filled with some of the most significant events and people of the twentieth century. There Allan is in the margins of the Spanish civil war, the development of the atomic bomb, the downfall of the Soviet Union, and on and on it goes. Throughout all of this, Allan is phlegmatic and unflappable, escaping from political prisons and dispatching would-be criminals with fatalistic indifference.

Jonasson is careful—or thorough, maybe, is the better word?—to make use of every detail so that simple gags become essential plot elements. These moments would fall flat in a more serious or melodramatic story, and feel like deus ex machina, but because the whole story is farcical from beginning to end it instead becomes just a more elaborate joke, elevated from physical comedy to long-form setup and payoff.

From a translation perspective there are a couple words and jokes that I’m curious to see handled in English, so of course now I have to read it again in English. But by all accounts it seems to land well with English speaking readers.

Null States

Hats off to Malka Older for enticing me enough to read a sequel to a more or less standalone book. Null States is set a couple of years after Infomocracy and tackles yet another crisis in this ever-shifting and adapting “microdemocracy” that Older envisioned in the first book. This time, rather than natural disasters and election fraud, the benevolent-ish Google-esque “Information” organization is up against multiple potential assassination attempts in developing (or up-and-coming) centenals. What’s the end game? Who’s behind the hits?

I probably waited a bit too long to start on this after Infomocracy; there were plenty of character names that were familiar, but I couldn’t always place the name to the person I had first encountered in Infomocracy. It’s not necessarily anything that ruins the book or makes it impossible to follow, and in all honesty I’d rather be a little bit lost than have the author waste time and ink giving a condescending and awkward “last time, on Infomocracy” recap. Older also does a great job shifting the focus outward from the three principal characters in the first to another secondary character rather than just running a concept (or character, in this case) into the ground. My only complaint for both Infomocracy and Null States is a spoiler-y one and has to do with a particular character trope that I dislike. Worth noting, I guess, but it’s also not anything that ruins the books.