Good evening!
I’m sure you’ve been absolutely desperate for an update on the cold I suspected I was getting last week. It turned into a cough, I’m sad to report. I feel okay though because I’ve been hoofing hot water with honey and lemon and doing nose sprays (not sure how to phrase that - spraying my nose? Inhaling nose spray?) which help with my sinuses anyway (I’m an ear infection girlie).
Anyway, in other, much more fun news, I interviewed one of my favourite ever writers Melissa Broder for i-D, which you can read here. We had a gorgeous conversation about our dad’s moustaches, twitter, reading and being addicted to our phones while we were in our pyjamas. If you’ve ever heard me wax lyrical about her debut The Pisces (2018), you’ll know how major this was for me. She has amazing reading taste, and in the interview she goes over some of the direct influences she had for her writing. Go and buy her new novel Death Valley, which I loved!!!!
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I’ve read two gems from Charco Press this week. If you’ve never read anything from them, or aren’t aware of them, I encourage you to seek them out. They’re an Edinburgh-based publishers who primarily publish translated Latin American fiction, although they have been branching out recently and have published original stuff, mainly memoirs from translators. They’ve brought some excellent books into my life, such as A Perfect Cemetery by Federico Falco, translated by Jennifer Croft (2021) and Never Did the Fire by Diamela Eltit, translated by Daniel Hahn (2022). They offer free delivery in the UK directly from their online shop, and they cover ⅓ of the shipping elsewhere -- they also offer the translation as well as the original text in the original language.
The first I read was Here Be Icebergs by Peruvian writer Katya Adaui, translated by Rosalind Harvey (2022), which I absolutely loved. It reminded me of two writers that I love, Fernanda Melchor and Gwendoline Riley, but also stood alone as its own complete thing. The majority of the stories rehash the same events, recasting them and reshaping them slightly in different settings. As an example, the motif of a child being hit by a car is written and rewritten into different stories, happening in different families that have a lot of similarities to one another. I don’t usually like to inject biography too much into my readings of texts, but I feel like some of the core memories that Adaui has in her own family unit have been used as the foundations of these stories, which are then loosely connected together. It was intriguing, looking out for the similarities and seeing how far they can be stretched in different directions, or altered slightly so that their significance changes.
I really liked how Adaui isn’t afraid to play with form. Although some stories were straight forward and chronological, others were unusual. The first in the collection, ‘The Hunger Angel’, is told in very short vignettes which are numbered and go backwards, It starts in the present and works its way back to the protagonist’s childhood, and so, although you are slightly unmoored at the beginning, working out characters and events, you begin to get an almost complete picture of a person and the family they came from. This is the one that most reminded me of Gwendoline Riley, who writes about dysfunctional families extremely well, as the story goes through the difficulties of two people who were not good for each other having children and eventually leaving one another. The numbered structure felt like an antithesis to the wily, unpredictable nature of the story’s actual contents -- a way for one woman to try and ascribe order onto a life. I think this applies to the collection as a whole, also, as she tries to make sense of events and behaviours by working through them again and again. Other stories in the collection are told in this short vignette style, or from different perspectives.
The second book I read was Selva Almada’s Brickmakers, translated by Annie McDermott (2021). I liked this a lot but there was something stopping me from out-and-out loving it. I think I was initially put off by the blurb comparisons to William Faulkner, so I expected something much more experimental. This is actually quite the opposite as it’s very straightforward, even if it does skip between the present and the past. The present in the novel is in a deserted fairground in Argentina, where two men, Pajarito and Marciano, lie wounded and dying after having a knife fight. The story then skips back to tell their individual stories and how their relationships with their fathers have shaped them. Pajarito dealt with a violent, unpredictable father who left his family, and Marciano’s father was murdered -- they both nurture complicated feelings towards violence and abandonment as a result.
I felt like a lot of the prose was quite simplistic, and again, this was disorientating after the Faulkner comparison. However, the characters in this novel were unbelievably well-crafted and they each stood completely apart from one another. This sounds juvenile, but sometimes when I read something in which the names of the characters are not ones I frequently come across I can get confused between them and have to keep checking who is who for the first 50 pages or so, but I didn’t have to do this once because Almada’s rendering of them was so precise. I think what triumphed most of all was the way that she presented women in these violent, patriarchal settings, and how Pajarito and Marciano’s mothers individually dealt with events in their community and in their own family unit. I’ll definitely read more of Almada because there was a lot to praise in this one, and I’ve heard more about her novel Dead Girls (2020), than I have this one.
Books on my radar
I visited the library again, and took out The Odyssey by Lara Williams (2022), because I’ve heard good things. I also have Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (2023) on hold for me there.