Tag: Archipelago Books

After the night, day breaks: The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón

Pablo and Ester live in the hills. Their children are grown. Their lives are simple, bound to the land, but lately there have been signs, omens. Pablo is concerned:

For some time now
he’s felt a heavy change pressing the air,
and can’t explain it.
Like when
he walks through town at night,
and when he hears the animals
can’t sleep.

Sensing danger, he gathers some papers and items in a box and goes out to bury it while Ester sleeps. And then they come.

Between the 16th and the 21st of February, 2000, members of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia descended upon the Montes de Maria region and attacked the people:

During this incident, known as the Massacre of El Salado, paramilitary forces tortured, slashed, decapitated, and sexually assaulted the defenseless population, forcing their relatives and neighbors to watch the executions. Throughout, the militiamen played drums they found in the village cultural center and blasted music on speakers they took from people’s homes.

Sixty people were killed. The Colombian Marine Corps battalion charged with protecting the area was nowhere in sight—they had withdrawn the day before the massacre began. With The Brush, a taut work of narrative poetry, Colombian poet and educator Eliana Hernández-Pachón draws on the official 2009 report on the massacre to bring the story of this brutal event into focus in an unusual and affecting manner.

The tragedy of this horror exists on many levels—the unimaginable terror of the attack itself which was not an isolated event, the lingering trauma of the survivors, and the years of fighting for a formal apology and reparations from the government. As a story well-known within Colombia, the poet says in an interview that “if I was going to tell it anew, then I would need a new form.” Her approach is to pass the account on to several distinct characters or voices and allow these diverse perspectives to carry the varied layers of this tragedy.

The first of three sections belongs to Pablo who has reason to be worried about the growing tensions. He will not survive the attack. The second part belongs to the thoughts of Ester, his wife, in the days that follow. She wonders where Pablo is, what might have happened, heading out into the brush to try to find him. And then…

Crossing the glade, she sees
a shadow vanish
in a glimmer of undergrowth.
Hey! she shouts.
And the woman approaches warily
leading a little girl by the hand.
A whisper first, and now her clearer voice:
They did it to me with a knife, the woman says
and points to a mark on her arm.
They also did things
I can’t talk about.

Knowing it is unsafe to return, the two women and child are now forced to keep moving through the brush.

In the third section, the Brush—the dense, living forest vegetation—is granted it own direct, poetic voice. It is The Brush that stands as witness, to sights, sounds and sensations, from the crushing footfalls of the approaching militants and falling bodies in the town square, to the careful movement through the forest of survivors, and, finally, to the blossoms and blooms that will welcome those who eventually return.

In conversation with The Brush’s testimony, Hernández-Pachón engages input from The Investigators and The Witnesses. These perspectives, drawn from official sources, define and correct one another, while the Brush adds its own comments and clarifications. The human choruses are presented in prose, but even if the Witnesses’ offerings are more poetic in tone, both stand in sharp tonal contrast with the lyrical, omniscient voice of the Brush. The Brush, it turns out, can tell a tale of horror and grief that people, especially those who have been victimized, are often unable to fully articulate.

The questions still survive:
what does it think about, the brush, somnambulist,
after it’s seen it all?
The day that follows night returns
its artifice, the well-known
interlocking of the hours:
how is it that time didn’t stop,
why do the grain’s unopened eyes
keep growing?

A disconcerting calmness rests over this book-length sequence of poems that, in a mere 57 pages, manages to capture the contradictions and harmonies that arise in response to acts of extreme violence. That calmness serves to unsettle the reader and honour the survivors, while placing this event within a wider ecosystem and granting a voice to nature, the one force, perhaps, that can truly offer both understanding and healing.

The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón with an Afterword by Héctor Abad is translated from the Spanish by Robin Myers and published by Archipelago Books.

Casting light on a fading world: For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul

It was so cold! I felt as if I were sleeping on ice. It was a large room and there were three of us in it. The windows were shut but they were without panes. Outside, it was raining heavily and the strong winds from the Pir Panjal came in gusts. The wind, this biting cold of Banihal, blew strongly through the room of the tourist hostel. Despite being indoors, it was as if we were sleeping outside.

Thus opens the title story of For Now, It Is Night, a collection of short stories drawn from across the career of Kashmiri writer Hari Krishna Kaul. In less than six pages, this tale of three travellers, strangers before they find themselves sharing a room on a stormy night after their bus driver decided it was too late and, perhaps, too dangerous to attempt to cross the Banipal Pass of the Pir Panjal range of the lower Himalya. One man is decidedly unhappy with the delay, the other almost mystically inured to the biting cold, while the restless protagonist finds himself questioning reality as the night drags on. It is a simple story that deftly conveys the cold, the discomfort, and the loneliness of three stranded souls unable to find even the slightest comfort in one another’s company. It is the perfect distillation of Kaul’s ability to capture the complicated dynamics that bind and divide individuals, on both an intimate and a wider community level.

Born in Kashmir in 1934, Kaul spent most of his life in his homeland where he taught Hindi literature until 1990, when he was forced to join the exodus of Hindu Kashmiris from the region. He settled in Delhi where he lived, in exile, until his death in 2009. His work captures the details of Hindu Kashmiri life in old-town Srinagar during the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the shifting socio-political tensions of the time. Over his lifetime, he published short stories, a novel and many plays for radio and television. For Now, It Is Night draws from all of his story collections, the first two published in 1972 and 1985, respectively and the latter published in 1996 and 2001, following his relocation to Delhi. However, what makes this selection of his work especially valuable and unique, lies in the combined effort of a team of translators.

As his niece, Kalpana Raina, describes in her Introduction, she had long heard of her uncle’s importance in modern Kashmiri literature, but until she had her father read some his stories to her—she could speak the language but not read it—she did not appreciate his eye for detail or empathy for his characters, their settings and their predicaments:

This was the world he had grown up in and his ambivalent relationship with it is quite clear in the forewords he wrote to his four collections of short stories. The are no grand themes in Kaul’s work, but an exploration and ultimately an acceptance of human limitations. He used his personal experiences to explore universal themes of isolation, individual and collective alienation, and the shifting circumstances of a community that went on to experience a significant loss of homeland, culture, and ultimately language.

Raina hoped that fresh new translations of her uncle’s stories might bring renewed attention to his work, and to that end, she recruited three young scholars and writers who could read Kashmiri and the Nastaliq script to collaborate with her on this project. They encountered unexpected challenges, first tracking down original manuscripts which were often not in the best condition, and then later with the more recent political upheavals in Kashmir and the pandemic. Despite the roadblocks, the final product is the result of a close engagement between four translators, “all native Kashmiri speakers, but representing a diversity of gender, age, experiences, and religious identity,” each bringing an important perspective and background.

The stories gathered in For Now, It Is Night, vary from domestic dramas, to surreal fables, to explorations of the uneasy relationships between Hindus and Muslims and between those of differing social standing. The narrators and protagonists often reveal much through their bluster and denial than what they openly admit to. In the opening story, “Sunshine,” for instance, the only one with a strong female character at its centre, Poshkuj arrives in Delhi to stay with younger son and his wife, certain that she has finally entered warmth and civilization. She has nothing good to say about her other son and “that fishwife,” but her bitter asides also reveal that she is put out and disturbed by her young daughter-in-law’s open-mindedness and rejection of Kashmiri social niceties. She is unable to comprehend the size of the city, its strangely quiet neighbourhoods, or the shocking mention of “Pakistan.” In fact the only thing she fully embraces is the sunshine, the glorious sunshine:

One could die for this sunshine. This is truly the only worthwhile thing in Delhi. She raised her sari slightly and scratched her right leg. She looked at her chapped skin and cursed the cold of Kashmir that was so hard on one’s hands and feet. Reflecting on the weather, she remembered her grandson, Bittĕ. Poor boy! How miserable he is, with his chilblains. How many times I told that monster mother of his that her son’s feet needed attention. Make sure he wears socks and fur-lined shoes, I said. But would that woman listen to me? Of course, fur-lined shoes are expensive and Gasha barely manages to get by. He doesn’t even have an overcoat for himself and shivers in the cold. She sighed. It’s all a matter of one’s fate.

The eighteen stories that comprise this collection demonstrate Kaul’s ability to craft a moving tale with vivid characters, caught up in events or circumstances that continually surprise and engage his reader. Some fall on the side of the fantastic like “Tomorrow—A Never-Ending Story” about two school boys who shirk their commitment to learning their times tables with such determination that they end up trapped in time, endlessly repeating Class IV while the rest of their classmates and peers grow up and move on with their lives, or “The Tongue and the Egg,” a bizarre fable in which two officers are charged with facilitating the collection of six million eggs, searching and even torturing or killing those thought to be hiding eggs, all for a bizarre purpose. Others begin on an eccentric note before taking a sharp emotional turn, such as “The Mourners” wherein two whimsically named young men, Tarzan and Doctor are called to assist with the funeral rites of their friend Pedro whose mother has just died. The subtle dynamics that bind fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and grandmothers and grandsons are teased out in stories that, more often than not, speak to the loneliness and isolation within families, heightened when distance pulls generations apart.

Kalpana Raina tells us that the selection of the stories in this collection was made with input from a small group of Kaul’s contemporaries and some younger students. The stories were then recorded in an effort to engage members of her family and the extended diaspora who could not read the script. That, together with the involvement of four translators, two of whom have contributed additional Notes, gives this volume a range and depth that truly honours Kaul’s contribution to Kashmiri literature and makes it accessible to a new generation of English language readers.

For Now, It Is Night by Hari Krishna Kaul is translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili, and Gowhar Yaqoob, and published by Archipelago Books.

Behind the lens and beyond the darkroom: The End by Attila Bartis

When I take stock of my life, I see no reason to launch into some big family history. I haven’t got what it takes, nor do I have the means. I can’t very well ask Mother and I can’t ask Father, and as for my grandparents, I never knew them. Besides, the story of my family is nothing out of the ordinary. One might even say that along with all its uniqueness, it could just as easily serve as the prototype of the history of the Hungarian family. Or even the history of a Middle-European, middle-class, non-Jewish family. Though, come to think of it, they are pretty similar to Jewish histories. Discounting, of course, what cannot be discounted.

The End, the latest novel by Hungarian writer Attila Bartis to be released in English translation, begins, as its title implies, at the end. We meet András Szabad, aged fifty-two, enroute to the airport to catch a flight to Stockholm for a medical examination. He tells us he is a photographer, very well-known in fact, but admits he has not touched his camera in two years, ever since a woman named Éva died. And, for some reason, he feels it is important to let us know, off the top, that he does not believe in God. He lacks faith. But his feelings about God or not-God seem less than certain. Questions remain. To that end, a friend has suggested that he get his life down on paper as a means of resolving this unfinished business, whatever it might be.

As a photographer, someone who frames the world as he sees it through pictures, moments preserved and observed with a certain distance—a practice he first engaged in as a child, observing a woman through a window from a gap in a fence, long before he ever held a camera—András approaches this project as one might lay out a series snapshots, each catching an image or memory from his past. He begins in the fall of 1960 when he and his father arrive in Budapest, following his mother’s sudden death and his father’s release from prison after serving three years for alleged anti-government activities. They take up residence in a small apartment, awkwardly sharing the space, continuing the same pattern of father-son avoidance passed down through four generations, each man sharing exactly the same name: András Szabad. The youngest András is seventeen when he moves to the city, a transition that marks an abrupt end to his childhood. But it is on his first Christmas there that he receives his first camera, his father’s Zorki, and that changes everything.

András chronicles his experiences finding his way around Pest, his father’s trouble finding work and meeting the young man, Kornél, who will become his life-long friend, sounding board and often frustrated better angel. He describes growing up in the rural town of Mélyvár, his beloved mother, and the difficult, lonely years of his father’s imprisonment when even a friendly neighbour could secretly be an informer. Now settled in Budapest, he drops out of school after an affair with his Hungarian teacher, listens in as his father is visited by his former collaborators, and befriends the eccentric countess, now reduced to a simpler life, who lives in apartment under the back stairs of his building with her elderly lady-in-waiting. There is no shortage of interesting characters peopling András’ otherwise ordinary world. On a larger stage, he is rather obsessed with Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space who reported that he saw no God up there, and feels defined by the seemingly endless reign of Communist leader, János Kádár. And then, there are the women.

His affairs with women are typically sexually intense and strange. He seems attracted to hopelessly inappropriate women—his high school teacher, an older woman he meets at the pool, and, of course, Éva, the concert pianist who András first sees, in the park, making out with her ex-husband, but looking directly at him over the man’s shoulder. Their torrid, yet dysfunctional, relationship lasts seven years, but she always holds him at arm’s length, across a space he can never breach. Most of his lovers end up before the lens of his camera, Éva included, as do many of the female customers he encounters once he begins taking photo ID pictures for a living. The camera—the Zorki now replaced with a Leica—becomes, for András, both an invitation to women and a shield to protect himself against them.

The strength of this nearly 600-page novel rests on the sometimes uncertain, often funny, well-paced narrative. The short, focused chapters titled in parentheses by a single feature—the punctum in Barthes’ terms—gradually unveil a portrait of a vulnerable, often stubborn, flawed man who is not sure where he stands in the world, even after achieving enviable fame. What he wants the most, Éva’s love, is the one thing that eludes his grasp, even if it is she who, after she has left him and Hungary altogether, mounts his first exhibition using “stolen” negatives. He professes an unwavering allegiance to the truth, at least as he sees it, with the wisdom, on occasion, to refrain from saying what he is thinking. And the smooth integration of dialogue—much of András’ account could be described as “verbal snapshots”—advances the flow of memories and reveals more about his nature, and that of those around him, than a more ego-driven fifty-two year-old would ever dare disclose in a formal written exercise.

For instance, when his father dies and he needs more than the part-time overnight job he has had at a print shop, András presents himself to József Reisz, the ID photographer who will teach him more about taking pictures than anyone else, and explains that he needs a job. Even though Reisz is not looking for an assistant, he is hired. The older man is a crusty, no-nonsense character with an uncanny attention to detail when it comes to people and to photography. When András serves his first client, he is fumbling with the unfamiliar folding bellows camera and, as he pushes the shutter release cable, Reisz calls out from the lab. Plate!

I pulled out the plate, I took the two required pictures, and wrote out the receipt. I was drenched in sweat. Soon as the man left, Reisz came out.

Thank you, I said.

You’ll get the hang of it, he said.

I’d have never thought that taking an ID photo was hell.

You’ll get the hang of it no time.

How did you know in there that I forgot to pull out the plate?

From the sound. There was no twang, and the shutter clicked.

You hear that from in there?

Yes. And at such times, don’t advance the film. Or if you’ve advanced it, take another picture of the client, so you’ll end up with a pair. As it is, you’ve got an empty frame now.

Fine. In the future, I’ll do that I said.

And don’t ask what the picture is for. It’s none of our business. If the client wants to tell us, he’ll tell us. If not, not.

Fine. But he looked like a lizard. He didn’t blink. Not once. He’s some sort of hunter.

He’s not a hunter.

He said he needed it for a license to carry arms.

He’s not a hunter. He’s a member of the Worker’s Militia. Hunters never stop talking.

The restrictions and ever-present threats and uncertainties of life in Communist Hungary, especially in the light of his father’s entanglements, shadow András from his early years, right through to middle age. Yet, many pieces of his life fit together seemingly by chance rather than by desire or design. He is strangely lacking in direction, even after he begins to have gallery showings. Left to his own devices, he might have been content taking ID photos or photographing the women who happened to cross his path indefinitely, enlarging some images leaving others untouched. But, flawed and frustrating as he may be, he is wonderful at isolating and narrating distinct moments of his life, slowly making his way to the memories and fears that he is continually trying to avoid. And what is life anyhow, but a series of negatives, some developed and returned to endlessly, others lying dormant until retrieved from the mists of time by accident or circumstance?

The End by Attila Bartis is translated from the Hungarian by Judith Sollosy and published by Archipelago Books.

Good news doesn’t come easy in this land of ours: Tali Girls – A Novel of Afghanistan by Siamak Herawi

The girls of Tali are beautiful. They have long hair, large almond shaped eyes, and skin the colour of wheat. They grow up learning to cook and sew. At seven, some are taught to embroider as well. They stitch and seam and sing together. And when they reach puberty, they fall in love with the sunburned boys who wear their skullcaps cocked to the side and play their reed flute as they scale the mountains shepherding goats and sheep and stealing young girl’s hearts.

Siamak Herawi’s Tali Girls opens with a disturbingly vivid account by his central character,  Kowsar, of one of her earliest memories. She offers it as an illustration of the condition that has plagued her for as long as she can remember. She is walking with her mother when a grizzled old man from her community comes up and kneels before her. He whispers, “Kowsar, I could eat you.” Before she can resist, the foul man has devoured her, leaving nothing but a pile of bones. When she comes to, in her mother’s arms, we realize she’s had a fainting spell complete with hallucination. Her family has been advised it’s epilepsy, but doctors are expensive and her family, like everyone else in her village, is poor. Once the harvest is complete, her father takes her into see a mullah in the nearby town. His appearance and manner is frightening to the child and, as he pronounces his call for the demon to leave her, waving his dagger in the air, she is lifted out of her body and watches as he slices her to pieces. Episodes marked by fever, convulsions and loss of consciousness will continue to strike Kowsar in moments of extreme distress, but the graphic visions that accompany these first two incidents stand as something else—a foreshadowing of the very real violence that lies ahead, especially for women, in a world where extremist fundamentalism is on the rise.

Set in Badghis Province in northwestern Afghanistan, Tali Girls is based on true stories and revolves around Kowsar and her friends Geesu and Simin, three young girls growing up in the village of Tali in the impoverished Jawad District. Although it is well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, the community is without electricity, plumbing or paved roads. The residents are farmers and shepherds. Conditions do not improve much over the course of this novel; in many ways they deteriorate greatly. But for three short years, the children of Tali will at least have the opportunity to go to school—if their families can spare their labour at home, that is. For Kowsar who demonstrates exceptional academic aptitude and a prodigious memory early on, her gifts could be her ticket out of a society in which women are married off young and typically spend their lives bound to the demands of home and husband. Unfortunately, her teacher’s effort to advocate for her in the provincial capital, does not succeed. Rather it turns the attentions of a powerful and hideously evil mullah to Kowsar and her little village, the first step in a series of events that will, over the years to come, have a devastating impact on the lives of the girls, their families and the peace of their little valley.

In clear, crisp prose with a tone that is almost folkloric, Herawi weaves a tale of rural life in contemporary Afghanistan that honours both the beauty of the landscape and the stark realities—internal and external—that have impacted the population over the years. For the poor farmers, conditions are harsh but it has long been a society designed by and for men, so often the only control they can exercise is over their wives and children. Women are restricted in their movement outside their homes and, in some communities, even inside their houses where they are not to be seen by any males who are not part of their immediate family. Without power or running water, traditional customs continue. Food and tea is prepared over fires, bread is baked in kilns and, when company is present, refreshments are left outside the doors of the rooms or guesthouses where men gather. Young, often prepubescent girls can be bartered for or purchased as brides for powerful mullahs and Talib leaders while the aging wives they have at home are pushed into increasingly subservient roles. And, if a woman’s fate was difficult before the Taliban’s presence expands, as they become a permanent fixture in Tali, taking over the schoolhouse and filling the fields with poppies, it becomes even more circumscribed. Excessive religious prohibitions are strictly enforced. But within this world, Herawi grants his female characters a strength and resilience that is not easily defeated, even in the face of unspeakable evil.

Kowsar, who is gifted, prone to fainting spells and a bit of a risk taker, is the primary first person voice in this multiple narrative in which, alternating with chapters told from a third person perspective, various characters pick up their own accounts as the action focuses on their particular experiences. Throughout, Kowsar is the voice of hope, however faint at times, in a story that is punctuated by moments of terrifying violence. The prose style is light, poetic and almost folkloric in tone, carrying a story that is at once a coming of age tale, a horror story, a love story and an adventure with action that moves across a mountainous landscape, from lush valleys to harsh deserts and back again. A decade and 380 pages pass swiftly, and it is best to say little in advance about what happens.

Through the dialogue and shifting narrative voice, Herawi has created an exhilarating novel with a relatively large cast of characters that we quickly come to care deeply about—or despise as the case may be. Some readers may feel that this is at the cost of depth and historical context, but much rests in the conversations between characters, as they share their hopes, dreams and fears. Mothers speak to their daughters and sons, with resignation, about the cards life has dealt them by virtue of their gender; Kowsar, who has had a wider access to books, expresses to Geesu how, the more she learns about the outside world, the more their own frightens her; a young man from a tribal community demonstrates an astute understanding of the current state of lawlessness in Badghis that has left the people caught between corrupt government officials and Taliban rebels:

“Back when the Taliban were first defeated and left, and a new government came into power, we though Afghanistan was finally safe and ready for progress. We though the Westerners who came with their money had freed us from living in limbo. But that sweet nectar soon turned into bitter poison. . . . It was all lies. Ignorant thieves left, cunning pillagers replaced them. And life here remains what it was. Every day, we have less security than the day before.”

Characters, scenes, and scenery propel this story forward. The result is a novel that is a vital portrait of simple people trapped by a shifting set of circumstances beyond their control.

Siamak Herawi is an Afghani writer born in Herat province who studied in Kabul and Moscow. After completing his masters in Russian language he returned to Afghanistan and started to work as a journalist. He then moved into politics, eventually taking on a diplomatic role at the Afghanistan Embassy in London. He resigned when Ashraf Ghani was elected in 2014 and presently lives in the UK. Tali Girls which was originally published in 2018, is his first work to become available in English.

Tali Girls: A Novel of Afghanistan by Siamak Herawi is translated from the Fasri by Sara Khalili and published by Archipelago Books.

A tale of two travellers, You and I: In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish

Allow me to see you, now that you have left me and I have left you, safe and sound like pure prose on a stone that may turn green or yellow in your absence. Allow me to gather you and your name, just as passersby gather the olives that harvesters forgot under pebbles. Let us then go together, you and I, on two paths:

You, to a second life promised to you by language, in a reader who might survive the fall of a comet on earth.

I, to a rendezvous I have postponed more than once with a death to whom I had promised a glass of red wine in a poem. A poet is at liberty to lie, but he only lies in love because the heart’s promises are open to alluring conquests.

The celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was aware that his own death was nearing when he composed In the Presence of Absence, an intimate synthesis of memory and meditation that not only turns its attention to the past, but looks ahead to contemplate what words can carry into a future that he knows he will not see. It is a self-elegy, an established genre in classical Arabic poetry, re-imagined, reshaped and realized through a unique “convergence” of prose and poetry in which, as translator Sinan Antoon puts it in his Preface: “[t]he living ‘I’ bids farewell to its imagined dying other in a sustained poetic address divided into twenty untitled sections.” Presented as a dialogue between the poet’s present self and his absent self, each section explores a particular experience or theme.

Early on, Darwish invokes his younger self, a mischievous child caught up in the magic of the natural world, lured by curiosity toward adventure and injury. However, another love was also nurtured at a young age: the love of language. The third section is devoted to the endless possibilities that the future poet discovers in the wonder of letters and words. It will become his life:

You become words and words become you. You do not know the difference between utterer and utterance. You will call the sea an overturned sky and the well a jar to preserve sound from the world’s tinkering and the sky a sea hanging from clouds.

There is something that assumes the obscure. It cannot be smelled, touched, tasted, or seen. It is what makes childhood a sixth sense. They called you the dreamer because you often gave words wings invisible to grown-ups.

Darwish devotes several sections to this time of dreams and dreaming before, at the age of seven, dreams turn into nightmares. The Nakba’s destructive force drives him and his family from their homeland under the cover of darkness at a time when his absent self was:

Still too young, you could not imagine your own death. You did not yet grasp that children could die.

Life will go on but, but this sudden, unprecedented displacement  will cause him to hate the second half of his childhood and foreshadow the circumstances that will shape the rest of his life.

In the Presence of Absence is not a memoir in the familiar sense of the word, but significant life experiences—imprisonment, exile, heart surgery, a visit to his mother—shape his reflections. Yet, at times, he turns to more open meditation on themes like love, loss, dreaming and what it means to return. These meditations turn on the poetic as poetry is always, for Darwish, more than a vocation, but an essential means of making sense of the world. Ever the dreamer, his dreams are soaked in a melancholy that reveals itself in imagery bound to a land and a life forever lost:

Longing is the absent chatting with the absent. The distant turning toward the distant. Longing is the spring’s thirst for the jar-carrying women, and vice versa. Longing allows distance to recede, as if looking forward, although it may be called hope, were an adventure and a poetic notion. The present tense is hesitant and perplexed, the past tense hangs from a cypress tree standing on its rooted leg behind a hill, enveloped in its dark green, listening intently to one sound only: the sound of the wind. Longing is the sound of the wind.

The more you delve into your loneliness, like that tree, the more longing takes you with motherly tenderness to its country, which is made of transparent, fragile fibres. Longing has a country, a family, and an exquisite taste in arranging wildflowers. It has a time chosen with divine care, a quiet mythical time in which figs ripen slowly and the gazelle sleeps next to the wolf in the imagination of a boy who never witnessed a massacre.

Darwish plays presence and against absence through this text, the image surfaces and reshapes itself in endless variations, including the confrontation with his own absence when he visits the ruins of the village he was born in. For, to articulate an absence that is present or a presence that is absent is not only the task of this self-elegy, it is, for Darwish, a poet’s role. This is, then, more than anything, a book about language—as a means to express, to understand, and to exist in a world that has been torn apart. His prose is rich with metaphor and sensual, even sexual, imagery, but the pain of a man who was denied the ability to live freely within the land of his birth, and witnessed, by the time of his death in 2008, the impact of sixty years of occupation and conflict on the Palestinian people, is never far from the surface.  It is, sadly more timely than ever.

Sinan Antoon’s translation honours the poetic energy of this work, aiming, he tells us, to preserve, where possible, the pulse and rhyme of the original. Endnotes supply necessary context, as required. This text, like Journal of an Ordinary Grief and Memory for Forgetfulness, is classified as poetry, but, as poetic as these works are, I prefer to consider them closer to prose lest a potential reader who is apprehensive about poetry be inclined to avoid them. Darwish’s meditative, incantatory prose is neither elusive nor intimidating. He writes from the heart and with the heart his words are best met.

In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish is translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon and published by Archipelago Books.

Things that will come to pass and cannot be stopped: January by Sara Gallardo

What is a day? What is the world when everything inside you shudders? The sky darkens, houses swell, merge, topple, voices rise in unison to become a single sound. Enough! Who is that shouting? Her soul is black, a soul like the fields in a storm, without a single ray of light, silent as a corpse in the ground.

Sixteen year-old Nefer has a secret. A secret growing inside her body that is pushing her away from her family and deeper into herself. Desperate to resist the abrupt transition to womanhood that has been thrust upon her, her predicament is the central focus of Argentinian writer Sara Gallardo’s January. Originally published in 1958, when Gallardo was only twenty-seven, this unsparing novella about rape, pregnancy and abortion in a world where a woman’s body and being was strictly defined by church and convention, has come to be regarded as required reading in her native country. It has now been released in Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy’s English translation.

This brief novella simmers with stark intensity as it follows Nefer’s conflicted and tumultuous emotions as she struggles to cope with her unfortunate circumstances alone in a deeply religious rural community in mid-twentieth century Argentina. The youngest of three daughters, her life on her family’s farm is one filled with hard work and constant expectations. She admires her disabled father’s quiet dignity, resents her sister’s fulsome beauty and fears her mother’s large, threatening presence. And, in spite of her condition, she nurses a hopelessly passionate crush on her handsome neighbour, Negro. In her mind, in fact, it is he who is responsible for her pregnancy although the child is not his. She had invested so much time and desire into the design and creation of a dress for her eldest sister’s wedding imagining it might magically catch his eye and, had she not been so intent on making an impression, she believes she would not have inadvertently attracted the attention of the older man who forced himself that day.

Playing out against a landscape defined by blistering heat, vast open spaces, sparse shade and clouds of dust, Nefer’s experience of her surroundings is highly charged and fragmented. She swings from rage to fear to jealousy to waves of crushing guilt. Unable to escape the stain of her strict Catholic upbringing, the sorry state of her soul is a constant concern. Anxiety eats away at her. She cannot help but think back to a time when she was carefree, when the world still held promise. But she remains determined to face her fate on her own terms, no matter where it takes her. Gallardo brings us right into the heart of her effort to assert control over her mind, her body and her life, as in this scene where she slips out during siesta to sneak into town in search of a possible medicinal intervention:

She kicks and takes off at a gallop, steering toward the thick grass that will absorb the footfalls. She doesn’t want to think about the end of her journey, about the old lady she’s never seen but with whom all her hope now lies. Her eyes pick out objects one at a time, attributing an exaggerated importance to each. Thistle, she thinks, thistle partridge, dung, anthill, heat; and then she hears – one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four – as the hooves hit the ground. Slowly, sweat begins to appear behind the horse’s ears and runs in dark strands down his neck where the reins chafe against his coat, churning up dirty foam. Little voices, little voices speak to Nefer, but she continues her journey indifferent to them. Cow, she thinks, a Holstein, and another and another. That one’s overheated. Lapwings. Two lapwings and their chick. Those piercing shrieks!

In less than 120 pages, January offers a vivid, internalized account of a young woman facing impossible odds. Gallardo was born in 1931 to a wealthy Buenos Aires family with broad agricultural interests and this, her first book, shows a clear sensitivity to the social dynamics impacting disadvantaged rural communities and the suffocating influence of the Catholic mission churches. But beyond the constraints of her time, it is Nefer’s private horror, as reflected in her relationship to other people and to the natural environment, that makes this such a compelling—and timeless—read.

January by Sara Gallardo is translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy and published by Archipelago Books.

In a hidden corner of the world: In Red by Magdalena Tulli

Whoever has been everywhere and seen everything, last of all should pay a visit to Stitchings. Simply take a seat in a sleigh and, before being overcome by sleep, speed across a plain that’s as empty as a bank sheet of paper, boundless as life itself. Sooner or later this someone—perhaps it is a traveling salesman with a valise full of samples—will see great mounds of snow stretching along streets to the four corners of the earth, toward empty, icy expanses.

It begins like this, with the sketch of a town isolated against a fanciful landscape of an unending winter, each gloomy day broken only for a moment at lunchtime between soup and the main course. It is sometime after the turn of the twentieth century, when Poland was divided among three empires—Austria-Hungary, Russia and Prussia—but Stitchings exists in an imaginary fourth partition under the control of a Swedish garrison, a condition the residents consider most favourable. As the years pass, however, conflict and commerce from the outside world will exert influence on the community of Stitchings for better or worse.

In Red, the 1998 novella by Polish writer Magdalena Tulli is a celebration of the power of stories to create a world that is at once magical and a microcosm of the early decades of the twentieth century in her native country. Echoes of Calvino and Saramago can be heard in her portrait of Stitchings and the many eccentric characters who pass through it and strange circumstances that arise in its streets, structures and public places. Defined by its industry and modes of approach—or exit—the town is, when we first arrive, home to three factories and a salt mine and, should one not approach by sleigh, a railway station to welcome newcomers. The primary businesses, all longstanding family concerns, are Strobbel’s porcelain works, Neumann’s phonograph record factory and Loom & Son who manage the flow of money and goods, and manufacture fine ladies’ corsets for the local and international market. Meanwhile, the salt mine and its miners hold an economic role that is essential to the very lifeblood of the town:

But it was to them alone that the factories, stores, banking houses, and law firms owed their prosperity. Any kind of enterprise would have run aground in a heartbeat if there’d been a lack of salt, which, as everyone knows, is the essence of tears. For along with riches, success in industry and commerce brings weeping. A boom requires weeping if it is to last. Otherwise it will dry up. A certain number of tears are needed to fill the channels of trade and allow the expeditious flow of assets and liabilities, just as water under the keel is essential for ships with holds full of cargo.

This town is no stranger to weeping. As war brings destruction its commercial strongholds, and death and injury to a generation of young men, the function of the various business and the visions of their new owners and managers evolve. Cycles of poverty and prosperity follow and the seasonal nature of the environment around Stitchings grows warmer. Eventually the snow is but a distant memory, a port is open to ships ferrying goods and visitors, and the daylight hours begin to expand until night is reduced to a brief daily moment of dimness. In the sweltering heat, sailors roam the streets and frequent the brothel. Life in Stitchings goes on. And, sometimes, it does not, as charcters fall prey to injury, illness and despair.

For a reader accustomed to following the path of an individual protagonist or collection of individuals, In Red might feel underdeveloped. But the primary character is the place, Stitchings. It evolves, with changes in development, climate and atmosphere rising and falling over the course of this short novella. People, as the framing reinforces—regularly describing how prospective visitors can approach or exit this mythical space—are transient figures whether they are born and die there or brought by commerce, external factors or familial obligation. They fall into routines, often emotionally destructive for themselves and those around them. There is, it seems, little true happiness in the streets and hallways of Stitchings. For that a person really needs to escape.

This fantastic fable moves forward with the inexorable pressure of forces that come from outside and from within. With a tumultuous flow of images, Tulli’s narrative never stops to take stock. It is up to the reader to catch references and pick up on the wry commentary woven into the account. Following the detail is less important than riding the flow, and appreciating the wisdom and humour woven into this dark tale. In the end we are reminded that the story is an entity with its own ontological motivation, but formed as it is on a community caught in the ebb and flow of larger world currents, it carries the best and worst of human nature in its wake.

In Red by Magdalena Tulli is translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston and published by Archipelago Books.

“I have ghosts inside my head”: The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro

The feverish paragraph that extends across the first six pages of Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu opens rather innocuously, with the titular character walking through the Parque de la Exposición in Lima, Peru on a pleasant afternoon. Suddenly the restrained and mild-mannered professor experiences a terrifying break with reality:

In the eternity of the instant, in a manner of speaking, the green of the afternoon flickered out, the park’s babbling was erased, as if the world had taken flight, the pebbled paths disappeared, no serene gardens, or laughing families, or murmuring young couples, or ponds full of fish: the only thing in the air now was the sakura tree, its branches and its luminous flowers. And in that fragment of afternoon, from that imperturbable beauty, Nakamatsu noticed, sprang a death drive, a vicious feeling, like the sakura were transmitting extinction, a shattering destruction.

The ominous atmosphere that descends on him triggers a panic attack that sends him raving through the streets of the city. Or perhaps he’s dreaming, it doesn’t matter, for his nightmare is only just beginning.

Not long after this first premonition of death, Nakamatsu finds that he has been forced to retire from his position at the university due to his age. He is fifty-eight. This leaves him with empty hours to fill as his anxieties and paranoia continue to grow. He returns to working on a novel based on the life of a friend of his father’s, Etsuko Untén, traces an endless network of named streets and alleys, and visits the cemetery where he pauses at the graves of his mother, father and his long dead wife. Self-exiled from his siblings and fellow members of the Japanese-Peruvian community, he seems to be engaged in a battle with his own Asian identity. Throughout his long days, he continually seeks to clear his mind of thoughts, exercise discipline over his imagination. When he doesn’t wish to go out, or watch TV, he crochets squares for a blanket that will never be finished, losing himself in the rhythms of the task. But hallucinations find him all the same.

They arrive as the sounds of birdsong and nature emanating from his bedroom. When he goes to investigate he finds himself surrounded by a chorus of song and babbling water so impossibly realistic that he is momentarily swept away:

It might have been a brief second, five minutes perhaps; in reality Nakamatsu, surprised, withdrawn into himself, couldn’t pinpoint exactly how long the happening lasted, the miracle occurred again and again over the next two weeks, intermittently, whether in the morning, in the afternoon, or at any hour of the night, and every time he was left astonished by that sensation of unusual beauty.

But astonishment eventually turns into uncertainty, and Nakamatsu begins to doubt his sanity. Soon he is back out seeking escape on the streets. At night he is troubled by horrific dreams, and as they intensify he grows increasingly despondent. And estranged. He purchases a felt hat, long coat and walking cane, affecting the 1940s style of both his father’s friend Utsén and his favourite poet, Martín Adán who had waged his own battles with alcohol and madness. Under this new guise, Nakamatsu’s wanderings become nocturnal and more torturous. He takes to hanging out in the dark corners of the city where prostitutes, addicts and homosexuals gather, always watching from the sidelines, engulfed by his own darkness, ever struggling to find a point of stillness.

This hypnotic novella moves with a steady, tumbling pace, intensifying as it traces the protagonist’s descent into madness. There is, at first, an odd uncertainty to the narrative, a speculative quality, that is explained when the narrator is revealed as a colleague of Nakamatsu’s who has taken upon himself to prepare this report. Because he is not exactly a friend, his account carries a slight tone of cynicism that only serves to heighten the crumbling state, mentally and physically, of a man who has long cut himself off from a natural support system, pursued and driven mad by the strangled ghosts of his father’s generation—the Japanese labourers who found themselves stranded in a distant hostile land where many managed to build lives and futures, but some never managed to adapt.

Born and raised in the working class centre of Lima in 1946, Higa Oshiro was the son of immigrants from Okinawa. His early writing was inspired by the neighbourhood in which he grew up, but after spending a year and a half doing factory work in Japan, he began to explore the experiences of the Japanese-Peruvian community, aliens in their New World home yet alienated from their ancestral land. The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, originally published in 2008, belongs to this latter period of his career and represents his first publication in English translation. Sadly, Higa Oshiro died on April 28, 2023, just two month shy of its May 30th release. Translator Jennifer Shyue’s Afterword describes her 2019 meeting with the author and his warm support and generosity so hopefully we can look forward to further translations of his work.

The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro is translated from the Spanish by Jennifer Shyue and published by Archipelago Books.

Not all there: My Life as Edgar by Dominique Fabre

With a child narrator it is always a challenge to strike the right note, the right balance of insight and innocence, but when the child in question has a developmental disability it can be even more difficult to create a believable, engaging voice. Or, as in Dominique Fabre’s My Life as Edgar, it can be an opportunity to present the world through an unusually sensitive, yet unfiltered lens. As is clear from the opening sentences, Edgar has a clear sense of what it is that sets him apart from others, even if he and those around him are never really certain just how far apart that truly is:

I was a quiet, unassuming child, but I had features of a kid with Down syndrome—a kind of coldness around the eyes, pale lips, big cheeks, a big butt, though my chromosomes weren’t really to blame. I could hear people around me say He’s not all there, is he? in soft voices, secretively, only I had ears, phenomenal ears, Micky Mouse was deaf compared to me, nature didn’t do me any favors, except for my ears.

When we first meet Edgar it is 1964, he is three going on four and living in Paris with his single mother, Isabelle. Life is pleasant. They go to the park, she takes him to visit a psychiatrist he is fond of, and when she goes to work he stays at a day home. But things start to change when a married man comes into his mother’s life. Suddenly his small world becomes a little uncomfortably crowded, perhaps too crowded. Before long, Edgar is sent to live with a foster family in Savoy. He will remain there for the next seven years, his care paid for by monthly cheque. He will talk to his mother on the phone weekly, write her letters, carefully copying the examples his caregiver prepares for him, and, on occasion, she will come to visit. But in a sense, out in the country he has more attention, freedom, responsibility and companionship than he had at home in Paris. He is even allowed to go to school. With Auntie Gina and Uncle Jos, and the other kids of unwed mothers who pass through their home, he has a second family and freedoms that urban life would never have afforded a young boy who is “not all there.”

On the surface, Edgar’s story is simple, but his telling of that story is neither simple, nor direct. The first section, recounting life in Paris with his mother, has a certain charm. He understands more of what is going on around him—or at least he appears to—and reports his observations and responses with a clarity that belies his age. However, this is a relatively focused period of his life that he may well have replayed in his mind many times over the years that he lived apart from his mother, because, with the second and longest section, the tone changes. Unfolding as an internal monologue addressed to his psychiatrist, Madame Clarisse Georges, he confesses: “I’m still not all there, but I know how to hide it well. I’m grown up now. I’m still quiet and unassuming too, but I’m not sure that won’t change.” He is eleven—a good year for him, he says—it is the year he will return to the city. But he admits that the years before that were also good, and he wants to talk about them. So he sets out to “dive into the past without remembering much actually.” And, sometimes, remembering too much.

As one might expect, Edgar’s efforts to fill in the gaps in his memory leads to a narrative that can be rather disjointed. He reports what comes to mind, moving back and forth in time, from event to event, often unaware of the larger context of what he sees and hears. His foster mother is of Italian descent, while his stepfather apparently doesn’t like Italians “even though he married one and she’s not the first, but I only know that because I let my ears listen.” Uncle Jos is a man who has chosen Stalingrad over the Catholic Church and works for the local municipality:

[H]e has road workers from the Department of Roads and Ditches who are all the time filling the holes of the world so it won’t spill over on all sides. Sometimes at night he goes out in his underwear, wearing his Damart thermals, when the roads collapse  and no one can get through.

His narrative is peppered with stock expressions seemingly incongruous with that of a young child, especially one who is supposedly “not all there.” He talks about his mother’s “dark and traumatized gaze” and accepts that he is the “village idiot.” He calls Italians Dagos and talks of cuckolds without understanding that the terms are being used in a derogatory fashion. His language absorbs and reflects the prejudices and politics of 1960s working class rural France.

As a narrator, Edgar has no filter. He tells what he remembers, the significant and the insignificant alike, from the quality of his bowel movements (especially after the weekly polenta dinner) to the excitement of the Revolution of 1968. What he reveals is often quite telling, even funny, but he his always very serious in his accounting. His is a monologue that invites one to read between the lines, revealing much about the society and the family units within which he exists. And his observations can be quite profound as when he describes his stepfather’s relationship with his adult son on a day when his own mother has come to visit:

They also fought about the Algerian war. I’d often heard the story since being here. Uncle Jos had tried to break Ricardo’s leg so he wouldn’t go back and help the French get killed over there in the colonies, but his leg had held up against the hammer blows, so Ricardo returned to Algeria covered in gauze and bandages. Since then, the two of them didn’t talk much. Me, if we had to go to war for independence, I think I’d go see Ricardo, not Uncle Jos. It feels weird, Madame Clarisse Georges, I’ll always know more about Uncle Jos and Auntie Gina than about Edgar and Isabelle, and all the rest. But today, in case you’re still alive and don’t mind listening to me, I’m like a separated Edgar, I’ve already lived a long time.

In the final section, Edgar, now eleven, returns to Paris and after a few weeks with his mother, is sent off to boarding school. He navigates the dynamics of this new environment for a while, but ultimately  will try to take control of his life in a world which has repeatedly pushed him off to the sidelines.

Dominique Fabre is a writer who is interested of illuminating the lives of people on the margins. This is a brave little book that I suspect may have missed the mark with some readers who fail to connect with narrator. Edgar, for all his concerns about the gaps in his memory, is an endearing child trying to tell his own story as best he can. In the process, he unwittingly tells a much larger tale about the lives of children whose parents are unable, or unwilling, to care for them, the systems in which they find themselves—day homes, boarding schools and foster families—and the value of consistency and support, wherever one may find it.

My Life as Edgar by Dominique Fabre is translated from the French by Anna Lehmann.

It’s raining light: Second Star and Other Reasons for Lingering by Philippe Delerm

In the waiting area, they’ve installed a piano. There’s one in each of the big Paris railway stations now, but you never know how that will go. In the Gare du Nord the other day, an older woman set her suitcase down beside her and then played, with great application, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring before melting back into the crowd, aware that no one had stopped to listen. She left without looking around, suitcase in hand, a little smile on her lips, of annoyance or contentment.
(from “En Route Virtuosos”)

French writer Philippe Delerm is a thoughtful documentarian of the quotidian experience. His signature pieces, one or two pages long, zero in on the small details of familiar actions or activities. Some might be thought of as meditations, others like character sketches or vignettes, and yet others like prose poems. Each one welcomes the reader in, sometimes addressing “you” directly, to consider a task, interaction or activity with a degree of attention you might otherwise overlook or disregard. It takes a special talent, after all, to celebrate the special satisfaction of washing windows. But that’s just one of the many subjects Delerm entertains in Second Star and Other Reasons for Lingering, a collection of sixty brief essays, drawn from his most recent collections of “literary snapshots”—The Troubled Waters of the Mojito and The Ecstacy of the Selfie—and translated by Jody Gladding.

Delerm approaches his topics with a careful eye, gentle wisdom and a little humour. They may be best appreciated a handful at a time, allowing space for the lingering the book’s title suggests. His subjects range from the whimsical to the profound and cover a considerable amount of territory from seasonal meditations, to the dissection of the enjoyment of a clementine, a slice of watermelon or a raw turnip.  Looking to the past, he ponders the watch pocket from the days of the pocket watch while in our futuristic present he contemplates the fingertip memory our cellphones now afford us. Delerm excels at creating scenes into which he invites you to imagine yourself gazing at a glass of whisky, directing a reluctant shopping cart or rolling up your sleeves. He takes you out onto the streets of Paris, visits Venice, spends time on the beach. Many of his “snapshots” capture familiar, common everyday moments, but, even in places and activities you’ve never experienced, he manages to kindle recognition because it is the intricacy of experience itself rather than the specific place or act. And, in doing so, we are inspired to take extra notice of our own small moments.

Like a prose poem, Delerm’s meditations tend to move toward a final moment that balances the prosaic with the profound—and sometimes this arises in the most unexpected context. Take for example, “The Embarrassment of Vaping” which suggest that vaping, if not hidden, lacks that certain mystique once associated with cigarettes:

There’s none of that with vaping. At first it was thought to be harmless, quite an insult to a self-destructive ritual. Doubts were raised, which have yet to spawn a new mythology. That’s because of the gesture. So sad in its asceticism, its privacy, surly Epicurean reduced to Jansenist. Someday maybe they’ll be a Gainsbourg for vaping. Although it’s hard to imagine. In the meantime, we have to go on living, or else smoking. Because smoking kills. But then living does too.

In other pieces, sentiment is clearly the guiding force, leading to a moving portrait as in “Memory of Forgetting” which looks in on a blind woman, newly moved to the Alzheimer’s unit of  a nursing home. Disoriented and frustrated, she tends to become irritated easily. When she informed that her husband has come to visit, she is surprised to learn that she has a husband, excited when she is told he has photos of her that he looks at often. She asks if she can meet him:

She’s happy to come sit beside his man who, five minutes earlier, she wasn’t the least bit aware of. She hums along with the Schubert impromptu and you’re amazed at her incredible memory for melodies, for songs.

Her face has relaxed and become almost radiant, ecstatic. For someone doing so badly, how can she still be so well? Why must she suffer the same anguish in her room again tonight? She’ll remember that she lost something, she won’t know what. They say it’s hell. But there isn’t a word for it.

Philippe Delerm is capable of taking the smallest sensations and observations and turn them into quiet meditations that fit within a frame that is never too tight or too large. It is fine skill, representative of a form or genre that he created over two decades ago. Now, with this attractively presented collection, English language readers can experience its charms.

Second Star and Other Reasons for Lingering by Philippe Delerm is translated from the French by Jody Gladding and published by Archipelago Books.