Best of 2013: Translations into English

2013 Translations Read:

Yoko Ogawa, Revenge

Angélica Gorodischer, Tráfalgar

Ismail Kadare, The Fall of the Stone City

Xu Lei, Search for the Buried Bomber

Pierre Grimbert, The Secret of Ji:  Six Heirs

Nihad Sirees, The Silence and the Roar

Jean-Marie Blas de Robles, Where Tigers are at Home

Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer

Martín Arias and Martín Hadis, Professor Borges:  A Course on English Literature

Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump

Inga Ābele, High Tide 

Liliana Bodoc, The Days of the Deer 

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone 

László Krasznahorkai, Seiobo There Below 

Jyrki Vainonen, The Explorer & Other Stories 

Leena Krohn, Datura 

Andrzej Sapkowski, The Time of Contempt 
João Cerqueira, The Tragedy of Fidel Castro

Edit:  Translators for these titles are listed in the comments to this post.
 
I read more translated works, both fiction and non-fiction alike, in 2013 than I had in recent years.  Yet even this list does not contain every book that I've read that saw an English translation this year (Javier Marías' Infatuations is one prominent example, although as good as that tale was, it would not have made my shortlist of three works), plus there is another book, Zoran Živković's Find Me (a sequel to The Last Book), that I got to read before its English publication (and that one would have possibly cracked the top 5, if not the top 3).

The translations here ranged from autobiographies such as Naoki Higashida's insightful look into his life as a teen in Japan with autism (I credit this memoir with helping me immensely with one of my current jobs) to philosophical meanderings (Leopardi's Zibaldone, which I also read in Italian this year) to various "genre" offerings (the mystery elements present in High Tide to the SF of Tráfalgar to the high fantasy of The Days of the Deer and The Time of Contempt) and all other points in-between and around (such as Datura).  It is difficult to choose the very "best" from this list due to the diversity of the genres listed and the various tastes that readers might have (if anything, I could note a few that were not my favorites, although they were decent reads and would appeal to some readers:  The Secret of Ji, Search for the Buried Bomber), but below are three works, only one of which I have reviewed before, that I would consider to be the Best of 2013 for translations into English:

3.  Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer

This harrowing look at the effects of war and terrorism has lingered with me even more than has Nihad Siree's The Silence and the Roar (which does a very good job laying out the crumbling situation in Syria).  See the full review for my thoughts.

2.  Jean-Marie Blas de Robles, Where Tigers are at Home

This 2013 US release was one of the more monumental reads of the year.  Blas de Robles tells what appears to be two stories in parallel, that of a 17th century philosopher/scientist and a contemporary scientist, both engaged in attempting to solve mysteries, but the tale soon becomes that about how we conceive of information systems and knowledge itself.  It sounds extremely complex to explain in a single paragraph, but what Blas de Robles does is create a magnificently-woven tapestry of images and concepts that sucks the reader into its weaving, leaving the reader bedazzled at what she encounters.  I enjoyed this work so much in translation that I sought out the French original a few months later to read it anew.

1.  László Krasznahorkai, Seiobo There Below

I am planning on doing a series of reviews next year of Krasznahorkai's works, but this novel (his fourth to be translated into English) is a true literary beauty.  Readers familiar with his labyrinthine sentences will encounter even more subtlety of expression and meaning (for those who are not, Krasznahorkai is akin to José Saramago in constructing pages-long sentences without using direct quotations, but with some differences to how points are conveyed within those clause-laden sentences).  The story touches upon many things, but at its heart lies the search for Art, Love, and the true Apocalypse where all of our (self-) deceits shall be laid bare.  Here is an exemplary quote fragment:

He set off from the deepest of hatreds and arrived, from deep below, and from far away, from so far below and so far away – that then, at the beginning of the beginning, he had not the slightest idea where he was heading; indeed, he didn't even suspect that there was a route toward anything at all, he had come to hate the country where he lived, come to hate the city where he resided, come to hate the people among whom he stepped onto the metro every morning at dawn, and with whom he traveled home in the evening, it is futile, he said to himself, I have no one here, nothing ties me to this place, let the whole thing go to hell and rot away; since for a good long while he could not decide, he just went with the morning metro and came back with the evening one, back home, and when the day arrived, one morning at dawn, that he no longer stepped onto that metro with the others, he just stood for a while on the platform, there was nothing in his head, he just stood, and he was pushed around, here and there; he picked up one of the free advertising newspapers, then had a beer standing at the counter, and he looked at the want ads and picked out a country along with a job offer, because he knew nothing about it, Spain, that's a good distance away, so let it be Spain, and from that point on things sped up, and a cheap airline was already dragging him along, he was traveling by plane for the first time in his life, yet he felt nothing other than fear and hatred, for he was afraid of them:  he hated the self-confident stewardesses, the self-confident travelers, and even the self-confident clouds that whirled around below him, and he hated the sun and the sparkling light as well – and then he was nearly plummeting down, plummeting down straight into that city, and hardly had he set foot here then he had already been swindled, for of course there was no job behind the job offer, and the money he had saved up was almost immediately gone – it had gone toward the traveling, accommodation for the first few days, and food, so that he could start here, there was no going back, no going back at all – he could start to look for work in this foreign land, which of course he didn't find, everything the "Romanian vagrants" and those of their ilk were chased away, he just wandered around in this beautiful city, and no one would give him any kind of work, and a week passed, and then another and then another, ... (Ch. 21, pp. 165-166)

At first these "walls of words" may be intimidating for even intrepid readers most eager to parse them, but there is a rhythm to his narrator's thoughts, to his blending of description and introspection, that lulls the reader into reading just a little bit more, into considering just a little bit more what is transpiring.  There comes a point (for myself, it was around 20 pages in) where the rhythms become so internalized that the narrative seems to "pulse" (for lack of a better work) with a force that is irresistible.  While this has been true for the other Krasznahorkai novels that I have read, here in Seiobo There Below it is intensified, perhaps because the author's explorations, which formerly focused more on matters of desolation and despair, have expanded to included the yearning qualities of hope and beauty.  It truly is a marvelous work to behold and (re)consider.

The Books of My Life

Earlier this year, I was asked by Safaa Dib, the editor of the Portuguese magazine Bang!, if I would write a 2500 word essay on "The Books of My Life" for translation and publication in the 15th issue of Bang!  This issue came out in Portugal last month and today I received my contributor's copy.  For those who can't read Portuguese (and I should note that Luís Santos does an excellent job translating my florid words into fluid Portuguese), here is the article in English.  Hopefully this will allow some insight into the stories that have shaped me for over three decades now.

I have spent a long time reflecting on what truly might be the “Books of My Life,” especially in regard to those works that touch upon those imaginative vistas so frequently associated with fantasies and other speculative fictions.   There are so many works that have influenced me over the years that it is difficult to just choose a small sample of stories and discuss them without at least grounding them in my life.  Therefore, I will begin by discussing “place” and its role in the creation of the stories that have enchanted me for years.

In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus chooses to identify his place in the world by going from the intimately local (Class of Elements) to the, well, “universal” (the Universe).  This inductive approach to placing himself inside the context of a greater universe is similar to how I believe many fantasies came to be:  the original storytellers tried to place an imaginative form of their own intimate locales within a larger, stranger, and sometimes frightful world that seemed to exist outside the limns of their villages or city-states.  The earliest mythologies preserved in writing, the Sumerian tales of Gilgomesh, Enkidu, Inanna, the action frequently takes place just a few mountains or valleys away from the Mesopotamian river valley.  Fraught with a dark, subterranean underworld and god-sent bulls and a rare flower (not to mention a flood that almost certainly is the antecedent for Noah’s), these tales served to educate generations of listeners about how they should conduct their lives and how they should remember the limitations of human life.  Yet often overlooked in discussions of mythologies, ancient as well as more modern, are the visual aspects that shape the tale to fit the needs of the audience.  From the hoary frost of the Norse myths regarding the world’s foundation to the shapeless Chaos from whence Night and Day were birthed and then from them the later gods and goddesses to the Cherokee belief that the water beetle Dâyuni'sï scooped up mud in order to provide a resting place during his sojourn there from the sky realm of Gälûñ'lätï, each myth takes natural elements (or the perceived absence of them) and they create fantastical places upon which stories of truth, justice, good, evil, and despair could be enacted upon in an aural tapestry that would simultaneously entrance their listeners (and later, readers) and lead them to consider the messages embedded within the stories.

In recent centuries, these fantastical mythologies expanded roughly along national lines.  The English have their “Matter of Britain,” or the cycle of stories surrounding the legendary King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.  In France and Italy, there is the “Matter of France” and the tales surrounding Charlemagne’s Twelve Paladins, particularly Roland/Orlando.  The Spanish have El Cid to represent the Reconquista.  Each of these, however, were birthed over several centuries and with the exception of the 16^th century epic poem Orlando Furioso, all came before Columbus’s voyages to the so-called “New World.”

With the circumnavigation of the globe by the last ship in Magellan’s fleet in 1521, the belief in a world suspended on pillars, flat as a plane, was shattered.  Yet the melding of physical and imaginative “place” continued to produce moving works, such as Camões’s Os Lusíadas and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the metaphoric locales became at least as important as real-world parallels.  One could argue that due to this ascendancy of the metaphoric , irreal place at the expense of the “real” physical locations (slightly altered to fit the needs of the tale), the unity of locale and belief, bound together in myths that reinforced social mores, had begun to fracture into the “speculative” and “realist” fictions of today.

There is some justification, some might argue, to considering fantasies to be “lesser” works.  After all, they do not possess the believability of the earlier myths – there is little sense of there being a discovery of Hobbiton in the layers of English detritus as there still is for some faint, distant echo of a historical King Arthur.  “Place” in regards to modern fantasies, feels estranged from known realities.  Yet this is not always the case.  Take for instance my native region, the American South.  Unlike virtually any part of Anglo North America, it possesses a memory of place so strong that history itself has been warped to suit the needs of the populace.

“Place” in the American South is treacherous, full of cultural and historical landmines that can detonate if the erstwhile traveler takes a single false step.   “The South” even 152 years after the beginning of the American Civil War, carries connotations of chattel slavery, plantation life, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and of enduring memories of the “Lost Cause.”  These sordid elements combine in odd ways, creating what might be some of the finest speculative fictions of the past century, several of which have served to influence writers across the globe even today.

“The South” has been mythologized as a place of sweltering summer heat and humidity, of decaying farms and encroaching kudzu.  The very air seems to sometimes carry a hint of ruined plantations and burning homes.  The devastation of the Civil War was much more than just the loss of a significant percentage of the pre-war population or the razing of several towns and plantations.  No, in the minds of many there was a sort of metaphysical impression put on the souls of those who survived and endured:  a sort of social Original Sin in which not just the sins of the fathers would be visited upon the descendants to the fourth degree but that there would be a tendency to slip into the evils of pride, anger, and racism.  While this mindset is not totally true, there is still a sense of a sort of Hawthornian “scarlet letter” that a great many Southerners still bear in penance for the evils of their forebears and themselves. 

Such societal feelings, however negative they may be, can be the impetus for great, imaginative literature.  Take for instance the late 19^th/early 20^th century Brer Rabbit stories.  These tales of a clever rabbit outwitting a devious fox, a brute bear, and other anthropomorphized animals, represent two strands of Southern life, each of which were born of a melding of West African, Southeastern Native American, and  Anglo-Celtic tales.  I grew up listening to the Joel Chandler version of the tales, in which the characters are presented as quaint tales told by plantation workers, with implicit racist commentary.  Yet the Brer Rabbit stories carried another connotation, one that Zora Neale Hurston transcribes in her first non-fiction work, Mules and Men.  There, Brer Rabbit leads a subversive resistance against the established order and that buried within the fantasies is a social commentary grounded in the complex realities of post-Civil War Southern society.  These twin poles, of white manipulation of black myth in order to suit their social hierarchical views and the black subversion of this same hierarchy, represent in fantasy form in cultural topography of the South even unto my childhood in the late 1970s and 1980s.  Looking back on these tales now, especially that of the “Tar Baby,” I cannot help but see the story in two ways:  a tale of a clever rabbit who manages to escape even his own deserved comeuppance and a metaphor for the battles fought to preserve a culture that was repeatedly oppressed by the dominant racial group.  Taking into account the variations between the Chandler and Hurston recordings of originally oral tales, the Brer Rabbit stories might be some of the more controversial and yet culturally significant fantasies to be produced, not just in my native South but in the world as a whole.

The South is also known for its Southern Gothic literature, which captures in haunting, eloquent words the mixture of religious fervor, faith, despair, and ruin that seem to haunt Southerners even today.  As Flannery O’Connor once said in an essay:

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

The Devil, nearly absent elsewhere, seems to lurk in the hollows and vales of the South.   When I first read O’Connor in college, I could not help but feel as though in her tales of sinners captured brilliantly the looming dread of the afterlife.  Although there is nothing explicitly supernatural about her fictions, the battle for redemption can be seen in characters such as the boy in “The River” who seeks so earnestly for a redemption that he barely understands that he continually immerses himself in a local river in a tragic effort to purge his body of sin and impurity.  Her first collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find, is replete with tales of those who seek redemption or redress of grievances in one form or fashion.  O’Connor comments on the latent power of redemption in an essay that I believe goes straight to the heart of why her fictions resonate so much with readers, particularly Southerners:

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”

Nowhere in her fiction is this “mock damnation” felt more strongly than in her first novel, Wise Blood, and its protagonist Hazel Motes and his “Church Without Christ.”  Having read it twice in my life, the novel grows even more haunted and grotesque on the second reading.  O’Connor’s use of religious imagery, particularly Catholic symbols filtered through a Southern apocalyptic lens, served as the genesis for some of the most unsettling fictions that I have read over the second half of my life.

If O’Connor’s South is a place in which the worst religious-inspired nightmares haunt its denizens, then William Faulkner’s fictions, mostly set in the fictional Mississippi Yoknapatawpha County, strikes at the confluence of past and present that pervaded Southern customs for over a century after the Civil War.  His tales are replete with families that have come down in life after the war, yet still clinging to the shredded, rotting remnants of former familial fame.  Stories like “A Rose for Emily” capture this in an almost horrific fashion.  When I first read it as an 18 year-old in 1992, I recall feeling a vague sense that Emily could have easily been any of a number of elderly women that I knew in the 1980s, those who would rather shut themselves away from the present in order to cling to a glorified past now mostly devoid of any resemblance to the present’s grim realities.  Faulkner’s fictions play upon this struggle to reconcile the past and its atrocities with the present’s demands.  In Absalom, Absalom!, this conflict is outlined in perhaps its greatest depth, making for a tale that feels as much a synopsis of a century of cursed existence as a tale of a family’s rise and fall.  Each time that I return to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, I feel as though I am experiencing a past South that exists as much on the metaphorical level of a place struggling to find itself within a world of hide-bound tradition as it does as a penetrating look into the actual “real” world of complicated race and class struggles.  Re-reading Faulkner after reading some of the Latin American realismo mágico writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, who both have cited Faulkner as an influence, it is easy to hear within their tales of three years’ of rain and the “war of the end of the world” echoes of Faulkner’s exploration of how humans are molded by their native lands and how those histories shape us in ways that seem utterly fantastical to those who grew up outside these tortured traditions and decadent societies.

Yes, the sense of the decadent pervades Southern Gothic literature and its cousin once removed, magic realism.  Ruin is in the ascendency and no greater goal than the redemption of individual or societal souls is at stake.  This has a resonance in several fantasies, particularly epic fantasies such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (which I read as a child, but despite re-reading it several times between 13 and 18, it did not have as large of a hold on me, perhaps due to its “foreign” qualities), but whereas secondary-world fantasies, with their invented locales, are at some remove from the high moral stakes that are often featured in Southern Gothic literature.  Although many of the classic writers of Southern Gothic literature are now dead, one writer still alive who uses its settings, themes, and techniques is Cormac McCarthy.  While McCarthy might be more famous today for his Western-set works such as Blood Meridian or The Border Trilogy, he began by writing dark, almost depraved works set in mountainous region of East Tennessee.  His  1973 novel, Child of God, describes the life of a loner, Lester Ballard, who sinks so far into depravity (necrophilia is but one of his numerous crimes) that instead of being repulsed by him, readers may instead sympathize with his transgressions against early 20^th century Southern society.  McCarthy’s short, staccato bursts of dialogue and sparse description create a setting that captures, similar to O’Connor but in an even more stark fashion, the desire for redemption even when damnation looms darkly over the narrative.  Unlike Faulkner and O’Connor, both of whom I have re-read several times over the past two decades, I have yet to re-read any of McCarthy’s stories, as they are so frightening in their feverish realism that they have seared their outlines into my mind.  Those who read McCarthy can expect to find something more fantastical than surreal fantasy within his tales.  It’s as though McCarthy has through his use of rural Appalachian settings created a dark, twisted fable within what appears at first to be a grim realist work.  Place here, as in Faulkner and O’Connor, becomes as much the grounds for myths to spring up from as a location upon which we might walk across.

Thinking again on this question of “Books of My Life,” perhaps it is best to say that the place where I grew up, the American South, is as much the grounds upon which fantastical nightmares and feverish dreams arise as a region that one can find on a map.  The stories of its evils and desire for redemption are, as Shakespeare says, such stuff as dreams are made.  Our fictions merely reflect a mindset that may be foreign to others, but which it is difficult to read without sensing that something fantastical has come to nestle itself beside quotidian life.  To these tales I return time and time again, in order to understand just a little more how this wonderfully mad culture came into being.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

So another December has come bearing with it another Peter Jackson adaptation of a J.R.R. Tolkien story.  With each passing movie, my enjoyment has declined to the point where I decided that I would make the effort to see the second The Hobbit adaptation, The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug more out of a morbid curiosity to see how I would react this time to the sundry changes than out of any real expectation that what I would view would be engaging entertainment.  With such expectations, it is hard to be disappointed, as the critic then is, if not suspending her judgments, involved more in a meta-evaluation than a full-scale critique of the film at hand. 

This is, of course, merely a long-winded way of saying that some films provide exactly what they promise, dammit if viewers would have liked something more from it.  Before commencing with this review, I re-read my 2012 review of the first film and found myself thinking that I could copy/paste almost the entirety of that review here, changing only the title and specific details and it would encapsulate well what I thought of the second installment.

As I said in that earlier review, I am no "purist"; I understand that cinema and novels are very different storytelling forms and that there are things that have to be adjusted to fit the medium in question.  That being said, the questionable alterations that Jackson did in order to split the story in three (presumably in order to spend more time on the Gandalf/Necromancer side-plot) bear their dreadful fruit here.  For those who favor a tauter narrative less filled with repetitive scenes, The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug is not the movie for you.  Now onto an exploration of some of the issues I had with it (filled of course, with those ever-so-dreadful "spoilers" that some drone on about for some reason or another.)

The film begins roughly a day or two after the final events of the first installment.  While Beorn does make an appearance here (and Jackson provides a great visual of his home that suits the descriptions found in the book), his entire history and his interactions with the war party are so haphazardly presented that one might question, if it were not for the fact that the dwarves needed ponies for a little while, why this scene appeared here if it to be so sketchily presented.  But mercifully, the scene quickly shifts to Mirkwood and the visceral horrors of that place are well-rendered.

But even here there are issues with the narrative.  Jackson's Bilbo does not get that moment of character development present in the book when he fights the spiders.  Instead, this scene devolves into a more generic action-adventure scene with dizzying spirals of action as the dwarfs, hobbit, and then some elves dance hither and fro slashing at and filling their enemies full of arrows and pointy objects.  There is nothing outright "bad," per se, about having such depicted in detail (conceding of course that this alters the themes of the source material), but there is really nothing spectacular here.  In thinking back to this scene and to subsequent fighting scenes (and there are a lot of fighting scenes, since one cannot keep a good orc down, it seems), I found myself thinking of two movie trailers that appeared before the opening scene, Seventh Son and the 300 sequel.  In those trailers and here in Jackson's film, the cinematography is very similar.  The camera moves in such a vertiginous fashion that it is difficult to keep the eye focused on the movements.  The grim-faced characters, speaking with voices reminiscent of 300's King Leonidas yelling "Sparta!", back-handing foes and having evil beasts roaring in their faces – all of this runs together into a prosaic, forgettable mash-up of action at the expense of any real storytelling.  Yet for many who "like this sort of stuff," these action scenes, which comprise at least 1/3 of the film's nearly three hours, will be appealing to them (as it was for my dad, who has never read the Tolkien books).

Other additions are a bit more tedious.  While the latest elf-maiden stand-in wasn't as incongruous as the Arwen character in the LotR films, the story becomes bogged down in its own need to justify its length around the point of the elvish appearance.  Instead of a simpler means of explaining the dwarfs' escape, Jackson feels the need to provide drama in the form of extraneous attacks (and lots of fighting, some of which, like the running across the heads of some of the fighters, was ridiculous to behold).  This does not add tension to the narrative as much as it drags out the scenes, making the flight-then-fight sequences feel redundant, as if the characters were trapped in some sort of Middle-Earth Groundhog Day.  Add to that a half-developed political conflict interlude in Lake Town and the entire affair just feels bloated in order to justify earlier bloatedness.

The Gandalf scenes, left undescribed in the book, also suffers from this bloating, not so much in the scenes themselves, but in the lack of development in contrast to the too-long time devoted to going from the elvish halls to the Lonely Mountain of Erebor.  While some of the scenes in this sub-plot are well-rendered, there is a discernible lack of connection with the greater narrative, something that perhaps could have been redressed by judicious edits in the larger plot coupled with perhaps a furthering of Gandalf's narrative.  As it stands, however, his scenes feel superfluous and they too add to the sense that Jackson has delayed overlong in having the war party reach Smaug's lair.

The final hour or so of the film is pretty much non-stop action, which again will appeal to some, but for others such as myself, will be another tedious exercise in repetitive fighting.  Smaug's initial scene with Bilbo is well-done, but Jackson's choice of having the dwarfs emerge to fight the dragon leads merely to a series of capers that quickly becomes dull.  There is nothing that occurs here that justifies over 45 minutes of movements and dumping of copious amounts of ore and molten metal ad nauseam.  Even if only 20 minutes (I would have preferred less than 10) were devoted to this fight, it might have been bearable, but near the end, I began to lose focus as I kept wondering, "when will this damn thing ever end?"  Finally, it does, with a series of (expected) cliffhangers that remain to be resolved in a year's time.

The Hobbit:  The Desolation of Smaug is not the sort of movie that I ever would enjoy.  If it weren't for the fact that I loved the book when I was 12 in early 1987, I wouldn't have considered watching it, knowing that it would be chock-full of the sorts of generic action/adventure scenes that I have come to loathe.  For this cinematic genre, however, it is decent, albeit not the sort of plot one should lose any sleep over considering its cohesiveness (or lack thereof).  But it certainly is a film that reveals in painful detail just why so many people questioned the need to have a 300 page book split into three movies that will cover nearly a combined nine hours.  A thoroughly mediocre production that illustrates well the declining abilities of its producer.

Things I am contemplating doing/reading in 2014

Although it won't be until January 1 when I post my official-official reading goals for 2014, I thought it might be of some interest to readers to see what I am contemplating having as reading challenges/goals for 2014.  This list is subject to change, dependent in large part on projected time/energy issues:

1.  Reading at least 366 books for the year.  Ever since 2008, I have read a minimum of 385 books (currently reading #370, but with the full expectation of reading another 20-35 books by the 31st), so this is an extension of the previous 6 years' accomplishments.

2.  Having at least 35% of those reads be by women writers/editors.  At the very least, I want to read a similar percentage as I have so far this year (currently, a shade under 35%), so this is another continuing annual goal.

Now for some newer ones:

3.  Reading at least 50 books each in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French.  Had thought about having the numbers be 40 each, since I turn 40 in July, but I thought a 50x4 challenge would be more fitting (plus it might make it where over 50% of the works I read will be in a language other than English).  Still might change this one before the 1st.

4.  Reprising the 2010 "World Cup" series of posts for the 2014 edition.  This is almost certainly going to happen in some form, but I haven't decided if I'll write short, silly country vs. country comparisons, or if I'll choose specific writers from the competing countries and write short reviews of their works.  If I do the latter, I probably will need to discover several new writers, which wouldn't be a bad thing at all, n'est ce pas?

5.  Doing an in-depth series of reviews of a Southern writer.  I know, I know, for the past two years I wrote several reviews of stories/novels by William Faulkner (2012) and Flannery O'Connor (2013) and by the springtime, both weekly series had been abandoned.  But perhaps if I made it something like a weekend or monthly feature, something that wouldn't tax me too much if I continue to work/travel 13-14 hrs/day for the workweek, maybe that might have lasting power?  Am considering Thomas Wolfe, one of my all-time favorite writers, for this.

6.  Doing at least one interview with a writer/editor.  Outside of the four interviews I did with certain reviewers/bloggers this year, I haven't interviewed anyone since mid-2011.  Maybe it's past time to resume interro-viewing authors/editors?

7.  Averaging writing a review a week for the year.  I'm nearly at that now, but only a few years ago, I wrote almost 3/week for the year (I think it was 2010).  Maybe that'll restore some life to this blog?


Oh, and there might be more rabid reading squirrels browsing shelves in your hometown/village in the near future.  You might want to stay out of their way...

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

I turned to look at her, to study her face.  She was taller than most Nilters, but fat and pale as any of them.  She out-bulked me, but I was taller, and I was also considerably stronger than I looked.  She didn't realize what she was playing with.  She was probably male, to judge from the angular mazelike patterns quilting her shirt.  I wasn't entirely certain.  It wouldn't have mattered, if I had been in Radch space.  Radchaai don't care much about gender, and the language they speak – my own first language – doesn't mark gender in any way.  This language we were speaking now did, and I could make trouble for myself if I used the wrong forms.  It didn't help that cues meant to distinguish gender changed from place to place, sometimes radically, and rarely made much sense to me. (Ch. 1)

Ann Leckie's debut novel, Ancillary Justice, has received quite a bit of praise since its October 2013 release.  Depending upon the reviewer, the focus has been on the novel's treatment of gender, its SF elements, or its thriller-style plot.  Normally, I do not mention others' impressions of a story, believing that it is better to focus more on my own personal evaluation of a fiction's strengths and weaknesses, but I mention this here because it is one of the rare few times that I've read a story and wondered just how so many others could praise this novel so highly without spending much, if any, time exploring its numerous and egregious flaws.

Ancillary Justice is set in a remote galactic future thousands of years from now.  Various human groups have colonized the galaxy and one, the Radch, has become the hegemonic power.  Based in part upon the Roman Empire in its methods of integrating disparate traditions within an autocratic framework, a defining trait of the Radchaai is their use of human bodies, ancillaries, to house fragments of AI intelligences, many of which are in turn housed in interstellar-traveling ships.  One of these ships,  Justice of Toren, has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind only a singular ancillary, known in the literary present as Breq, to begin a mission that quickly appears to be suicidal in nature.

Many readers may find Breq/JoT/other ancillaries connected to the ship to be of interest.  Leckie frequently shifts perspectives, sometimes within the space of a single page, in flashbacks that span nearly two decades in time.  These shifts are not confusing, but they also are largely devoid of major differentiation in narrative voice.  There rarely is the sense of anything being hidden within these flashback sequences; everything is spelled out in a laborious, expository fashion.  This lack of narrative tension robs the plot of any real impetus; things are unfolding, in both present and flashback sequences, toward a conclusion that feels more perfunctory than anything else.

Yet chronicles of events foretold do not have to be prosaic.  Intriguing, multi-faceted characters can make even the tinniest of plots rich with depth.  The fractured protagonist and her (to indulge the gendered conceit here; more on this shortly) struggle to piece together a cohesive identity does hold some promise of achieving this richness of characterization, as the below passage demonstrates:

I don't know the answer.  But I do know that, though I can see hints of the potential split going back a thousand years or more, that's only hindsight.  The first I noticed even the bare possibility that I – Justice of Toren might not also be I – One Esk, was that moment that Justice of Toren edited One Esk's memory of the slaughter in the temple of Ikkt.  The moment I – "I" was surprised by it.

It makes the history hard to convey.  Because still, "I" was me, unitary, one thing, and yet I acted against myself, contrary to my interests and desires, sometimes secretly, deceiving myself as to what I knew and did.  And it's difficult for me even now to know who performed what actions, or knew which information.  Because I was Justice of Toren.  Even when I wasn't.  Even if I'm not anymore. (Ch. 14)

Yet ultimately this promise of a conflicted, perhaps occasionally unreliable, protagonist(s) largely remains unfulfilled.  Breq/One Esk too often is the passive observer, her own conflicts pushed down in order to devote more time to describing her environs.  Several chapters in Ancillary Justice felt unnecessarily padded with descriptions that didn't adequately develop either character or plot.  The following passage, with just a few alterations for time/locale, could have been lifted whole-cloth from a Wheel of Time novel:

Next morning I bought clothes.  The proprietor of the shop Inspector Supervisor Skaalat had recommended was on the verge of throwing me out when my bank balance flashed onto her console, unbidden I suspected, Station sparing her embarrassment – and simultaneously telling me how closely it was watching me.

I needed gloves, certainly, and if I was going to play the part of the spendthrift wealthy tourist I would need to buy more than that.  But before I could speak up to say so, the proprietor brought out bolts of brocade, sateen, and velvet in a dozen colors.  Purple and orange-brown, three shades of green, gold, pale yellow and icy blue, ash gray, deep red.

"You can't wear those clothes," she told me, authoritative, as a subordinate handed me tea, managing to mostly conceal her disgust at my bare hands.  Station had scanned me and provided my measurements, so I needed to do nothing.  A half-liter of tea, two excruciatingly sweet pastries, and a dozen insults later, I left in an orange-brown jacket and trousers, and icy white, stiff shirt underneath, and dark-gray gloves so thin and soft I might almost have still be barehanded.  Fortunately current fashion favored jackets and trousers cut generously enough to hide my weapon.  The rest – two more jackets and pairs of trousers, two pairs of gloves, half a dozen shirts, and three pairs of shoes – would be delivered to my lodgings by the time, the proprietor told me, I was done visiting the temple. (Ch. 19)

There are times when colorful detail can add to the story, but in this case, any momentum derived from the character disguising herself in order to carry out her mission is lost in this swamp of extraneous description.  If this were a singular or even occasional issue, it would not have stood out so vividly here, but all-too-frequently Leckie confounds description for scene/character development.  This leads to a narrative that feels hollow, where the backdrop becomes more important than the characters moving through these scenes.

Even when it comes to Leckie's use of non-differentiated gendered pronouns is lacking in substance.  Yes, there are times when the narrator's use of "she" for even obviously male characters makes the reader pause and consider her own reactions, but rarely does this go beyond the surface-level of characterizations.  There is so little apparent differentiation in the actions and customs of these other characters that it was very easy to perceive them all as a homogeneous mass largely devoid of defining traits.  Without any substantive differences in Breq/One Esk's perspectives versus the other characters' own self-perceptions, the lack of any palpable tension in these potentially conflicting identities renders this presumed subversion of gender/character expectations moot, as there is really nothing to react to after the initial realization (spoiled in part upon Breq/One Esk's musing on it in the first chapter) that not all "shes" are hers.

This failure to realize adequately the author's presumed aims in treating gender is but only a symptom of a larger malaise.  The prose on the whole attempts to describe an alien setting, but instead it feels bland and largely devoid of anything interesting when it comes to setting, plot, or character interactions.  Beyond the examples I listed above, there is nothing truly wretched about the story, but there certainly is little that makes it memorable either.  In trying to think of a single word that could sum up Ancillary Justice, the first word that came to mind was "lukewarm."  There is nothing obviously offensive about the work (unless one wants to spend more time wondering why the morally-questionable practice of using the corpses of potentially-enslaved – the narrative does not spend enough time on the issue to determine if this may indeed be the case – people as the corpse-soldier ancillaries is not addressed), but ultimately there is really nothing praiseworthy about the narrative as well.  The characterizations are not well-developed, but nor are they completely devoid of dynamism.  The plot was rather subdued, but has enough points of interests to keep it from being a complete chore to read.  Ancillary Justice is the sort of bland narrative that makes it difficult for me to conceive of reading any future installments in Leckie's proposed trilogy.  One of the more disappointing 2013 releases that I have read.

Best of 2013: The Longlists

It's that time of year where most anyone with a platform and an opinion starts to release his or her "Best of 2013" lists.  I've been doing this for around a decade now, first on wotmania and then on this blog.  Much has changed since that time, as I've begun again reading much more non-speculative fiction than speculative fiction (although there will be several sterling examples of the latter appearing on these lists).  To date, I have read or have begun reading 101 books released in the US in 2013 and these are the books from which I'll choose shortlisted/winning titles the last week of the year.  Several of these books belong in several categories and I'll list them in such.  Those that do not fit in the preceding ones will be (along with those that do appear in category lists) considered for the general "best of 2013" list.  The titles will appear in the order in which I read them, as I wrote the titles down from my 2013 reading log.  Feel free to argue for/against the titles listed:

Short Fiction Collections:

Tamas Dobozy, Siege 13

George Saunders, Tenth of December

Yoko Ogawa, Revenge

Angélica Gorodischer, Tráfalgar

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Jim Gavin, Middle Men

Joan Silber, Fools

Jyrki Vainonen, The Explorer & Other Stories

Ron Rash, Nothing Gold Can Stay

Anthologies:

Nisi Shawl (ed.), Bloodchildren

João Barreiros (ed.), Lisboa no Ano 2000

John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen (eds.), Oz Reimagined

Mike Allen (ed.), Clockwork Phoenix 4

Mariano Villarreal and Luis Pestarini (eds.), Terra Nova:  vol. 2

Debut:

Helene Welker, The Golem and the Jinni

Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

Matt Bell, In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

J.M. Sidorova, The Age of Ice

Therese Anne Fowler, Z:  A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

Bill Cheng, Southern Cross the Dog

Non-Fiction:

Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito, The End of Oulipo?

Justin Landon and Jared Shurin (eds.), Speculative Fiction 2012

Carolyn Dalgliesh, The Sensory Child Gets Organized

Martín Arias and Martín Hadis, Professor Borges:  A Course on English Literature

Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, March: Book One

Al Gore, The Future

Denise Kiernan, The Girls of Atomic City

Gene Yuen Yang, Boxers/Saints

Umberto Eco, Storia delle Terre e dei Luoghi Leggendari

George Packer, The Unwinding

Graphic Novels:

Ayun Halliday and Paul Hoppe, Peanut

John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, March: Book One

Gene Yuen Yang, Boxers/Saints

Children's/Middle Grade/Young Adult:

Kate DiCamillo, Flora & Ulysses

Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince

Gene Yuen Yang, Boxers/Saints

Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone

Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck

Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp

Tom McNeal, Far Far Away

Translated Works:

Yoko Ogawa, Revenge

Angélica Gorodischer, Tráfalgar

Ismail Kadare, The Fall of the Stone City

Xu Lei, Search for the Buried Bomber

Pierre Grimbert, The Secret of Ji:  Six Heirs

Nihad Sirees, The Silence and the Roar

Jean-Marie Blas de Robles, Where Tigers are at Home

Sinan Antoon, The Corpse Washer

Martín Arias and Martín Hadis, Professor Borges:  A Course on English Literature

Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump

Inga Ābele, High Tide 

Liliana Bodoc, The Days of the Deer 

Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone 

László Krasznahorkai, Seiobo There Below 

Jyrki Vainonen, The Explorer & Other Stories 

Leena Krohn, Datura 

Andrzej Sapkowski, The Time of Contempt 
João Cerqueira, The Tragedy of Fidel Castro

Poetry: 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur 

Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke 

Mary Szybist, Incarnadine 

Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion 

Matt Rassmussen, Black Aperture 

Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog 

Foreign Language: 

João Barreiros (ed.), Lisboa no Ano 2000 (Portuguese)

Alliah, Metanfetaedro (Portuguese)

Ildefonso Falcones, La reina descalza (Spanish)

José Ovejero, La invención del Amor (Spanish)

Umberto Eco, Storia delle Terre e dei Luoghi Leggendari (Italian)

Mariano Villarreal and Luis Pestarini (eds.), Terra Nova:  vol. 2 (Spanish)

2013 Novels Not Already Listed: 

Leah Stewart, The History of Us 

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, A Memory of Light 

Jim Harrison, The River Swimmer 

Thomas Maltman, Little Wolves 

Adam Mansbach, Rage is Back 

Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then 

Karen Lord, The Best of All Possible Worlds 

Carlene Bauer, Frances and Bernard 

Jennifer Cody Epstein, The Gods of Heavenly Punishment 

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being 

William H. Gass, Middle C 

Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine

Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Mary Beth Keane, Fever 

James Salter, All That Is 

Ron Currie, Jr., Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles 

Jonathan Dee, A Thousand Pardons 

M. John Harrison, Empty Space 

James Kelman, Mo Said She was Quirky 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah 

Karen Joy Fowler, We are all Completely Beside Ourselves 

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane 

Benjamin Percy, Red Moon 

Evangeline Walton, She Walks in Darkness 

Jim Crace, Harvest 

Colum McCann, TransAtlantic 

Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary 

Philipp Meyer, The Son 

Terry Goodkind, The Third Kingdom 

Alice McDermott, Someone 

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers 

Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point 

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland 

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge 

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch 

Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

Tom Drury, Pacific 

Tash Aw, Five Star Billionaire 

James McBride, The Good Lord Bird 

And for those wondering why certain titles were listed in the final section, I chose to list all of the 2013 releases that I read.  It is possible that I might consider doing a "Disappointing 2013 Release" category (although some didn't disappoint as much as they sucked to the level of my low expectations), but I am uncertain.  Should I do such?

Also, I will write a series of articles between Christmas week and New Year's Eve on these categories and there will be a focus on my favorite 3 from each category followed by a combined top 25.  Hope these titles will be of interest to readers looking to buy something in the near future.  I do reserve the right to add any new titles that I don't currently own by Christmas, but odds of that are relatively low for now.

November 2013 Reads

Read or re-read 43 books in November and have either matched or am on the verge of matching each and every of my 2013 reading goals that I have listed at the bottom of most of the monthly reads posts.  Going to add a few more goals to the list and update those that have been matched or should be within the next couple of weeks.

309  Andrzej Sapkowski, Feuertaufe (German; already reviewed)

310  Andrzej Sapkowski, La torre de la golondrina (Spanish; re-read; already reviewed)

311  Andrzej Sapkowski, La Tour de l'Hirondelle (French; already reviewed)

312  Andrzej Sapkowski, Der Schwalbenturm (German; already reviewed)

313  Andrzej Sapkowski, La dama del lago:  volumen 1 (Spanish; re-read; already reviewed)

314  Andrzej Sapkowski, La dama del lago:  volumen 2 (Spanish; re-read; already reviewed)

315  Andrzej Sapkowski, La Dame du lac (French; already reviewed)

316  Andrzej Sapkowski, Die Dame vom See (German; already reviewed)

317  Andrzej Sapkowski, Narrenturm (Spanish; re-read; already reviewed)

318  Andrzej Sapkowski, Narrenturm (German; already reviewed)

319  Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone (YA; 2013 National Book Award finalist; already reviewed)

320  Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck (YA; 2013 National Book Award winner; review forthcoming)

321  Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp (YA; 2013 National Book Award finalist; good)

322  Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture (Poetry; 2013 National Book Award finalist; outstanding)

323  Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Poetry; 2013 National Book Award finalist; good)

324  Soumya Ammar Khodja, Rien ne me manque (French; very good)

325  Jacek Dukaj, La Cattedrale (Italian; short fiction; very good)

326  Tom McNeal, Far Far Away (YA; 2013 National Book Award finalist; very good)

327  Dacia Maraini, Voices (good)

328  César Aira, Relatos reunidos (Spanish; short fiction; very good)

329  Fae Myenne Ng, Bone (good)

330  Maria Bellonci, Rinascimento privato (Italian; Premio Strega winner; good)

331  Manuel Maria de Barbosa du Bocage, Sonetos (Portuguese; poetry; very good)

332  Cesare Pavese, La bella estate (Italian; Premio Strega winner, very good)

333  Petrarca, Poesie (Italian; poetry; good sonnets but too brief of a selection)

334  Leandro França, A Trama das Numens (Portuguese; meh)

335  Andrzej Sapkowski, Camino sin retorno (Spanish; re-read; will review in future)

336  Andrzej Sapkowski, Etwas endet, etwas beginnt (German; will review in future)

337  Gonçalo M. Tavares, Histórias Falsas (Portuguese; re-read; excellent)

338  Mia Couto, Terra Sonâmbula (Portuguese; very good)

339  Lalla Romano, La parole tra noi leggere (Italian; Premio Strega; decent)

340  Mia Couto, O Último Voo do Flamingo (Portuguese; excellent)

341  Mia Couto, The Last Flight of the Flamingo (re-read; excellent)

342  Mia Couto, Cada Homem é uma Raça (Portuguese; short fiction; very good)

343  Mia Couto, Every Man is a Race (re-read; short fiction; very good)

344  Simone de Beauvoir, Une mort trés douce (French; very good)

345  Calixthe Beyala, Tu t'appelleras Tanga (French; good)

346  Moacyr Scliar, O Exército de um Homem Só (Portuguese; good)

347  Mercé Rodoreda, Aloma (Catalan; re-read; very good)

348  Herta Müller, Bassure (Italian; good)

349  Clarice Lispector, Laços de Familia (Portuguese; short fiction; excellent)

350  Herta Müller, L'Home és un gran faisà en el món (Catalan; very good)

351  Clarice Lispector, A Hora da Estrela (Portuguese; very good)


Year Goals:

Overall:  351/366 (should easily reach this, so might expand this to as high as 400, based on the increased reading time I'll have the last 11 days of the year)

Women writers:  123/351 (just over 35%; goal is a minimum of 33%, so I should reach this)

Foreign Language:  153/150 (expanding this one again, to 175 books, since I'll be reading a lot of foreign literature this month)

Spanish:  50/50 (will expand to 52, so I can say I averaged 1 Spanish-language book a week for 2013)

Italian:  24/25 (should reach this one within the next few days)

New Goals:

French:  19/25 (have several at various stages of completion, so I feel confident about this one)

Portuguese:  17/25 (been reading more Portuguese-language fiction recently, so while this might be a hard one to achieve, I'm putting in on there regardless)

German:  10/12 (have two more Sapkowski translations to read, so I should read this one)

Serbian:  11/12 (only one more to go to have averaged 1 Serbian book/month, so why not?)


Interesting that only a shade over 56% of my 2013 reads have been of books written in English or translated into it.  Lowest percentage since 2006, when just over half of my reads were in Spanish and the rest in English.

Comments/questions on any the books listed here?