How did you come to Dead Girls?

Annie McDermott: In fact, came to me. Chris Andrews, who translated糖心传媒攂rilliantly糖心传媒擲elva糖心传媒檚 first novel, , was too busy to take it on, so Carolina from Charco Press asked me to do it. She gave me a copy of the original after we met up in London one evening, and I remember reading the opening pages on the tube on my way home, among the discarded McDonald糖心传媒檚 packaging and dozing office-workers, and getting shivers down my spine because it was so extraordinary.

Why should people read this book?

AM: Because it puts gender violence under the microscope and shows you what it糖心传媒檚 made of糖心传媒攁ll the ugly component parts, wriggling around on the slide in full view. Nothing in this book is abstract: it糖心传媒檚 all real, it糖心传媒檚 all there on display, which is what makes reading it such a visceral and unforgettable experience.

What did you learn in the process of translating this book?

AM: In a way, I felt like I was translating for the very first time when I began work on . The stakes seemed so high糖心传媒攖hese were real women, real stories, real lives and deaths. Because of that, the accuracy of the translation seemed more crucial than ever, and my early drafts were quite wooden because I was clinging so tightly to the original. But as I carried on working, I learnt all over again that translating involves being faithful to so many things at once, like the rhythm and tone and emotional weight of each sentence, and that to achieve this you sometimes have to loosen your grip on the original.

What specific elements of style/structure/voice were the most challenging/rewarding about this project?

AM: The sparseness of the prose was a great challenge and, by the end, a great thrill糖心传媒攍earning from Selva how much you can do with very few words, as long as they糖心传媒檙e the right ones and in the right places.

If someone loved Dead Girls, what would you听recommend they read next?

AM: I edited this book, so I糖心传媒檓 biased, but I糖心传媒檇 say this even if I hadn糖心传媒檛: , by the Salvadoran writer Claudia Hern谩ndez, translated by the inimitable Julia Sanches and published last month by And Other Stories. Set in an unnamed Central American country, it tells the story of several generations of women struggling to get on with their lives in the wake of a civil war. Like Dead Girls, it goes beyond the headlines and statistics to explore everyday reality for individual women in a corrupt, patriarchal and unequal society. Both books are preoccupied with historical memory and seem to be presenting themselves as a kind of alternative account, with a different focus and on a different scale, and telling a different kind of truth.

by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott ()

Yesterday, on Twitter, I promised that the rest of this month’s posts on new books in translation would be way more positive, but, well, sorry everyone糖心传媒擨 momentarily forgot which books I was planning on writing about today (and next week). Let’s kick this off with a page from the “epilogue” to Dead Girls, which also serves as the book’s main thesis:

The new year began a month ago. In that time, at least ten women have been killed for being women. I say at least because these are the names that appeared in the papers, the ones that counted as news.

Mariela Bustos, stabbed twenty-two times, in Las Caleras, C贸rdoba. Marina Soledad Da Silva, beaten and thrown down a well, inn Nemesio Parma, Misiones. Zulma Brochero, knifed in the forehead, and Arnulfa R铆os, shot, both in R铆o Segundo, C贸rdoba. Paola Tom茅, strangled, in Jun铆n, Buenos Aires. Priscila Lafuente, beaten to death, half-burned on a barbecue and then thrown in a stream, in Berazategui. Carolina Arcos, killed with a blow to the head, on a building site in Rafaela, Santa Fe. Nanci Molina, stabbed, in Presidencia de la Plaza, Chaco. Luciana Rodr铆guez, beaten to death, in the capital of Mendoza. Querlinda V谩squez, strangled, in Las Heras, Santa Cruz.

We’re in summer now and it’s hot, almost like the morning of November 16th, 1986, when, in a way, this book began to be written, when the dead girl crossed my path. Now I’m forty and, unlike her and the thousands of women murdered in my country since then, I’m still alive. Purely a matter of luck.

The most frustrating aspect of this book is also its main point: women are murdered, over and over and over, and justice is never served. (All this summer I’ve had the opening line to A Frolic of His Own听stuck in my head: “Justice? 糖心传媒擸ou get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”) And in Dead Girls, you don’t even get the law.

The book centers around three murders that took place in “the interior” of Argentina in the 1980s, when Selva Almada was a teenager. Andrea Danne was stabbed to death in her own bed, without putting up a struggle. Mar铆a Luisa Quevedo went missing in December 1983 and was found raped and strangled “on a patch of wasteland on the outskirts of the city. No one was tried for the murder.” And Sarita Mund铆n disappeared on March 12th, 1988, and declared dead when remains were found nine months later “on the banks of the Tcalamochita river [. . .] Another unresolved case.”

Over the course of the book, Almada talks to living relatives of the three girls, Andrea Danne’s boyfriend at the time of her murder, even a medium, but nothing is ever uncovered, the murderers are never found out, never arrested, never tried, never convicted. She details a number of suspects, of “likely” possibilities, all without resolution. This lack of closure is taken to an extreme with Sarita Mund铆n. With the advent of DNA testing, her bones were exhumed and tested. The body her sister thought was Sarita’s wasn’t. She could still be alive, although that’s not the consolation for her sister that one might hope for糖心传媒攊nstead, her sister believes that she was sold into the sex trade.

Bleak and unforgiving,听Dead Girls听draws attention to the secondary horror of violence in society. Not only are woman constantly in physical danger (and not just women糖心传媒攖his book could be written about Black Americans or members of the trans community or, god, I can’t finish this list), but their murders are often left unresolved or, way too frequently, uninvestigated.

One other note: In a way,听Dead Girls听and听Mothers Don’t听by Katixa Agirre (available in Basque and Spanish, forthcoming in English) are mirrors of one another. In the case of Dead Girls, it’s billed as fiction, but is almost entirely true. (And reads more like an investigation than an invention.) In the case of听Mothers Don’t, it reads like an autofictional true-crime book about a woman who kills her child, but it’s completely fabricated. Both deal with tough subjects in differing ways, and would be interesting to read in conversation with each other. (In a couple years when Mothers Don’t comes out, that is.)

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听by Alain Mabanckou, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson () is the ninth book of Mabanckou’s to appear in English (although maybe only the eighth to be available in the U.S.? I’m confused by the status of Black Bazaar) and his works generally receive a decent amount of review coverage and buzz. Personally, I still love听听the best, but it’s probably because that was the first one I read . . . I haven’t seen this yet, but it totally fits with my “death” theme for this post:

Mabanckou糖心传媒檚 riotous new novel, The Death of Comrade President, returns to the 1970s milieu of his awarding-winning novel听Black Moses, telling the story of Michel, a daydreamer whose life is completely overthrown when, in March 1977, just before the arrival of the rainy season, Congo糖心传媒檚 Comrade President Marien Ngouabi is brutally murdered. Thanks to his mother糖心传媒檚 kinship with the president, not even naive Michel can remain untouched. And if he is to protect his family, Michel must learn to lie.

Moving seamlessly between the small-scale worries of everyday life and the grand tragedy of postcolonial politics, Mabanckou explores the nuances of the human soul through the naive perspective of a boy who learns the realities of life糖心传媒攁nd how much must change for everything to stay the same.

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听by Davide Sisto, translated from the Italian by Bonnie McClellan-Broussard ()听sounds fascinating:

Facebook is the biggest cemetery in the world, with countless acres of cyberspace occupied by snapshots, videos, thoughts, and memories of people who have shared their last status updates. Modern society usually hides death from sight, as if it were a character flaw and not an ineluctable fact. But on Facebook and elsewhere on the internet, we can’t avoid death; digital ghosts糖心传媒攅lectronic traces of the dead糖心传媒攁ppear at our click or touch. On the Internet at least, death has once again become a topic for public discourse. In听Online Afterlives, Davide Sisto considers how digital technology is changing our relationship to death.

Sisto describes the various modes of digital survival after biological death糖心传媒攊ncluding Facebook tributes, chatbots programmed to speak in the voice of a dead person, and QR codes on headstones糖心传媒攁nd discusses their philosophical ramifications. Sisto reports on such phenomena as the Tweet Hereafter, a website that collects people’s last tweets; the intimacy of sending a WhatsApp message to someone who has died; and digital cremation, the deactivation of a dead person’s account. Because we can mingle with the dead online almost as we mingle with the living, he warns, we may find it difficult to distinguish communication at a distance from communication with the dead. The digital afterlife has restored the communal dimension of death, rescuing both mourners and the mourned from social isolation. A society willing to engage with death and mortality, Sisto argues, is a more balanced and mature society.

It also reminds me that a) I need to clear out my browser history more often, and delete my Twitter at least once a mental breakdown, and b) that the听Black Mirror听episode “” is trippy as shit.

But what I really want to write is about . I didn’t know Randall very well, but there are few human beings I think on with as much tenderness and respect and admiration as I do Randall. We met in Marfa in 2016 when we were both on Lannan Fellowships, and, in addition to a few interactions at readings and receptions, all of us who were there at the time (Amitava Kumar and Timothy Donnelly were also there) had the most amazing going away party for him. Aside from him warning me about (first I’d heard of them! but Randall was nervous about being out too late with these things around糖心传媒攁nd ) and telling me to email him next time I’m in Chapel Hill, I don’t remember any of the specifics of that conversation. Nevertheless, my memory is steeped in a warm glow, a sense of rightness and goodness. (I also very clearly remember his smile. Not just from that day, but from all our encounters. He had a really fantastic smile.)听 In the back of my mind, I’ve assumed for years that I would see him again someday in Chapel Hill and hang out. (And that I would read the giant novel he was working on in Marfa as soon as it was published.) And then, I found out, through John Keene’s social media, that Randall had passed away.

And as much as I want to rail against social media, and am afraid to read this book because of the philosophical issues surrounding death that it inevitably must bring up (my next birthday isn’t too far away, which makes this primetime for mortality thinking), I do have to say that the tributes and photos and memories being shared about Randall are really touching.

(There will be a for Randall on September 20th at 4pm eastern.)

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by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund ()听is maybe the most timely (?) book in translation to come out this month. I mean, anything about the postal service . . . (Although I wish it was “Long Live the Muted Post Horn! W.A.S.T.E. 4EVA!”)

Ellinor, a thirty-five-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she糖心传媒檚 not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she糖心传媒檚 ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months.

This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Hjorth糖心传媒檚 trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

I wasn’t personally as into听听as many others, but this sounds a bit more up my alley . . .

Pierce Alquist听has an MA in Publishing and Writing from Emerson College and currently works in publishing in Boston. She is a freelance book critic and writer. She is also the Communications Coordinator for the Transnational Literature Series听at Brookline听Booksmith, an author events series that听focuses听on stories of migration, the intersection of politics & literature, and works in translation.听She can be found on Twitter @PierceAlquist听and听on听.

by Selva Almada, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews (Graywolf)

In Selva Almada糖心传媒檚 arresting debut, translated by Chris Andrews, four souls are 糖心传媒渢hrown together on a single day in rural Argentina糖心传媒� as a storm brews overhead. When Reverend Pearson糖心传媒檚 car breaks down, fate leads him and his teenage daughter Leni to the dusty, out-of-the-way garage of Gringo Bauer and his assistant Tapioca. The traveling Evangelical quickly takes an interest in Tapioca糖心传媒檚 pure soul, setting up the increasingly tense relationship between the mechanic and the man of god. As the storm breaks and the titular winds lay waste, the lives of these characters will be forever changed.

The Wind That Lays Waste is a profound examination of family and faith, a modern fable really. In comparison to the other books on the longlist, it糖心传媒檚 one in a trend of rural novels and yet it stands apart in its writing and approach糖心传媒攖old in one day and with only four main characters it may seem simple but in reality it糖心传媒檚 this refreshingly deep and thoughtful novel, a self-contained moment of time and place. A simplicity that I can imagine is one of the most challenging things for an author to write, and then a translator to convey.

And what a translation it is! Perfect sentences abound, 糖心传媒淗is mother糖心传媒檚 skirt moved in front of him like a curtain revealing and hiding the landscape as the cloth blew about in the wind.糖心传媒� And each character is compelling糖心传媒攖o describe them as 糖心传媒渇leshed out糖心传媒� seems almost tongue-in-cheek as it doesn糖心传媒檛 come close to encompassing the depths to which Almada plunges into each character糖心传媒檚 heart and soul and Andrews masterfully captures it:

But Leni had no lost paradise to revisit. Her childhood was very recent, but her memory of it was empty. Thanks to her father, the Reverend Pearson, and his holy mission, all she could remember was the inside of the same old car, crummy rooms in hundreds of indistinguishable hotels . . . and a mother whose face she could hardly recall. The Reverend completed his circuit and came back to where his daughter was standing, as rigid as Lot糖心传媒檚 wife, as pitiless as the seven plagues. Leni saw his eyes glistening and quickly turned her back on him.

The Wind That Lays Waste is also set against one of the most powerful and beautifully described atmospheres of a novel I糖心传媒檝e ever read. It糖心传媒檚 a novel that tangibly feels like weather. As the plot picks up, the characters swirl around each other and everything thickens like the dense, sticky, humidity that comes before the storm. As the story reaches its peak, tensions erupt like thunder and lightning and then the rains finally come. Whether or not they could have been stopped and the fate of these four characters changed is anyone糖心传媒檚 guess.

The storm had gathered in the blink of an eye. If they hadn糖心传媒檛 needed the rain so badly, the Gringo would have stopped it like his mother had taught him, because it wasn糖心传媒檛 looking pretty. She had passed the secret on to him before she died. Out in the open, facing the storm front, you drive an ax into the ground six times, to make three crosses and after the last blow you leave it stuck there. It糖心传媒檚 hard to believe if you糖心传媒檝e never seen it done, but the sky opens and the raging storm turns into a blustery passing wind. The storm slinks off, with its tail between its legs, to someplace where no one knows the secret. But those who know it must use it with care. Every crack in the earth was crying out for rain. This was no time to turn a storm away.

Nature糖心传媒檚 secret thought the Gringo, kills any secret man can know.