Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet

How much of the world, with its intricate power structures and wildly complex natural systems, can one human mind understand? Or possibly change? Florian Herscht, the gigantic and dim-witted protagonist of László Krasznahorkai’s latest novel, is doing his best with both tasks. He has come to believe that just as the universe began with an accident, it may soon end the same way. He writes Chancellor Angela Merkel again and again, warning her of destruction to come, hurt at her silence but obstinately hopeful. 

By plunging us into Florian’s misunderstandings and cluelessness—he works for a graffiti-removal company run by neo-Nazis without fully realizing that’s what they are—Krasznahorkai creates a bewildering world, hostile to human frailty and goodwill. Florian’s community is terrorized and terrorizing, living in fear and violence and lashing out against the vulnerable. It seems fitting that wolves mysteriously return to the region, as though they sense civilization collapsing around them.  

The novel is over 400 pages but contains only one sentence, brilliantly translated by Ottilie Mulzet. It flows on and on in rhythmic phrases that absorb and enchant, sweeping us into a river of prose that is as captivating as it is disturbing. Herscht 07769 is a powerful portrayal of the dangers of nationalism and how fear rots a society from inside. It’s also a shattering story of violence and revenge and one person’s valiant if doomed attempts to change the world. 

—Rebecca Hussey

Melvill by Rodrigo Fresán, translated from the Spanish by Will Vanderhyden

As someone who’s taken part in multiple marathon readings of Moby-Dick, I spend more time than I should considering the enduring power of Herman Melville’s writing. Some of that can be explained by his versatility, capable of everything from the moral horror of Benito Cereno to the experimental structure of The Confidence-Man. Rodrigo Fresán’s Melvill, translated by Will Vanderhyden, offers another answer to this question: that Melville’s life itself also contains the stuff of an engaging narrative. At least, that’s where this novel first seems to be headed, as a kind of fictionalized look at the connections between Herman Melvill and his ill-fated father, Arthur Melvill. Had that been all Fresán set out to do, this novel would have been thoroughly compelling in its own right. But then things get weirder; ghosts, vampires, and the outer limits of space and time all become factors in the proceedings. And again, that’s a heck of a pivot—but Fresán doesn’t stop there. By the time Melvill reaches its end, this heady, formally inventive, and often absurd book arrives at a deeply moving place and turns a tragic image into one of profound human connection. It’s a measure of Vanderhyden’s skill as a translator that this novel echoes and updates Melville’s idiosyncratic English; perhaps before too long, someone will take a crack at organizing a marathon reading of this volume as well.

—Tobias Carroll

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles: Selected Essays by Pedro Lemebel, translated from the Spanish by Gwendolyn Harper

In 1925, Virginia Woolf recorded a single positive review for Mrs. Dalloway in her diary: “This time you have done it—you have caught life and put it in a book.” Perhaps this is the only way to summarize Pedro Lemebel’s A Last Supper of Queer Apostles, a dizzying chronicle of queer life in Chile, from false lashes at AIDS-era funerals and the dance floors of Santiago (“Hot Pants at the Sodomy Disco”) to democracy’s false promises and the memory of a brutal dictatorship (“Merci Beau Coup”). A multidisciplinary artist and activist, Lemebel often arms his crónicas with his favorite weapons against fascism: irony and camp. And while they have all the shape and texture of poetry, they’re positively electric with political critique: “It’s possible that these homo-temples of dance have united the gay ghetto with far more success than militant politics […] The folkloric fairies and freaks have survived only as little baubles hanging on homo culture, under the delusion of being a pharaohess fluttering in the dance club’s mirrors.”

In the pocket of every crónica is a middle finger pointed at commercial queerness that “does not confront, does not transgress,” and “offers the category ‘homosexual’ as a regression to gender.” He rails against “Mister Gay”—“so perfumed in capitalist charm, so far from the dark leather of our geography.” His description of Stonewall’s twentieth anniversary could have been pulled from recent “boycott Pride” manifestos against being cashed in on by “love is love” t-shirts: “the island of Manhattan is draped with flags sporting all colors of the gay rainbow. Which is really just one color: white.”

Gwendolyn Harper translator’s note is the best of its kind, contextualizing Lemebel’s (eyebrow-raising) nomenclature in a book populated with beloved locas and travestis. Harper admits her occasional “linguistic subterfuge,” sharing in Lemebel’s frustration with the limits of language and his delight in its infinite reworkings. He claims: “I could write with the silence of the Dao […] while stuffing my adjectives under a disciplined tongue. I could write with no tongue, like a newscaster on CNN, no accent and hold the salt.” But why would he? This collection is a gift— kinetic and intoxicating. The very existence of an English translation of a work lambasting Western homogeneity is already food for thought. The opening crónica invites us to sit in the tension: “I’ll never write in English; with any luck I say, Go home.” Well, pass the salt.

—Hannah Weber

Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger

Iman Mersal’s biography of Egyptian writer Enayat al-Zayyat, translated by Robin Moger, is a detective story grounded in one of reading’s greatest joys: the experience of finding in another’s words the feelings and hunches that have swept through our minds, rendered so beautiful, and surprising, that they mark us indelibly. When she read Enayat’s Love and Silence, Mersal immediately incorporated it into her canon. But seeking insight into this writer who ended her own life before the novel’s publication, Mersal found that Enayat’s sparse biography was dominated by literary luminaries more preoccupied with making her story match their retellings of history than with the actual contours of this woman whose writing they promised to endorse and then shelved. Unwilling to accept portrayals of Enayat as an archetype of female tragedy, Mersal embarks on a quest for Enayat’s personal record. Her search is more cartographic than archival as she wanders mausoleums filled with the living cooking atop gravestones; records conversations with Nadia Lutfi, the film star who was Enayat’s best friend; tracks down Enayat’s haunts by interviewing the doormen who “are guardians of entire geographies”; and gets lost as she confronts the desire of the living to preserve the stories they assembled to cope with Enayat’s early death. Robin Moger’s translation highlights the immediacy of Mersal’s voice, inviting the reader into the highs and lows of a search whose intimacy and difficulty are constitutive to the biographer’s quest as she charts the interiority of a person whose public record is almost mythic in its mystery, mis-telling, and the mark it has left on those who knew its subject well. Through her biographical tracing, Mersal reclaims Enayat’s image from the literary conclusions drawn around her life while acknowledging the answers she cannot fill in. In the process, Mersal explores the limits of biography, questioning the degree to which we can know anyone in the face of our own impulse to make a subject resemble what we need from them.

—Liz Wood

O by Judith Kiros, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson

“State the price
For swallowed words
For blackened hands
For tethered freedoms
For stalled revolutions
For the caustic light
From which we emerge
Like a flash of insight
Right before sleep
State the price
We refuse to pay
With any measure of blood”

Translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson, O is a remarkable debut from the gifted poet Judith Kiros that gorgeously shatters and reconfigures our understanding of poetry, of stagecraft, and of language itself.

Shakespeare’s Othello is a ghostly refrain in this collection, and Kiros both employs and upends the traditional five-act theatrical arc, transmuting classic canon into a sharp examination of gender, race, and empire. The final result transcends genre and blends poetry and theater, lyric and performance. All translation is alchemy of course, though to my mind, this is especially true of poetic texts, and Josefsson’s collaboration with Kiros—along with an excellent translator’s note—is exceptional. Kiros’s sure and powerful vision makes O a literary creature of ambition, risk, and wonder, a polyphonic layering of voices that enjoins multiple rereadings, yielding insight, wonder, and sighs.

“The drama contracts. The audience is transported from the Venetian court and the public sphere, into the wife’s bedchamber. She sings a song about a willow and discusses death and men with her chambermaid. ‘O these men, these men!’”

O, this book, this book!

—Mandana Chaffa