{"id":276716,"date":"2010-02-22T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2010\/02\/22\/btba-2010-fiction-finalists-a-recap\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:39","slug":"btba-2010-fiction-finalists-a-recap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2010\/02\/22\/btba-2010-fiction-finalists-a-recap\/","title":{"rendered":"BTBA 2010 Fiction Finalists: A Recap"},"content":{"rendered":"

A commenter asked the other day for links to all of the daily summaries for this year’s BTBA<\/span> fiction finalists. Well, I’ll do you one better . . . Below are all ten shortlisted books with links to AND<\/span> excerpts from the overview pieces:<\/p>\n

C\u00e9sar Aira, Ghosts.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Argentina, New Directions) <\/p>\n

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Of the three Aira books to make their way into English, this one is by far my personal favorite. It\u2019s just so tight. Not a wasted word. And the opening is incredibly impressive and grand, depicting the setting for the novel (New Year\u2019s Eve at a fancy high-rise that\u2019s still under construction) through a variety of perspectives, from the earlier morning visits of the future inhabitants to check in on how things are going, to the mind of the architect, to Patri\u2019s cousin who gets all the workers their lunch, to Patri\u2019s mom, before settling in on Patri herself. This extended intro is almost like a supernatural flight, a way of passing through all the layers of the building and the class divisions of the people involved with it. And beyond setting up the plot and players, it also gives Aira a chance to show off his skills and to start his mediation on space, happiness, and potentiality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Gerbrand Bakker, The Twin.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer. (Netherlands, Archipelago)<\/p>\n

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We\u2019re not the only ones to praise The Twin\u2014Jessa Crispin included it on the list of \u201cTop Foreign Fiction\u201d books that she put together for NPR<\/span>. In her summary she gets at another interesting aspect of this novel\u2014it\u2019s lost sense of time. It feels very turn-of-the-century, and is, but in a 20th becoming 21st sort of way . . . Or as Jessa puts it: “In its candor about the bitterness that can arise from family obligations and the responsibility of caretaking, The Twin is both touching and surprising. Bakker\u2019s beautiful and uncluttered prose style is almost old-fashioned. A character\u2019s remark about the farm \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s here on this road now, but it might just as well be 1967 or 1930\u201d \u2014 could refer to the novel itself. Family drama, after all, is timeless.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ign\u00e1cio de Loyola Brand\u00e3o, Anonymous Celebrity.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the Portuguese by Nelson Vieira. (Brazil, Dalkey Archive)<\/p>\n

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Centered around an unreliable narrator obsessed with the idea of becoming famous, Anonymous Celebrity reads more like a scrapbook than a novel, teaming with information and jokes, switching tone on every page, forcing the reader to come to terms with the manic, slightly unhinged mind behind it all. And by \u201cslightly unhinged,\u201d I mean willing to murder the \u201cLead Actor\u201d\u2014who supposedly looks just like our narrator\u2014so that he can take over all of L.A.\u2018s roles.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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All the various sections, such as the \u201cRescuing the Anonymous\u201d bits to draw attention to the nearly-famous (like Marli Renfro, who served as Janet Leigh\u2019s body double in Psycho, or the unknown friends present in a photograph of Hemingway) are brilliant. The manuals for how to be famous and the gallery of characters extremely fun. But it\u2019s obvious as you move through this book that there\u2019s something going on underneath to decipher. The entire narrative is steeped in lies and delusions, constructing a wonderful game for the reader to puzzle through. All is clarified by the end (maybe a bit overclarified), but along the way the writing is brilliant, the posturing and the bittersweet appeal of celebrity is palpable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hugo Claus, Wonder.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the Dutch by Michael Henry Heim. (Belgium, Archipelago)<\/p>\n

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I can\u2019t do half the job Michael Orthofer did in describing Wonder so I\u2019m think I\u2019m just going to crib his review . . . The focal point of the novel is Victor Denijs de Rijckel, a schoolteacher who is a bit mental before the story even starts. And the novel progresses along two major tracks: a series of entries de Rijckel makes in a notebook he\u2019s keeping at the institution where he currently resides, and a chronological description of earlier events.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The plot is set in motion when de Rijckel attends a masquerade ball, falls for a woman (isn\u2019t it always the case?), and then meets a young student the next morning who knows the woman and where she lives. Michael can take it away: “The woman lives at Almout castle, in Hekegem, and they go there. Taking a room at a local inn the teacher passes the boy off as his nephew, but eventually they suspect him of being a paedophile; rather than turn him in, however, they want their silence to be bought \u2014 typical, it turns out, for this morally compromised nest. Reaching Almout de Rijckel is mistaken for someone else, the Dutch delegate to a meeting taking place there.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Wolf Haas, The Weather Fifteen Years Ago.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the German by Stephanie Gilardi and Thomas S. Hansen. (Austria, Ariadne Press)<\/p>\n

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In the novel The Weather Fifteen Years Ago<\/em>, Wolf Haas is being interviewed about a book he wrote with the same title that is more or less a prolonged story of unrequited love. The novel inside the novel revolves around one Vittorio Kowalski, who appears on a game show to show off his ability to remember what the weather was like in a particular small village in the Austrian Alps every day for the past fifteen years. In and of itself, this is a pretty remarkable, but the Haas of the novel knows that there\u2019s something more to the story . . . Why would a man memorize the weather every day for some podunk town where his family once vacationed? (A: A girl. It\u2019s always<\/em> a girl.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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From this seemingly innocent, yet oddly compelling story, a whole world unfolds, one that\u2019s both intricate in terms of its plot (there\u2019s a lot more to this little summer love than one initially expects) and in terms of how the interviewer talks with (fictional) Haas about the way the (imaginary) book is written. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Gail Hareven, The Confessions of Noa Weber.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu. (Israel, Melville House)<\/p>\n

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. . . After the first handful of pages I was in love with Noa\u2019s voice. As I mentioned in my review,<\/a> this is one of those novels in which the voice and telling of the story far outstrips the plot of the actual book. At its most basic, The Confessions of Noa Weber<\/em> is about a middle-aged writer who married a man out of convenience (to escape her military duty) and continues to love for the rest of her life despite the fact that he leaves her for Russia, for another woman, for a different life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Noa goes on to become a very successful author of Nira Woolf detective novels, but never stops loving Alek. And this book is her gut-wrenchingly personal account of her obsession and her life as a whole. In our blog & Twitter-obsessed world, this book is perfectly suited for our times. It reads like a too-personal look into someone\u2019s life, but one that is charming, honest, smart, self-critical, sarcastic, and absolutely captivating. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jan Kj\u00e6rstad, The Discoverer.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the Norwegian by Barbara Haveland. (Norway, Open Letter)<\/p>\n

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What\u2019s fascinating about this trilogy\u2014and the reason why you don\u2019t need to read all three books to \u201cget it\u201d\u2014is the way that each volume presents Jonas\u2019s life and Margrete\u2019s death in completely different ways. There\u2019s some tricksy narrative stuff going on\u2014who is narrating The Seducer and how do they know all the details of Jonas\u2019s life? who is the woman giving the professor all the dirt on Jonas in The Conqueror?\u2014but on a basic level it\u2019s pretty straightforward: in The Seducer, Jonas is a superstar who is one degree from perfection and arrives home from a trip to find that his wife has been murdered, and in The Conqueror, he\u2019s always has some violent urges which culminated in him murdering his wife. And in The Discoverer, he\u2019s out of prison sailing down a fjord with his daughter and a group of young people working on a high-tech multimedia project. [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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And that\u2019s Kjaerstad\u2019s genius. The way these three separate visions overlap and interplay is absolutely brilliant. You can start anywhere with the series, and depending on the order in which you read these, you\u2019ll end up with a different impression of Jonas, of what really<\/em> happened, and of the various threads that tie together the three books.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, Memories of the Future.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull. (Russia, New York Review Books)<\/p>\n

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This is one of those books that must drive a certain B&N buyer (and a dozen sales reps) absolutely insane. All the book world prejudices come into play: 1) short story collections don\u2019t sell, 2) dead authors don\u2019t sell, 3) who gives a shit about Soviet Russia?, 4) could be cross-shelved in either sci-fi or literature, and 5) how do you pronounce \u201cKrzhizhanovsky\u201d? [. . .]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Although the pieces aren’t quite as avant as Kharms, the strange sense of humor and the self-reflexiveness of the book remind me of the OBERIU<\/span>. With a little bit of Calvino thrown in for good measure. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Jos\u00e9 Manuel Prieto, Rex.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen. (Cuba, Grove)<\/p>\n

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Trying to summarize this book is a bit tricky. It\u2019s like a mafia thriller filtered through Nabokov. It\u2019s a dense book with a narrator who is both unreliable and maybe a bit confused, and who is obsessed with Proust. It was also the subject of an incredible conversation Erica Mena and I had with Esther Allen for a forthcoming Reading the World podcast. (That\u2019s a subtle enough plug, right?)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Anyway, the basic set-up of this book is that the narrator has been hired by a Russian couple living in Marabella, Spain to tutor their son. The narrator decides that all the kid needs to do is read Proust\u2019s \u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu, which is the book that contains everything from psychology to quantum physics. The world is in there. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Robert Walser, The Tanners.<\/b><\/a> Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. (Switzerland, New Directions)<\/p>\n

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I think I\u2019ll close this off with one of my favorite quotes from the novel. It\u2019s from the very end, but really, this is a book that\u2019s more mood than plot, so I\u2019m really not giving away much of anything:<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\u201cNo,\u201d she said, \u201cyou won\u2019t sink. If such a thing were to happen, what a shame it would be\u2014a shame for you. You must never again condemn yourself so criminally, so sinfully. You respect yourself too little, and others too much. I wish to shield you against judging yourself so harshly. Do you know what it is you need? You need things to go well for you again for a little while. You must learn to whisper into an ear and reciprocate expressions of tenderness. Otherwise you\u2019ll become too delicate. I shall teach you; I wish to teach you all the things you\u2019re lacking. Come with me. We shall go out into the winter night. Into the blustery forest. There\u2019s so much I must say to you. Do you know that I\u2019m your poor, happy prisoner? Not another word, not one word more. Just come\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There you go . . . Enjoy the write-ups and the books. I’d love to hear from anyone who has read and loved (or hated) any of the books on the list, and since the winner has yet to be decided, feel free to lobby for your favorite in the comments section below . . . <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A commenter asked the other day for links to all of the daily summaries for this year’s BTBA fiction finalists. Well, I’ll do you one better . . . Below are all ten shortlisted books with links to AND excerpts from the overview pieces: C\u00e9sar Aira, Ghosts. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (Argentina, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[29976,19116,1646],"class_list":["post-276716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba-2010","tag-fiction-finalists","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":322506,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276716\/revisions\/322506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}