{"id":295466,"date":"2013-10-29T21:18:40","date_gmt":"2013-10-29T21:18:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/10\/29\/gushing\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:31","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:31","slug":"gushing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/10\/29\/gushing\/","title":{"rendered":"Gushing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jenn Witte is a bookseller at Skylight Books<\/a> in Los Angeles<\/i><\/p>\n

I fall in love easily. Books possess me and while reading them I am completely blinded. Is this a terrible quality in a panelist? I wonder, but I\u2019m going to declare that my engagement with these books is fair in that I give them my whole self, one at a time. When I finish a book, separate myself from it, move on, only then do I begin to develop the perspective needed to pitch them against each other. <\/p>\n

A bit like a young me, quietly crushing on some cutie I\u2019d never talk to in school, I doodled about two of the books that I\u2019m obsessing over. I animated them specifically to debut on this blog, but got excited and ended up leaking them onto my own blog\/portfolio<\/a> ahead of time. As a bookseller, it is in my nature to promote the books that I feel strongly about. I can\u2019t help it. <\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

I felt that the animation I made for Karl Ove Knausgaard\u2019s My Struggle: Book Two<\/i><\/a> could be used to help promote the kickstarter<\/a> campaign Archipelago was running at the time (I\u2019m happy to report that they exceeded their goal). The turtle works in a couple of ways, for me at least, to represent the pace of the book as well as the potential that it has to win, slow but steady, somewhere down the line. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I drew this animation of Seiobo There Below<\/i><\/a>, it was a happy accident that I finished on its date of publication, so I leaked it to New Directions in case they could use it to help readers pronounce the title with confidence. (Feel free to send me requests for future pronunciation animations. This is a serious issue in translated literature.) <\/p>\n

It is with blind confidence that I present these books as extremely strong candidates for this year\u2019s award. I had the same blind confidence in Clarice Lispector\u2019s A Breath of Life<\/i> last year, which made it to the shortlist by a hair and quickly revealed itself to be too\u2026 of a way to win. She has a strong musk, I must admit— Karl Ove does, too. Everyone I\u2019ve spoken to at the store has marveled at how they can coexist with his character, how they don\u2019t mind devoting so much time to his books, despite everything (a tweet<\/a> as evidence). I would love to hear from people who don\u2019t enjoy living through this book. I didn\u2019t expect to, at all, but it owned me. I sit at my dining room table now and I am transported to the conversation I read while sitting there before. I was knitting a scarf at the same time, and wearing it now takes me to Stockholm. On the other end of the spectrum, ,Seiobo There Below<\/i> perfectly presents the world to the individual in a floating rainbow soap bubble, clean and shiny and at a safe distance. It is a bit of a trophy already. This might prove to be a more winning quality in a candidate. Time will tell. I ride my bike along the Los Angeles river every day, and the herons I see now remind me of the most beautiful first chapter I\u2019ve ever read. Thank you, L\u00e1szl\u00f3, thank you forever. <\/p>\n

To be fair, I\u2019ve been equally enchanted by dozens of other eligible and ineligible books this year, and I hope to draw my way through understanding where they belong in the context of this award. I\u2019ll be over here in Los Angeles, thinking about the whole world, thinking about nothing but the book in front of me, scribbling its name over and over, trying not to lose my identity, and trying to identify for everyone. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jenn Witte is a bookseller at Skylight Books in Los Angeles I fall in love easily. Books possess me and while reading them I am completely blinded. Is this a terrible quality in a panelist? I wonder, but I\u2019m going to declare that my engagement with these books is fair in that I give them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295466","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\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339036,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295466\/revisions\/339036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}