{"id":296496,"date":"2014-02-07T11:26:23","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T11:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/02\/07\/slim-little-stories\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:44:27","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:44:27","slug":"slim-little-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/02\/07\/slim-little-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Slim Little Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sarah Gerard is a writer who used to work at McNally Jackson Books,<\/a> but recently took a job at BOMB<\/span> Magazine.<\/a> Her work has appeared in the New York Times<\/a>, New York Magazine<\/a>, Bookforum<\/a>, the Paris Review Daily<\/a>, the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>, Slice Magazine<\/a>, and other publications. Her new book, “Things I Told My Mother,” can be purchased here.<\/a> She holds an MFA<\/span> from The New School and lives in Brooklyn.<\/i><\/p>\n

There\u2019s so much praise out there for fat books, but what about little books that pack a big punch?<\/p>\n

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\nCommentary<\/i><\/a> by Marcelle Sauvageot, (trans. Christine Schwartz Hartley, Anna Moschovakis)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nobody has talked about Commentary<\/i>, yet, and I just don\u2019t know why. This autobiographical epistolary novel was written in the weeks before Sauvageot died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium on the coast of France, and is addressed to her lover who left her for another woman just days after she admitted herself. On its premise alone, it\u2019s almost too easy to love.<\/p>\n

Granted, I\u2019m a sucker for strong first-person voices, but Commentary<\/i> sucked me in immediately. Sauvageot is fierce and incisive, and seconds away from inevitable death. She has nothing to lose, and says everything with that in mind. She simultaneously pities and despises the other patients in the sanatorium because she can\u2019t escape their coughing. She hates their passive acceptance and scorns the person who betrayed her and left her alone in this place. Her sentences scream with vulnerability and suffering. <\/p>\n

Included in the book are a foreword and note by Charles du Bos and an essay by Jean Mouton, from previous French editions, as well as a new introduction by Jennifer Moxley that contains these lines, which I had to copy into my notebook: \u201cWe recall here that in Latin, vulgare, meaning \u2018of the people\u2019 but also \u2018to publish,\u2019 was used as a slur against women who were thought to have made their bodies \u2018public.\u2019 Thus a vulgar woman is a woman who \u2018publishes\u2019 that which men believe should stay private.\u201d<\/p>\n

A note about the book\u2019s design: Ugly Duckling Presse has done a beautiful job. A flesh-tone letterpress cover, clean, geometric cover design, vintage aesthetic. This book feels good in your hand. <\/p>\n

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\nThe Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra<\/i><\/a> by Pedro Mairal, (trans. Nick Caistor)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In many ways, this book is a typical small-town procedural, complete with a cast of colorful local characters, unexpected diversions, and a protagonist who discovers more about his past than he bargained for. Except, in this story, Miguel Salvatierra isn\u2019t looking for a killer; he\u2019s looking for a painting. And in looking for a painting, he\u2019s looking for a missing piece of history. And in looking for a missing piece of history, he\u2019s looking for his father.<\/p>\n

The story is constructed elegantly around the metaphor of the scrolls Miguel Salvatierra\u2019s father painted one-per-year throughout his lifetime: their movement from left to right is synchronized with the movement of the story \u2013 then reversed, right to left, like the movement of the turning pages of the book you\u2019re holding, or Miguel\u2019s journey into his family\u2019s past. In the end, the story and the scrolls make a circle; we end up where we started. Except now (you know this already), everything is different.<\/p>\n

To say that Marial\u2019s setting is vivid is to blanche it. It is warm and earthy, humid and pungent, colorful, and slightly sour. It is old and familiar but not entirely unchanged. It is remote, but civic, with suggestions of encroaching commercialism. I loved inhabiting this place and felt at home among its community. <\/p>\n

New Vessel Press was founded in 2012, and The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra is one of only six titles they\u2019ve published thus far, and the only one I\u2019ve read. A second New Vessel title, Some Day by Shemi Zarhin, is translated from Hebrew and is also eligible for the award this year.<\/p>\n

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\nThe Whispering Muse<\/i><\/a> by Sj\u00f3n (trans. Victoria Cribb)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Several of this year\u2019s BTBA<\/span> judges have said that they\u2019d love to see Sj\u00f3n on the longlist, and I agree. The Whispering Muse<\/i> follows a fish enthusiast, Valdimar Heraldsson, on board a Danish merchant ship occupied by the Greek god, and the ship\u2019s second mate, Caeneus. Each night, Caeneus regales the crew with tales of his travels with Jason and the Argonauts, making this a sort of frame story along the lines of a humorous, Nordic Heart of Darkness.<\/p>\n

While Heraldsson is quirky and entertaining, Caeneus is by far the best part of this book, as he brings with him wonder and metaphor, and a cast of characters both mythical and familiar. His story opens up varicolored and metaphysical dimensions out of reach for Heraldsson, whose focus is perpetually on the small, limited to the goings-on of the ship\u2019s crew, in particular their diet. Caeneus: the hero; Heraldsson: the anti-hero. These disparate agents come together in the end, in a delightful recapitulation of the origin of the namesake Muse.<\/p>\n

s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Gerard is a writer who used to work at McNally Jackson Books, but recently took a job at BOMB Magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Bookforum, the Paris Review Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Slice Magazine, and other publications. Her new book, “Things I Told […]<\/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":[1646],"class_list":["post-296496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296496","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=296496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":317746,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296496\/revisions\/317746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}