This match was judged by Hannah Chute. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this,<\/a> and download<\/a> the bracket.<\/em><\/p>\n I hear that soccer\/football fans are pretty excited about Switzerland these days. (Sorry everyone, I haven\u2019t been keeping up with the world of FIFA<\/span>.) In a literary match-up against Honduras, though, its chance at a win feels a lot smaller. Neither country is really one of the literary world\u2019s power-houses, but in this match Honduras brings to the table the potent prose of Horacio Castellanos Moya, whose Senselessness<\/em> is pretty remarkable.<\/p>\n \u201cI am not complete in the mind,\u201d begins Moya\u2019s narrator. And no, he most certainly is not: he is caustic, sex-obsessed, unstable, and at least a little bit insane. If you go with it, though, if you let his sentences pull you along for pages with their paranoid urgency, you\u2019re in for a hell of a ride. He is an irritable, obsessive atheist who has gotten himself caught up in the affairs of the Catholic Church as it fights to bring to light the atrocities committed by the unnamed country\u2019s power-hungry military. His rage and angst spiral into what he calls an \u201cexpanding maelstrom of paranoia.\u201d And, whether you believe in his conspiracies or think he\u2019s lost his mind, it\u2019s very compelling. An excellent (and excellently unreliable) narrator, a great story and a satisfying ending: this is Moya\u2019s hat-trick.<\/p>\n Now comes Switzerland, with Urs Widmer\u2019s My Mother\u2019s Lover.<\/em> From the start, it looks grim. A melodramatic title and some pretty awful jacket copy leave me unenthused, but I\u2019m willing to give it a chance. Which is my own mistake, really. On top of this, the narrator speaks in this bizarre, inverted Yoda-speak (\u201cPushing and shoving they\u2019d be to get to her,\u201d and \u201cflat as a pancake everywhere was\u201d) and uses em-dashes in baffling and excessive ways. <\/p>\n Stylistic weirdnesses aside, My Mother\u2019s Lover<\/em> suffers from a lack of empathy. Moya\u2019s characters are not likable (far from it, in fact), but I cared what happened to them. With Widmer\u2019s, I didn\u2019t. At all. And so this novel\u2014supposed to be a tragedy of unrequited love across a backdrop of war and loss\u2014fell flat. <\/p>\n The only major redeeming factor is Widmer\u2019s harrowing and believable portrayal of the mother\u2019s descent into madness. But it isn\u2019t enough to make up for the huge gap in style, impact and appeal that separates it and Senselessness. Between the two, there\u2019s no comparison. Honduras 3, Switzerland 0. <\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n Hannah Chute translates literature from Russian and French. She is currently a master\u2019s student in the University of Rochester\u2019s Literary Translation Studies program. She is exceptionally bad at soccer.<\/em><\/p>\n ——<\/p>\n This match was judged by Hannah Chute. For more info on the World Cup of Literature, read this, and download the bracket. I hear that soccer\/football fans are pretty excited about Switzerland these days. (Sorry everyone, I haven\u2019t been keeping up with the world of FIFA.) In a literary match-up against Honduras, though, its chance […]<\/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":[67486],"tags":[50496,12836,696,56706,13176,50486,56386],"class_list":["post-298266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-donal-mclaughlin","tag-horacio-castellanos-moya","tag-katherine-silver","tag-my-mothers-lover","tag-senselessness","tag-urs-widmer","tag-world-cup-of-literature"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298266","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=298266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":337766,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298266\/revisions\/337766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe narrator\u2019s mother starts out the novel waist-deep in a lake, frantically shouting her lover\u2019s name (\u201cEdwin!\u201d) across the water. Her former lover, once a poor musician and now the richest man in the country, lives in a mansion across the water and never even thinks about this woman, who he was involved with for a couple of months in his youth. She, on the other hand, obsesses over him, is possessed by the thought of him, hears the wind whisper his name to her all day long. I\u2019d say that this is still a better love story than Twilight<\/em>, except that a sad and confused woman who shrieks \u201cEdw-!\u201d into the empty night actually sounds an awful lot like Twilight.<\/em> (I take full responsibility for the fact that, by bringing up the T-word, I am probably fulfilling the literary equivalent of Godwin\u2019s law.) There\u2019s some big, over-the-top Freudian thing going on here; her father is a taciturn, cantankerous control freak who treats her like dirt, and her lover is an insufferable egomaniac who also treats her like dirt. And I just can\u2019t bring myself to care about any of it.<\/p>\n