{"id":299966,"date":"2014-11-27T18:56:49","date_gmt":"2014-11-27T18:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2014\/11\/27\/children-or-soviets-or-both-the-books-that-have-made-me-laugh-by-madeleine-larue\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:12:30","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:12:30","slug":"children-or-soviets-or-both-the-books-that-have-made-me-laugh-by-madeleine-larue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2014\/11\/27\/children-or-soviets-or-both-the-books-that-have-made-me-laugh-by-madeleine-larue\/","title":{"rendered":"CHILDREN OR SOVIETS OR BOTH: THE BOOKS THAT HAVE MADE ME LAUGH By Madeleine LaRue"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of<\/i> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.musicandliterature.org\">Music &amp; Literature<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>The news has been worse than usual this year, so I\u2019ve been particularly thankful for books that make me laugh. Here are some of the funniest contenders \u2013 in what I\u2019m sure is just a coincidence, they all take place in the 1980s and involve either children or Soviets or both. <\/p>\n<p><txp_image id=\"5412\" \/><\/p>\n<p><i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.andotherstories.org\/book\/quesadillas\/\">Quesadillas<\/i><\/a> by Juan Pablo Villalobos (translated by Rosalind Harvey) is narrated by a little boy named Orestes who lives in a very small, very poor town in Mexico. His father\u2019s favorite activity is cursing the police, while his mother spends most of her time making quesadillas to feed Orestes and his numerous siblings (all similarly named after figures of Greek tragedy). When the family\u2019s two youngest children, the twins Castor and Pollux, disappear, it sets off a chain of wild events that culminates with the appearance of some extraterrestrial visitors. <\/p>\n<p>But before the aliens get involved, Orestes runs away to make his fortune, and so the book becomes a kind of sad, but hilarious, parody of a poor boy\u2019s rags-to-riches story. Villalobos\u2019 novel, originally titled <em>Si vivi\u00e9ramos en un lugar normal<\/em> (\u201cIf we lived somewhere normal\u201d), criticizes a system of poverty and corruption that is, of course, not limited to Mexico, all while delivering lines so colorful and surprising that you can\u2019t help but laugh. <\/p>\n<p><txp_image id=\"6872\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Another tale narrated by a clever, resourceful, and chronically poor child, <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblioasis.com\/ondjaki\/Granma-Nineteen-and-the-Soviets-Secret\">Granma Nineteen and the Soviet\u2019s Secret<\/i><\/a> by Ondjaki (translated by Stephen Henighan) moves the scene to Angola. The novel is populated by a cast of odd, lovable characters, including the eponymous Soviet, called Comrade Gudafterov by the children for his habit of greeting everyone with a solemn \u201cGudafter-noon,\u201d no matter the time of day. Though there are moment in the plot when things seem to be getting dangerous, nothing really terrible actually happens, and we are left with an unusually vivid sense not only of the Angola of Ondjaki\u2019s own childhood, but of the general texture of childhood itself. Stephen Henighan has done a particularly fine job conveying the range of Ondjaki\u2019s style \u2013 the Soviet\u2019s comically broken Portuguese and the narrator\u2019s fleeting moments of poetry, for example, seem to arrive in English with equal ease. <\/p>\n<p><i><a href=\"http:\/\/counterpointpress.com\/products\/pushkin-hills\/\">Pushkin Hills<\/i><\/a> by Sergei Dovlatov (translated by Katherine Dovlatov) is not narrated by a child. Rather, our hero is Soviet version of the superfluous man \u2013 poor, highly sensitive to literature, perpetually drunk, and somehow badly equipped for life. After a divorce and at the end of his rope, he arrives one summer at Pushkin\u2019s country estate, looking for work as a tour guide. His ensuing adventures are punctuated by witty-one liners worthy of a vodka-soaked Oscar Wilde (\u201cAre you good friends [with Mitrofanov]?\u201d someone asks the narrator, who replies, \u201cI\u2019m good friends with his bad side.\u201d), but overall, the novel owes more to Bulgakov, whose humor builds slowly, almost imperceptibly, until suddenly the entire situation is absurd. The book, like all my favorite Russian tales, is a tragicomedy, one of the saddest and funniest to appear this year. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music &amp; Literature. The news has been worse than usual this year, so I\u2019ve been particularly thankful for books that make me laugh. Here are some of the funniest contenders \u2013 in what I\u2019m sure is just a coincidence, they all take place in the [&hellip;]<\/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":[57276,58986,48716,59026,58046,58996,59006,58976,47526,59016,8686],"class_list":["post-299966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-btba-2015","tag-granma-nineteen-and-the-soviets-secret","tag-juan-pablo-villalobos","tag-katherine-dovlatov","tag-madeleine-larue","tag-ondjaki","tag-pushkin-hills","tag-quesadillas","tag-rosalind-harvey","tag-sergei-dovlatov","tag-stephen-henighan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299966","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=299966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336846,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299966\/revisions\/336846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}