{"id":300296,"date":"2015-01-27T10:37:48","date_gmt":"2015-01-27T10:37:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/01\/27\/the-books-i-havent-forgotten-or-in-lieu-of-a-plot-by-madeleine-larue\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:23","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:23","slug":"the-books-i-havent-forgotten-or-in-lieu-of-a-plot-by-madeleine-larue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/01\/27\/the-books-i-havent-forgotten-or-in-lieu-of-a-plot-by-madeleine-larue\/","title":{"rendered":"THE BOOKS I HAVEN\u2019T FORGOTTEN, OR IN LIEU OF A PLOT by Madeleine LaRue"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of<\/i> Music & Literature<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I have an embarrassing inability to remember plots. It took me three readings of The Brothers Karamazov just to be able to remember beyond a few weeks who had actually killed Fyodor Pavlovich \u2014 and The Brothers Karamazov<\/em> is one of my favorite books. I have no idea why this happens; but no matter how exciting they are, plots in my brain have a very short half-life. On the other hand, the emotional or ethical texture of a book \u2014 especially a book I liked \u2014 will remain with me for years, completely unattenuated. Now that the announcement of the longlist is approaching, it\u2019s been interesting to go back to my notes, to see which titles I\u2019ve forgotten and which are somehow still with me. <\/p>\n

The following books don\u2019t have much in common, other than this tenacity (which is, of course, highly subjective) and the fact that they haven\u2019t been talked about much on this blog. None of them, I feel, would be out of place on the longlist.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a type of mysticism in Last Words from Montmartre<\/i><\/a> by Qiu Miaojin (translated from the Chinese by Ari Larissa Heinrich) that recalls Clarice Lispector, but Qiu\u2019s philosophy feels solid in a way that Lispector\u2019s often does not. Qui\u2019s narrator, a young, queer Taiwanese woman living in Paris, feels a pain and an ecstasy embedded in everyday objects and experiences: letters, phone calls, film screenings. Hugely important to the blossoming Taiwanese literary culture of the 1990s, Last Words from Montmartre<\/em> also bears the tragic urgency of books whose authors later committed suicide. Qiu took her own life at the age of 26, but the work she left behind is astonishingly mature. Its literary merit alone would be enough to recommend Last Words from Montmartre<\/em> to the longlist, but as a work of queer literature \u2014 a tradition that up to now has been disappointingly underrepresented among BTBA<\/span> contenders \u2014 it deserves even more serious consideration. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Tove Jansson, the Swedish-speaking Finnish author best known for her children\u2019s books about the Moomin family, was also one of the most brilliant short story writers of her time. Her stories have been slowly making their way into English for a few years now, but NYRB\u2019s The Woman Who Borrowed Memories<\/i><\/a> (translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella) is the first collection likely to attract significant attention from American audiences. I am unabashedly biased when it comes to Tove Jansson; I love her, and even though technically she\u2019s already posthumously won the BTBA<\/span> once (in 2011, for her novel The True Deceiver<\/em>), her short stories could give almost anyone a run for their money. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Elusive Moth<\/i><\/a> by Ingrid Winterbach (translated from the Afrikaans by Iris Gouws and the author) is a very mysterious novel about an entomologist in a remote, desert-encircled South African town. Summer lies heavily over every sentence, sleepy, slow, and sensual, and yet throughout the novel there is a taut, nearly unbearable line of tension. As elusive as its title promises, Winterbach\u2019s novel may not exactly be the sort to inspire rabid enthusiasm, but it is very subtly and intelligently done.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And one more word on my most recent read: Like Last Words from Montmartre<\/em>, Letters from a Seducer<\/i><\/a> by Hilda Hilst (translated from the Portuguese by John Keene) is passionate and epistolary, but its tone couldn\u2019t be more different. Letters from a Seducer<\/em> is an irreverent catalogue of outrageous, theatrical sexualities. Hilst delights in breaking taboos and detailing fetishistic obsessions, making constant fun of phallocentrism and bourgeois sensibilities. But she does it with a good sense of humor and often great literary panache. (Translator John Keene deserves praise for the number of euphemisms he\u2019s managed to generate for various body parts alone.) Behind the absurdity are also flashes of deep feeling, comical desperation in the face of writing, and these meditations lend Hilst\u2019s short novel staying power as literature, and not only as (in the author\u2019s own words) \u201cbrilliant pornography.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature. I have an embarrassing inability to remember plots. It took me three readings of The Brothers Karamazov just to be able to remember beyond a few weeks who had actually killed Fyodor Pavlovich \u2014 and The Brothers Karamazov is one of my […]<\/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":[67476],"tags":[58256,58046],"class_list":["post-300296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba2015","tag-madeleine-larue"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300296","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=300296"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334876,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300296\/revisions\/334876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}