{"id":303326,"date":"2016-01-07T23:17:29","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T23:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2016\/01\/07\/one-pleasure-books-btba-2016\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:39:18","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:39:18","slug":"one-pleasure-books-btba-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2016\/01\/07\/one-pleasure-books-btba-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"One Pleasure Books [BTBA 2016]"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA<\/span> judge P. T. Smith. For more information on the BTBA<\/span>, “like” our Facebook page<\/a> and follow us on Twitter.<\/a> And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges.<\/em><\/p>\n

There have been books throughout the year that stand out because they astound on a general level, accomplish a number of things well. Others are memorable because they do one or two things incredibly well. In some cases, it\u2019s as if the books are devoted to that one ambition, to that one possibility of literature. This seeking out of one specific bit of a book, whether it\u2019s something in the structure, tone, style, or subject matter, etc. has a couple motivations. The most common one, unfortunately, is when a book isn\u2019t very good, and I still want to engage with it. I have faith there must still be something interesting there, and I seek it out. When it\u2019s found, not only does the reading experience turn more pleasurable, but help forms another way to think about writing. Less common, more worth spending time writing about, are the books that have the one fascinating aspect and do it so well that the reading becomes about that singular pleasure, even if others play in the background. And in the end, I just find this way of identifying a single stand out aspect of a book a way of entertaining myself and beginning conversations. So, here are some BTBA<\/span> books from the latter category, of books memorable from one pleasure, rather than mundane books scarcely saved.<\/p>\n

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The first such experience in BTBA<\/span> reading was Violette Leduc\u2019s Th\u00e9r\u00e8se and Isabelle<\/em><\/a> (trans. Sophie Lewis). The story of a love affair, kept secret, between two girls at a boarding school, Th\u00e9r\u00e8se and Isabelle<\/em> is so hyper focused it is nearly overwhelming, which is exactly what Leduc portrays. It is unrelentingly physical: \u201cMy recollection of the two fingers grew sweeter, my swollen flesh began to recover, bubbles of love rose up. But Isabelle was there again, the fingers turned faster and faster. Where had this mounting wave come from? Smooth wrappings inside my knees. My heels were drugged, my visionary flesh was dreaming.\u201d There is little to no time spent describing how or why these two are attracted to each other, because it is irrelevant. All that matters is the overpowering attraction, the desperate emotional desire that courses in their bodies.<\/p>\n

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With absolutely nothing in common with Th\u00e9r\u00e8se and Isabelle<\/em>, Christian Kracht\u2019s Imperium<\/em><\/a> (trans. Daniel Bowles) may have at its heart something to say about the blind following of ideals that led to the world wars, as the cover copy wants to emphasize, but that was not the compelling reason to read. Instead, the humor, the parody of historical adventure novels, is the source of pleasure. The hero is the joke, August Engelhardt, idealist, blind to his flaws and to the fact that other people aren\u2019t the na\u00efve waif he is. His faith is in coconuts, the purest food devised by God, and in nudity. Telling the story of Engelhardt\u2019s travel to New Guinea, his life on an island there, and the failure of his attempt to found a society, the narrator celebrates and mocks sailing and adventure tales, all the while cynically undermining, knowing his utter failure is coming, the man it puts forth as a hero.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s through prose that makes the most minute details and observations into something affecting that Jean Echenoz\u2019 story collection The Queen\u2019s Caprice<\/em><\/a> (trans. Linda Coverdale) finds its identity. The opening story, \u201cNelson,\u201d is of that oftentimes epically depicted historical figure, Admiral Nelson, but this is not of battles and history being made. Instead, it is him visiting friends, their care for him, his adjustment to age and his loss of arm and eye. It is a simple, pleasing tale of him planting acorns so for them to grow into \u201ctrees whose trunks will serve to build the future royal fleet.\u201d Only then can the grand scheme of history return through his death in battle. The title story is a roving description of a country landscape, leaving a writer\u2019s hand to travel across the surrounding land, in details of hills and trees, all building to make a tiny moment with ants full of depth and insight. These stories are above all quiet. That quietness is the success of The Queen\u2019s Caprice<\/em>, parsing down even and abundance to the quietness scenes that can communicate the most.<\/p>\n

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Regina Ullmann\u2019s The Country Road<\/em><\/a> (trans. Kurt Beals) is a story collection that is completely of a time and space, yet a step outside of that, a skewed mirror image not quite real, but unsettled. The Dream of My Return<\/em><\/a> (trans. Katherine Silver) is Horacio Castellanos\u2019 distillation of paranoia, anxiety, and haunting guilt of a culture, of a time, into the daily life of a man who may in fact be utterly safe. This could go on, this way of reading and talking about books, the aspect that makes one memorable, makes it stand off from others, but these are the best of the bunch so far, though if I wrote this a week from now, L\u00e9on Bloy\u2019s Disagreeable Tales<\/em><\/a> (trans. Erik Butler) would probably make the cut for its triumph of the sinister. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s Best Translated Book Award post is by reader, writer, and BTBA judge P. T. Smith. For more information on the BTBA, “like” our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. And check back here each week for a new post by one of the judges. There have been books throughout the year that […]<\/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":[67476],"tags":[18416,35996,61536,63846,12836,1206,61436,52096,63776,63146],"class_list":["post-303326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-best-translated-book-award","tag-btba","tag-btba-2016","tag-christian-kracht","tag-horacio-castellanos-moya","tag-jean-echenoz","tag-leon-bloy","tag-p-t-smith","tag-regina-ullmann","tag-violette-leduc"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303326","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=303326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331146,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303326\/revisions\/331146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}