{"id":305696,"date":"2017-04-03T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2017\/04\/03\/umami-by-laia-jufresa-why-this-book-should-win\/"},"modified":"2018-05-04T14:40:32","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T14:40:32","slug":"umami-by-laia-jufresa-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2017\/04\/03\/umami-by-laia-jufresa-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“Umami” by Laia Jufresa [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists<\/a> and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win<\/a> series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase and read!<\/em><\/p>\n

The entry below is by Jennifer Croft, who is the recipient of Fulbright, PEN<\/span>, and National Endowment for the Arts grants, as well as the Michael Henry Heim Prize for Translation. She has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow and holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and an MFA<\/span> from the University of Iowa. She is a Founding Editor of the Buenos Aires Review.<\/i><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Umami<\/em><\/a> by Laia Jufresa, translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes (Mexico, Oneworld)<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 53%<\/b><\/p>\n

Chad\u2019s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA<\/span>: 8%<\/b><\/p>\n

Umami<\/em> is that rare novel that becomes the world it depicts, inviting us to inhabit it in the gentlest, kindest possible terms through Sophie Hughes\u2019s delightful translation of Laia Jufresa\u2019s perfectly crafted structural wonder in prose. With the alternating metaphors of creating and tending the garden at the center of Belldrop Mews\u2014the building where all the book\u2019s characters reside, in the heart of Mexico City\u2014and remaining afloat or drowning in streams of consciousness, pressures and mourning, Umami calls our attention to attention, binding us to protagonists who instantly become beloved and whose crimes of inattention we both understand and feel deeply devastated by.<\/p>\n

Ana, the twelve-year-old gardener who opens Umami<\/em> and recurs as its soothingly emphatic refrain, describes the atmosphere of her family\u2019s home following the death of her sister Luz at the age of five (though Luz always told everyone she was \u201calmost six\u201d):<\/p>\n

. . . it\u2019s not quite a river, our sadness: it\u2019s stagnant water. Since Luz drowned, there\u2019s always something drowning at home. Not everyday. Some days you think we\u2019re all alive again, the five remaining members of the family: I get a zit; some girl calls Theo; Olmo plays his first concert; Dad comes back from tour; Mom decides to bake a pie. But later you go into the kitchen, and there\u2019s the pie, still raw on the wooden countertop, half of it pricked and the other half untouched, with Mom hovering over it, clutching the fork in midair. And then you know that we too, as a family, will always be \u201dalmost six.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Her directness is disarming, and here\u2014and throughout the book\u2014the tone is a magic trick, the perfect mix of light and dark that enables us to understand that both life and death are in little details, like selfhood itself, the primary pursuit of Ana\u2019s neighbor Marina: \u201cMarina distrusts her own malleability and is attracted by the possibility of the opposite: the fascinating and at the same time terrifying prospect of being someone.\u201d Marina is an artist with a severe eating disorder who spends her days inventing colors, or rather, words for colors, learning English from Ana\u2019s American mother Linda because \u201cEnglish takes the edge off things, makes them feel less serious, a bit like scribbling mustaches on photos.\u201d<\/p>\n

Language and even translation are consistently integrated into the plot\u2014a potential translation hurdle cleared with apparent effortlessness, and even pleasure, by Hughes\u2014as another neighbor\u2019s parallel project of cultivation begins alongside Ana\u2019s garden. Alfonso is an academic taking time off after his wife Noelia dies of cancer; when he gets a new laptop, he decides to use it to create a chronicle of the couple\u2019s time together, a kind of textual monument to commemorate their love. The details he remembers and loves about Noelia are so touching they are worth a novel on their own, while Alfonso\u2019s growing understanding of his own process simultaneously takes the reader through the basic framework of the novel, its reason for existing as well as why we might read it and what reading it might help us to find:<\/p>\n

What I like about writing is seeing the letters fill up the screen. It\u2019s something so seemingly simple, so perfectly alchemic; black on white. To plant worlds, and tend them as they grow. If you\u2019re missing a comma, you add it, and now there\u2019s nothing missing. Everything this text needs is here.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And white on black, too. The pauses, the spaces, or as my friend Juan the philosopher would say: the ineffable. Everything missing from this text, its absences and silences, is here too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Umami<\/i>\u2019s balance\u2014of light and dark, of cultivation and deluge, of presence and absence\u2014is what makes it such a welcoming home for the reader, one that feels profoundly lived-in (one can almost sense the neighbors\u2019 heartbeats) as well as haunted (one can also sense the hovering shadows of Luz, Noelia, the children Alfonso and Noelia did not have, the parents Marina never quite had, the mother Ana\u2019s mother might have been\u2014but never was\u2014and the abandoning, abruptly returning mother of Ana\u2019s best friend Pina). When, in order to begin her garden, Ana stays home for the summer for the first time ever (instead of spending it with her grandmother in the States), she gets to go to the cemetery with her parents to mark the anniversary of her sister\u2019s death:<\/p>\n

I\u2019d fantasized about this moment, about what I\u2019d say to Luz. But in my fantasies it was raining and Luz was somehow able to listen to me. Now the sun is beating down and there\u2019s not a patch of shade in the whole cemetery. She\u2019s dead, and I have nothing to say to her. Was she beloved? She was my sister.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A little later, she goes home:<\/p>\n

One by one, Pina and I pull off the little flowers. It occurs to me that if I\u2019d known, I could have taken them to the cemetery. It\u2019s a silly idea: they\u2019re tiny. But Luz was too. Tiny, I mean. She used to sit on my lap, hug her legs, then curl into a little ball so that I\u2019d hold her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cSqueeze!\u201d she\u2019d say.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sometimes I was scared I\u2019d hurt her or break something, and I always let go sooner than she wanted me to. We all did. My brothers held on a bit longer, but not much. Luz always wanted to be squeezed more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cSqueeze, squeeze, squeeze!\u201d she begged Dad, and he would squeeze her with a single arm.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t want to, but I can\u2019t help imagining her in her box, in the cemetery. But that\u2019s another silly idea because there\u2019s not even anything in that box. It was too expensive and complicated to bring her body back to Mexico.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWhat?\u201d I ask Pina, who\u2019s staring at me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAre you crying?\u201d she says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAre you stupid?\u201d I say, and she goes off in a sulk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jufresa\u2019s warmth and restraint, along with the poise and inventiveness of Hughes\u2019 translation, make Umami<\/em> a novel I deeply hope people will contemplate and savor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the announcement of the Best Translated Book Award longlists and the unveiling of the finalists, we will be covering all thirty-five titles in the Why This Book Should Win series. Enjoy learning about all the various titles selected by the fourteen fiction and poetry judges, and I hope you find a few to purchase […]<\/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":[35996,64586,48766,51466,65606,65626,1646,65616,65596,37876],"class_list":["post-305696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-btba","tag-btba-2017","tag-btba-fiction","tag-jennifer-croft","tag-laia-jufresa","tag-oneworld","tag-review","tag-sophie-hughes","tag-umami","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305696","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=305696"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396812,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305696\/revisions\/396812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}