July 2023 MBR The Literary Fiction Shelf

The Literary Fiction Shelf

Whale
Cheon Myeong-kwan, author
Chi-Young Kim, translator
Archipelago Books
232 Third Street #A111, Brooklyn, NY 11215
https://archipelagobooks.org
9781953861146, $22.00, PB, 327pp

https://www.amazon.com/Whale-Cheon-Myeong-Kwan/dp/1953861148

Synopsis: A woman sells her daughter to a passing beekeeper for two jars of honey. A baby weighing fifteen pounds is born in the depths of winter but named "Girl of Spring." A storm brings down the roof of a ramshackle restaurant to reveal a hidden fortune. These are just a few of the events that set Cheon Myeong-kwan's beautifully crafted, wild world in motion in "Whale".

"Whale", set in a remote village in South Korea and follows the lives of many linked characters, including Geumbok, an extremely ambitious woman who has been chasing an indescribable thrill ever since she first saw a whale crest in the ocean; her mute daughter, Chunhui, who communicates with elephants; and a one-eyed woman who controls honeybees with a whistle.

Critique: Ably translated in English by Chi-Young Kim, "Whale" by showcases and documents South Korean author Cheon Myeong-kwan as a natural born storyteller and one with a cinematic, darkly humorous, and thoroughly original perspective. Replete with unexpected surprises and a wicked sense of humor, "Whale" is a riveting, rollicking, combination of adventure and satire of epic saga proportions by arguably one of the most original literary talents in international literature. While an unreservedly recommended addition to personal, community, college, and university library International Literary Fiction collections, it should be noted for students, academia, and non-specialist general readers that "Whale" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $8.63).

Editorial Note #1: Cheon Myeong-kwan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheon_Myeong-kwan) is a South Korean novelist and screenwriter. Upon publication of his first story, "Frankand I" (2003), he received the prestigious Munhakdongne New Writer Award. His debut novel, The Whale, published the following year, won him the 10th Munhakdongne Novel Award. His novels have been translated into Chinese, English, French, Thai, Russian, and Vietnamese.

Editorial Note #2: Chi-Young Kim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi-young_Kim) is a literary translator and editor based in Los Angeles. A recipient of the Man Asian Literary Prize for her work on Please Look After Mom by Kyung-sook Shin (2011), she has translated over a dozen books, including works by Ae-ran Kim, You-jeong Jeong, and Young-ha Kim, among others.

A Greek Love: A Novel of Cuba
Zoe Valdes, author
David Fry, translator
Arcade Publishing
www.arcadepub.com
c/o Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018
www.skyhorsepublishing.com
9781956763409, $24.99, HC, 144pp

https://www.amazon.com/Greek-Love-Novel-Cuba/dp/1956763406

Synopsis: A free spirit who spends time near the port of Havana, where her friend Osiris is known as the "Greek sailormen's whore", teenager Ze becomes pregnant after a brief love affair with a captain's son her age. By the time she realizes her condition, the ship has left and the boy is gone.

In her father's Cuba, an unwed teenage mother is a source of scandal and shame and a threat to his ambitions in the Party. He disowns her and brutally throws her out of her home. Led by her mother, she leaves the city for refuge in Matanzas, a university town rich in Afro-Cuban culture, where her mother's sister, a music scholar, lives and where she will raise her child mentored by these three older women -- an aunt, a mother, and Osiris.

Years later, Ze's son, Petros, has become a world-class musician bridging Cuban and Greek traditions, while Ze has become a scholar herself. When a recording executive invites Petros to give concerts in Greece, Ze seeks permission from the authorities to leave the island and accompany him. Secretly (a secret they guard from the authorities and her father, who is now a Party stalwart) they both nourish the hope of somehow finding Petros's father and Ze's one great, lost love.

Critique: A remarkable, engaging, memorable, original story of human passions, emotional endurance, unrelenting hope, -- as well as one woman's resolute and enduring love for the father of her child, "A Greek Love" by Cuban novelist Zoe Vales is expertly translated into English for an American readership by David Frye. The result is a deftly engaging read from cover to cover and a novel that is especially and unreservedly recommended for both community and academic Contemporary International Literary Fiction collections. It should be noted that "A Greek Love" is also readily available in a digital book format (Kindle, $16.99).

Editorial Note #1: Zoe Valdes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo%C3%A9_Vald%C3%A9s) was born in Cuba in 1959 and worked with UNESCO and the Cuban Cultural Office in Paris between 1983 and 1988. In exile in France since 1995, she has been a screenwriter and assistant director of the magazine Cine Cubano. Her bestselling debut novel, Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada, brought her international acclaim - she was once dubbed "the Madonna of Cuban literature" - and she has written many more novels, including I Gave You All I Had and The Weeping Woman, both published by Arcade. Winner of the Planeta Prize, Azorin Prize, and Premio de Novela Ciudad de Torrevieja, she received the Tres Llaves (Three Keys) to the city of Miami in 2001. She currently lives in Paris.

David Frye teaches anthropology and Latin American culture and society at the University of Michigan. As a professional translator he has published more than thirty books in translation, ranging from Heart of Tango (2010) by the Spanish novelist Elia Barcelo and the sixteenth-century picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes (2015) to the poetry of Nancy Morejon. He resides in Ann Arbor.

Dom Casmurro
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, author
Margaret Jull Costa, translator
Robin Patterson, translator
Liveright
c/o W. W. Norton & Company
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
www.wwnorton.com
9781324090700, $27.95, HC, 288pp

https://www.amazon.com/Casmurro-Joaquim-Maria-Machado-Assis/dp/1324090707

Synopsis: Originally published in 1899, "Dom Casmurro" is widely considered to be Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's masterpiece and a progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction. This exuberant new translation captures all the hilarious, maddening, and utterly compelling idiosyncrasies of one of Machado's most complex characters.

Bento Santiago, our charismatic yet exceedingly unreliable narrator, nicknamed by his enemies Dom Casmurro, has become a bit of a recluse in old age. He spends his days reading and mourning the past in a house built as a replica of his childhood home. One day, musing over the painted busts of Nero, Augustus, Masinissa, and Caesar, he is inspired to write his own story, a tale of equally epic proportions. Or so, at least, he thinks.

"Yes, let us begin by evoking a famous November afternoon, one I will never forget," he writes, recalling the day he fell in love with his childhood sweetheart, Capitu. Thus he transports readers back to his youth in a once fashionable neighborhood, when he and Capitu were neighbors playing innocently in the backyard. But after overcoming many obstacles, Bento's happy-ever-after ending proves short-lived when he is consumed by paranoia and jealousy.

At once oblivious and obsessive, Bento becomes a strangely engaging antihero as he mines the repercussions of his suspicions against the backdrop of a rapidly modernizing Rio de Janeiro.

Critique: Eloquently and collaboratively translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (the same duo that sparked a Machado renaissance with their brilliant translations of The Collected Stories and Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas) and brimming with the signature literary charm of author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, "Dom Casmurro" is a subversive and groundbreaking dark comedy from one of Brazil's greatest authors and now readily available to an American readership. A highly recommended pick for community and academic library Literary Fiction collections, it should be noted for personal reading lists that "Dom Casmurro" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $14.99).

Editorial Note #1: Machado de Assis (21 June 1839 - 29 September 1908) was born in Rio de Janeiro and, along with seven short-story collections, wrote such groundbreaking novels as Quincas Borba and The Alienist. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machado_de_Assis)

Editorial Note #2: For her translations of Spanish and Portuguese, Margaret Jull Costa (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Jull_Costa) has won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize four times as well as the Premio Valle-Inclan, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the 2008 PEN Prize for best translation from any language for The Maias, by Eca de Queiros (New Directions, 2007).

Editorial Note #3: Award-winning translator Robin Patterson lives in England. he has participated in both the Birkbeck and the BCLT literary translation summer schools and in 2013 was mentored by Margaret Jull Costa as part of the BCLT mentorship program. His translation of Our Musseque by Jose Luandino Vieira was published by Dedalus Books. Additionally, his translations have appeared in Ninth Letter, on the Bookanista website, and in The Football Cronicas. (https://wordswithoutborders.org/contributors/view/robin-patterson)

The Country of Too
Rodrigo Rey Rosa, author
Stephen Henighan, translator
Biblioasis
www.biblioasis.com
9781771965149, $16.95, PB, 120pp

https://www.amazon.com/Country-To%C3%B3-Biblioasis-International-Translation/dp/1771965142

Synopsis: Raised on his wits on the streets of Central America, the Cobra, a young debt collector and gang enforcer, has never had the chance to discern between right and wrong, until he's assigned the murder of Polo, a prominent human rights activist -- and his friend.

When his conscience gives him pause and his patron catches on, a remote Mayan community offers the Cobra a potential refuge, but the people there are up against predatory mining companies. With danger encroaching, the Cobra is forced to confront his violent past and make a decision about what he's willing to risk in the future, and who it will be for.

Following the Cobra, Polo, are a faction of drug-dealing oligarchs, and Jacobo, a child caught in the crosshairs, Rey Rosa maps an extensive web of corruption upheld by decades of political oppression. A scathing indictment of exploitation in all its forms, "The Country of Too" offers a particularly gripping account of what it means to consider societal change under the constant threat of violence.

Critique: Ably translated into English by Stephen Henighan, the narrative driven and distinctive storytelling style of novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa raises "The Country of Too" from a basic crime thriller to that of a work of literary excellence making it unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library Contemporary International Literary Fiction collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "The Country of Too" is also readily available in a digital book format (Kindle, $9.99).

Editorial Note #1: Born and raised in Guatemala City, Rodrigo Rey Rosa is the author of five collections of short stories and more than a dozen novels that have been published in sixteen languages. Among his works available in English are The Beggar's Knife, The Pelcari Project (both translated by expatriate American author Paul Bowles), The Good Cripple, The African Shore, Human Matter, and Chaos: A Fable. Rey Rosa has been awarded Guatemala's national literature prize, China's Best Foreign Book Award, and, for his life's work, the prestigious Jose Donoso Prize in Chile. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodrigo_Rey_Rosa)

Editorial Note #2: Stephen Henighan's translations have twice been longlist finalists for the Best Translated Book Award and once for the International Dublin Literary Award. He is the author of ten books of fiction, most recently the short story collection Blue River and Red Earth (2018) and the novel The World of After (2021). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Henighan)

Yuwa: A Novel
Yixin Chen, author
Howard Goldblatt, translator
Long River Press
c/o China Books
https://www.chinabooks.com
9781592652587, $16.95, PB, 140pp

https://www.amazon.com/Yuwa-Novel-Yixin-Chen/dp/1592652581

Synopsis: Set in a dirt-poor area of Gansu Province in China's far west, "Yuwa" is a contemporary novel about a boy who rises above his marginal existence in a village bypassed by economic growth.

Yuwa (rain child) leads a simple life surrounded by an extended family, love, and friendship. He tends sheep with his grand-uncle, who teaches him about life; he goes to school with his best friend, whose loyalty never wavers; he has an aunt who dotes on him and a mother who worries about him.

As a novel, "Yuwa" builds in intensity and emotion after the boy experiences heartbreak after heartbreak. While symbolizing the challenges facing the villagers, the story illustrates how a child's indomitable nature and inherent decency help him endure despite the forces of nature, tradition, and cruelty arrayed against him.

Critique: It is difficult to read a novel like "Yuwa" without also taking note of its symbolic resonance and message of hope. Chen Yixin is young Chinese writer who was born and grew up in a village similar to Yuwa's. Chen's childhood experience has given him a unique perspective on contemporary life in impoverished parts of China that seldom emerge from the shadows. With plain language and compassion. Deftly crafted by author/storyteller Yixin Chen and very ably translated into English by Howard Goldblatt (who is the translator of numerous works of Chinese fiction, including Xiao Hong, Su Tong, and Nobel Laureate Mo Yan) "Yuwa" and unreservedly recommended for personal, community, college, and university library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections. It should be noted that "Yuwa" was originally published in Chinese in 2019 and is now readily available from Long River Press.

Double Vision: Stories From Home
C.T. Fitzgerald
Emerald Books
9781954779709, $8.99

https://www.amazon.com/Double-Vision-C-T-Fitzgerald/dp/1954779704

Double Vision: Stories From Home embraces the childhood and life of author C.T. Fitzgerald, providing prose and poetry that capture his world through a series of candid truths about what he saw, experienced, and heard.

The stories unfold an origami of life impressions that some readers may find gritty in their language, and perhaps even politically or racially biased or derogatory. These images of yesteryear are replete with such representations because Fitzgerald maintains that "...exposing the realities of that world is an important learning tool because, in my opinion, much of what I have presented along objectionable lines still exists throughout our society in this world."

From the five-word opening flash fiction piece 'For Sale: American Dreams' to the more detailed 'Bodies,' which explores an unnamed northern city on the eastern shore of Lake Erie which explodes with racial tension in the 1960s, the backdrop serves as an unusual adjunct to a story about first responders whose actions lead to surprising revelations and end results that depart from normal life progressions: "No mention was made in the paper of the "fucking idiot" Firefighter who almost wasted Officer Mike Conner."

"Locked and loaded" assumes an entirely different prospect as the responder muses, "Would he have to face a whole family of these sneaky cocksuckers?" Readers might not expect humor to intersect with social and political observation, but Fitzgerald's candid vignettes open both cans of worms and hilarity as events unfold with the precise observations of a world replete with police, shotguns, working-class men, the mysteries of women, and jobs on the line.

More so than most memoirs or collections about community and coming of age, Fitzgerald's stories in Double Vision reinforce a sense of time and place that will seem both alien and oddly familiar to his readers. His attention to building the dialogues and interpersonal interactions that come from assumptions about the world and minorities as well as white privilege makes for a collection that is as constantly hard-hitting as trench warfare, and as socially thought-provoking as any history of the times.

Double Vision: Stories From Home would do especially well as a book club selection, powering its insights with controversial subjects that will lend to debate and social inspection among a wide circle of readers. Libraries that choose Double Vision: Stories From Home for their literary collections will find it will appeal to readers of memoirs as well as literature students interested in vignettes that circle around what can and cannot be changed in the community, world, and self.

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