Author: Harriett Press

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January 2023 Book Club

Our book club wasn’t able to meet up the last few months of last year because of our busy schedules, so we decided to combine two books and discuss them in January! It was great seeing each other online again and exchanging views on translated literature – this time round, Argentine writer Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (tr. Sarah Moses) that we had read for Halloween last October, and Kannada author Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar (tr. Srinath Perur).

Tender of the Flesh hasn’t been the easiest novel to digest because of its elaborate depiction of the horrendous treatment of humans by humans in a dystopian society where a virus has contaminated all animal meat and the only meat left edible is human meat. I found it easier to wade through the novel by replacing the humans with animals, which set me thinking about how we have been treating animals – the breeding, skinning, killing. It was interesting to hear from each other on the decision to become a vegetarian, the emotions we feel when eating animals, the intelligence of animals like octopuses.

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Bazterrica’s skilful writing also comes through in her ability to string a myriad of emotions across the story: grief, love, horror, pain. The twist at the end of the story is clever and further reinforces the dystopianism of the novel, highlighting the innate desires and malice of mankind as a result of which they may think that the means justify the ends.  

Ghachar Ghochar is far more light-hearted as it centres on the psychological drama of a middle-class Indian family. Shanbhag guides the reader through an Indian family’s transition from poverty to riches, portraying how each family member’s personality changes or remains the same.

Is wealth a blessing or a curse? There’s no easy answer in this novel. I suppose the appeal of this novel lies in that the familial scenes are quite universal in that every family is broken or messy in similar ways. I also like the Coffee House as it serves as a refuge for their customers from their everyday troubles, and the waiter who dispenses advice and words of comfort that hit all the right, commonplace notes for a person grappling with familial troubles.

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Join us in February as we discuss Indian writer Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (tr. Daisy Rockwell), which won the International Booker Prize last year.

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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July Book Club

Originally published in Russian in 2009 and translated into English in 2011, Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov’s Milkman in the Night (tr. Amanda Love Darragh) offers a mixture of everyday ordinary Ukrainian life, absurdism, and magicalism of sorts.

Our book club members enjoyed reading it despite mixed reviews of the novel. There are strange characters with unbelievable stories and behaviours, and their stories are presented in an interestingly slow pacing that concurrently draws the reader to read on. There are numerous cliff-hangers and Kurkov pauses at the right critical points.

That said, perhaps Kurkov had tried to pack too much in 480 pages with several intertwining threads of stories, so much so there seems to be little exploration of character development and at times there seems too much tell rather than show.

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We wonder if we should read Kurkov’s critically acclaimed Death and the Penguin to have a better grasp on his satirical writing and black humour. We’re also curious about his other writings like Grey Bees and Penguin Lost.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has certainly increased our curiosity and interest in Ukrainian culture and literature. Prior to the invasion, we probably had little or close to no awareness of the Ukrainian way of life, history, and literary culture.

It’s a relief we have access to English translations of their literature and can slowly move towards narrowing that knowledge and cultural gap.

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Join us in August as we discuss Danish writer Olga Ravn’s The Employees (tr. Martin Aitken).

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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June 2022 Harriett Book Club

At Night All Blood is Black by French writer David Diop (tr. Anna Moschovakis) is probably one of the shortest novels our book club has read so far, but man, it packs a punch!

Diop’s ability to portray a myriad of men’s emotions and the trauma that soldiers suffer in the context of WWI against the backdrop of Senegalese history and culture is evidence of why his writing won and deserves the 2021 International Booker Prize.  

In only 145 pages, At Night All Blood is Black illustrates the protagonist Alfa Ndiaye’s descent into madness after his more-than-brother Mademba Diop died a long death in the trenches because Alfa refused to finish him off after he was mutilated by the enemy.

Guilt. Insurmountable guilt. How does a colonised man, a Senegalese man, or a man in general cope with guilt, pain, loss, and trauma?

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A book club member pointed out the toxic masculinity that flows throughout the story, where Alfa, despite undergoing tremendous stress and heartache, succumbs to cultural pressures in the war context and perhaps in that era for men to resort to even more killing to assuage inner suffering.  

Yet there are unspoken expectations on the limits to violence – other soldiers begin to fear Alfa after he returns from the trenches with the fourth pair of enemy hands. Where does savagery begin and end?

I personally find that the original French title of the book “Soul Brothers” would have been more apt as it accurately encapsulates the intimacy between and history of Alfa and Mademba. With the French title in mind, it’ll help the reader make better sense of the final chapter and the dissociative episodes that Alfa experiences throughout the story.

If I could ask the writer a question, I’ll probably ask him about the language of body parts in the book. Why are male body parts like the penis obscured with the term “inside-outside” and “middle of the body” while the female breasts are simply spelled out as breasts? Are male bodies treated with more dignity, and, if so, why?

One last point to note is that our book club member also pointed out that we might be able to understand At Night All Blood is Black a tad better if we knew more about Senegalese culture and terms like “demm” (soul eater) [p.s. there are some journal articles on “demm”], which could help us interpret Alfa’s dissociative episodes and the overall story differently.  

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Join us in July as we discuss Ukrainian writer Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov’s The Milkman in the Night (tr. Amanda Love Darragh).

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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May 2022 Harriett Book Club

Bodies, bodies, bodies. If there were a specific theme in Argentinian novelist Claudia Pineiro’s Elena Knows (tr. Frances Riddle), it would be hideous, infirm, malformed bodies, the way they move and feel and think, as well as how religion dictates (or not) the way one views and care for these bodies.

Elena has Parkinson’s, which she calls the ‘fucking whore illness’. Roberto has had a hunched back since birth. Rita undergoes an invasive procedure to check if she has a uterus. As Elena sets out to determine who had killed her daughter Rita, it gradually dawns on the reader that every character in this story is equally helpless.

A book club member calls Elena Knows a book about everything people doesn’t want to talk about.

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We started our book club discussion with this question: What are some of the issues raised in Elena Knows that resonated with you the most?

Mother-daughter relationship. Caregiver-patient relationship. Mental distress of caregivers. Impact of bureaucracy and patriarchy on women’s bodies. Disparity between thinking and knowing. Reality of motherhood: do mothers really know their children best? Pain and suffering. What does pain turn you into? Hypocrisy of religion. Sickness and dignity.

We also discussed the role of Inspector Avellaneda and the lawyer at the government agency that issued Elena her disability certificate. We agreed that these two characters offered Elena solace and dignity by doing the most human thing possible in the face of her debilitating illness and after the death of her daughter: offering a listening ear and shaking her hand. These two characters seem to emit tiny rays of hope in this broken fictional world.

The allure of this narrator-solves-the-mystery-novel also lies in Pineiro’s very skilful depiction of body movement that enables the reader to visualise the impact of Parkinson’s on Elena’s body as she walks down the streets, gets herself into and out of a cab, remains stationary until her pills mobilise her body again.

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Join us in June as we discuss French writer David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black (tr. Anna Moschovakis) that won the 2021 International Booker Prize.   

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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April 2022 Harriett Book Club

It was no doubt a pity that in the end Lizzie, the translator of Korean Teachers, couldn’t join us for our online book club because of technical difficulties on her side. I’m not gonna lie that I’m disappointed the book launch was cancelled because the book’s author Su-jin came down with the coronavirus, and now the translator couldn’t join us for book club.

I really want readers to hear directly from the author and translator as that would give them more context to the novel, but alas it wasn’t meant to be. That said, we still had a wonderful discussion! 😊

Our overall impression of Korean Teachers is how relatable the stories about the four female Korean protagonists are to us female readers: workplace competition (between women), tagging performance to self-worth, exploitation and oppression of female hourly workers, juggling work expectations and personal ambitions.

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Su-jin’s style of writing stands out because of its brevity—she makes a point and then moves on to the next, which (I think—some people will disagree) is pretty uncommon among Korean writers who tend to write at a relatively more tedious length and risk being deemed as longwinded.

We each have a different favourite protagonist. Mine is Ga-eun, a multi-layered character that the novel introduces bit by bit—first, her popularity as the best lecturer; second, the price that comes with popularity; third, her underlying dissatisfaction with work because it’s unchallenging; fourth, the secret she harbours; fifth, the death of her father. It’s this layered approach that also exhibits Su-jin’s cleverness in storytelling.

On the whole, Korean Teachers has helped readers question and challenge our own prejudices and inform us about the darker side of the Korean wave and its attendant socio-economic problems. It has definitely provided a good starting point for us to reflect on and discuss these issues. (P.S. Check out the reviews on IG by other book reviewers on their thoughts about the book! Meanwhile, you can get a copy of Korean Teachers from our online bookstore!)    

*

Join us in May as we discuss Spanish writer Claudia Pineiro’s Elena Knows (tr. Frances Riddle), which has been shorted for the 2022 International Booker Prize.  

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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March 2022 Harriett Book Club

Before our book club meeting in March, I asked our members for help via our WhatsApp group chat: how do we define science fiction? I’d started to read a few chapters of Broken Stars, an anthology of 16 Chinese science fiction stories translated and edited by Ken Liu, and I just didn’t think some met my definition of science fiction.

One member kindly sent me two articles: one was Wired’s The Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness and the other was Futurism’s The Scale of Hardness in Science Fiction. Really interesting explanations but I became even more confused. What qualifies as hard and soft science fiction?

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Broken Stars is a collection of very diverse writing styles and attempts to showcase a wide spectrum of (Chinese) science fiction genres, so much so it can seem unbalanced in delivery as a whole.

Moonlight by Liu Cixin, for instance, will no doubt fall under the familiar hard science fiction category with its play on time travel and apocalyptic visions. But what about Salinger and the Koreans by Han Song, a wild, comical take on North Koreans dominating the world with little depth in imagination and no references to physics and astronomy? How about Broken Stars by Tang Fei that explores the concept of fate and star movements?

Which category do they fall under: dystopia fiction, space opera, military SF, alternative history, post-apocalyptic, science fantasy…?

A really good point our book club members made was perhaps the categories don’t really matter. What seems speculative today may become realistic in the future as science is constantly evolving. And perhaps the magic of science fiction lies in the blurred lines and the broad, vague definitions.

*

Join us in April as we discuss Korean writer Seo Su-jin’s Korean Teachers (tr. Lizzie Buehler), which you can purchase from our online store.

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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February 2022 Harriett Book Club

We were so fortunate to have renowned Marathi writer and film maker Sachin Kundalkar join our February book club to shed more light into his debut novel, Cobalt Blue, which, his own words, has been beautifully translated by Jerry Pinto.

First published in Marathi in 2006 and then translated into English in 2013, Cobalt Blue is about a brother and sister, Tanay and Anuja, who fall in love with a paying guest in their home in Pune. It explores male sexuality, family relations, gender roles, and societal norms.

Most of our book club members agreed that Cobalt Blue builds on a simple plot and a symmetrical structure (first, Tanay’s point of view in a first-person narration, then Anuja’s in the form of diary entries) that makes for a smooth reading. Though based on Indian culture, the novel comes across as very Asian as various themes like traditional roles, son preference, sibling rivalry are relatable to non-Indian readers.

Despite the symmetry in structure and both siblings being infatuated with the same man, Cobalt Blue presents two contrasting ways of dealing with the aftermath of a failed relationship, which also reflects the different lived realities of heterosexual and homosexual characters.

Perhaps there are three layers of expressions of grief depicted through this novel: the uppermost layer where heterosexuals can overtly and uninhibitedly express their grief and seek therapy; the middle layer where homosexuals keep their pain and anguish hidden and private; and the bottom layer where bisexuals (as represented by the paying guest whose voice isn’t even given a chance to be heard throughout the novel) and their emotions and needs are completely obscured.

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Perhaps the paying guest serves as a concept that doesn’t exist in reality – an Indian bisexual man without a name, without a family, without the encumbrance of traditions and familial expectations and pressures.

Upon reading the book and discussing various themes with the book club, it was especially gratifying to hear from the author himself – what had inspired him to write the novel, what are his influences and inspirations, what are the challenges in exploring sensitive issues of male sexuality in his creative work?

Sachin shared with us that he’d written Cobalt Blue in his early twenties and his debut work had received the support of many senior writers in Pune. There was hardly any homophobic response. It was an amalgamation of stories of many people he’d met two decades ago, when it had been difficult to be bisexual and be fully in love.

He called Cobalt Blue an analogue novel, written before the present age of interconnectedness. Before the invention of the internet, there was a purity in the pain of never seeing the person again. If two lovers parted, they truly parted as they will never see each other again. But today, with the internet, no one can leave anyone anymore. There isn’t a real respect for separation anymore. Cobalt Blue is a story that cannot happen today.  

*

Join us in March as we discuss Broken Stars, an anthology of Chinese short science-fiction stories by award-winning writer and translator Ken Liu.

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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January 2022 Harriett Book Club

We were pretty excited about our first book club of 2022 as we were expecting a guest for the first time: Anton Hur, translator of Korean writer Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny! We also all finished reading Cursed Bunny. It had been some time since all of us finished reading a book from cover to cover and actually enjoyed reading it – and that seemed like a really good start to a new year.

Cursed Bunny is genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean writer Bora Chung that fuses magical realism, horror, speculative fiction, and, above all, ‘unrealistic’ fiction. The first story ‘The Head’ is no doubt an effective hook that fully captures the reader’s attention and offers a foretaste of what Bora Chung is capable of as a writer of unrealistic short stories.

What really struck me was Bora Chung’s cleverness in challenging and twisting logic, imagining possible what would be inconceivable in real life, and turning the ordinary and conventional on its head. My favourite story is ‘Snare’ in which the traditional portrayal of women as predominantly evil foxes in Korean folktales is challenged and the state of patriarchy and human greed in the Korean society is examined.

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Anton shared more about Bora Chung’s writing style and that helped us better appreciate her written work. He helped us see that she tries to write stories as objectively as she can and does not feel the need to explain a scene, which avoids the violence of imposing her views on the reader. There is also a beauty in her sentences that evokes both horror and humour at the same time.

Anton also told us more about his role as a translator and strategist for Cursed Bunny and his other translated book Love in the Big City by Korean writer Sangyong Park. My question for him was how far he would go as a translator. And the truth is he goes all out for his Korean authors, handling the translation, networking, marketing, securing interview opportunities. His efforts are tireless.

*

Join us in February as we discuss Marathi writer Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue, translated by Jerry Pinto. We’ll be discussing Chinese writer Ken Liu’s Broken Stars in March.

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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December 2021 Translated Literature Book Club Meeting

The last book our book club read for 2021 was Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Jose Saramago’s Blindness, translated by Giovanni Pontiero. While preparing for the book club, I read up a little on Saramago’s personality – he was known as an outspoken atheist. I haven’t read his other books but I can see how much his atheist beliefs and disillusions with the human race come through in Blindness.

Published in 1995, Blindness is a story about a city hit by an epidemic of ‘white blindness’ that spares no one. The authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations, and assaulting women.

As our book club members can attest, Blindness is definitely not the easiest book to read not because of its storyline but because of its dialogues. Several dialogues are interjoined in one sentence and separated by a comma, each dialogue beginning with a capital letter to illustrate different voices.

We found this style of writing dialogues really intriguing as it seems to attempt to reflect the chaos that transpire when anxious blind people speak almost all at the same time. In a world without sight, our voice becomes our primary tool of communication – that is if you haven’t lost your voice too. In other words, Saramago’s style of dialogue writing seems to make a lot of sense but it can be exhausting for the reader as it demands him or her to pay very close attention to the text.  

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How did you recognise me, Above all, by your voice, the voice is the sight of the person who cannot see, Yes, the voice, I’m also beginning to recognise yours, who would have thought it, doctor, now there’s no need for an operation, If there is a cure for this, we will both need it, I remember you telling me, doctor, that after my operation I would no longer recognise the world in which I was living, we now know how right you were,

– Blindness (p. 117)

Storyline wise, the numerous themes about blindness (physical/metaphorical), fear, greed, lust, morality, sin, fairness, faith (or the lack of) discussed in Blindness prompt reflection. It makes the reader question if there is a disease more incurable than blindness? Are there limits to one’s malice? How far would one go to stay alive? What use are one’s values in a world without sight and comfort?   

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For the first quarter of 2022, our book club members have decided to read the following translated books:

January 2022 – Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (Korean)

February 2022 – Cobalt Blue by Sacina Kundalkar (Marathi)

March 2022 – Broken Stars by Ken Liu (Chinese)

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet online every last weekend of the month. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook! Or email us at editor@harriettpress.com to indicate your attendance.

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November 2021 Translated Literature Book Club Meeting

Wait, what?

He watched as her head started to twist.

No, not just her head. Her entire body was turning.

He now realised her body had been facing away from him at first, but her head…

And now both head and body had turned a full half-circle—her head was facing away, her body facing toward him. She dropped to the floor on all fours, her face now turned to the ceiling, and scuttled a few insectile steps toward him before jerking to a halt.

– Whisper, p. 209

 

Our book club read Taiwanese writer Chang Yu-ko’s horror novel Whisper in November. As Honford Star describes it, Whisper is a plot-driven, Taiwanese horror story that cleverly combines Taiwanese folklore, the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and the long-term mistreatment of the country’s aboriginal people into a story of how the past can still kill.

During our discussion, I shared how spooked I was while reading it at night before going to sleep. I realised that was because I was familiar with Chinese religions and spirituality and had visited Taiwan a couple of times, so I could relate to and understand the references to the supernatural, Taiwanese folk cultures, and a little bit about indigenous people depicted in the novel.

I’m saying this because our book club members had pointed out that there are some writers that might expect readers to already know some local context, so they may not see the need to elaborate on certain events (e.g. February 28 incident) or characters (e.g. Chinese priestess, xiaogui) in the story.  

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In reading Whisper, it may therefore be helpful if the reader has some prior knowledge of the local religious, political and social contexts, or be willing to deepen their understanding by looking up on the internet about things that aren’t familiar to them.

Chang seemed to have wanted to explore quite a lot of things in the novel, so much so that one of our members called it ‘info dumping’. Perhaps Chang was trying to present a more complex Taiwanese identity or conscience steeped in the country’s turbulent political and social histories that isn’t as often palpable to a non-Taiwanese or that has been entirely forgotten by some Taiwanese themselves.

What most of us could agree on is that Chang is no doubt an excellent writer. Whisper reads like scenes from a Taiwanese drama or movie, a technique which is likely heavily influenced by Chang’s background as a scriptwriter.

We especially liked how Chang’s succinct style of writing could evoke very strong emotions and create very vivid images in the scenes where tension built up between Shih-sheng and his father and where Shih-sheng was ascending Mount Jade to solve the mystery.

To know whether you’ll like the book, you’ll have to read it for yourself.

For the month of December, we’ll be reading Portuguese writer José Saramago’s Blindness.

Everyone is welcome to join our book club. We meet every last weekend of the month, either online or in person, depending on the COVID-19 restrictions. For more updates, follow us on Instagram and Facebook!

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