Al otro lado

by Can Xue
translated by Tyra Díez and Teresa I. Tejeda

I borrowed this book from the library without even knowing who Can Xue is. I just read the first paragraph of the first story that gave the collection its name and knew that I had to finish it. A few days later, I read that Can Xue was one of the favourites to win this year’s Nobel prize in literature. I didn’t read anything by the actual winner but I hate him already.

This compilation contains 10 stories originally published by Can Xue between 2010 and 2018; five translated by Tyra Díez and five by Teresa I. Tejeda. All these stories can be found in English translation by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping in I Live in the Slums (Yale University Press, 2020), but I haven’t read that book. I can only hope the English versions are as good.

It’s a shame I don’t read Mandarin though because something is always lost in translation. Does the name of the village in La reina (Wang) refers to its most famous citizen, 女王 (Nǚwáng)? Is Mrs Wang of Catfish Pit also a royal? Even more intriguingly, is Xiao Ping of Catfish Pit the same girl as Xiao Ping of Venus?

Ah well. In words of Liane Moriarty, not all mysteries are meant to be solved.

旧居

Un señor mayor cogió una tetera y preguntó a Zhou Yizhen por el precio. Ella le contestó que no era la dueña de la tienda.
— Y si no eres la dueña, ¿qué haces aquí parada? — dijo en tono de reproche —. Ten el coraje de hacerte cargo. ¡Ja! He visto el precio, está pegado en el fondo de la tetera. Veintitrés yuanes.
Sacó el dinero, contó veintitrés yuanes, los puso sobre el mostrador y se dirigió hacia fuera farfullando aún enfadado: «No he visto nunca peor manera de hacer negocios que la tuya».

La antigua casa

沼泽地

Curiosamente, esta vez encontró el estudio fotográfico sin mayor complicación. Seguía siendo el edificio de ladrillo visto de tres plantas, aunque el cartel original «Fotografía de boda» había desaparecido de su fachada, así como su puerta principal. Era como si hubiera cambiado su orientación, y la entrada ya no diera a la callejuela. Ah Yuan se acercó al muro y pegó la oreja. No oyó nada. Una niña de once o doce años se le acercó.
— Eh, ¿qué haces? — le preguntó.
— ¿Sabes como puedo entrar? — le replicó a su vez, avergonzado.
— ¿Entrar? No se puede, este edificio no tiene puerta.
— ¿Y hay alguien dentro?
— Claro que hay alguien.
— Quiero decir, los que están dentro, ¿nunca salen?
— Y por qué tendrían que salir? No los he visto ni una vez. Puedes quedarte aquí esperando todo lo que quieras, pero será inútil.

El humedal

女王

Frente a ella estaba aquella mujer. Zhen no pudo evitar preguntar en voz baja:
— ¿Reina?
— Eso parece — se adivinaba cierto tono burlón en su voz.
— No pretendía importunarla.
— De todas formas, ya me has molestado. Has supuesto muy bien, no necesito que nadie venga a hacerme compañía. En cambio, sí me gusta aleccionar a los demás, es mi punto débil. Tu problema resulta muy fácil de solucionar, te voy a ayudar a resolverlo ahora mismo.

La reina

Al otro lado

隔墙的那边	Al otro lado *	The Other Side of the Partition
旧居	La antigua casa †	Her Old Home
鹿二的心事	El tormento de Lu Er *	Lu-er’s Worries
老蝉	La vieja chicharra *	The Old Cicada
鲇鱼套	El Recodo del Siluro †	Catfish Pit
幸福	Plenitud *	Euphoria
沼泽地	El humedal *	The Swamp
鬼屋	La montaña del Cuervo †	Crow Mountain
女王	La reina †	The Queen
启明星	Venus †	Venus

*	Translated by Tyra Díez
†	Translated by Teresa I. Tejeda

Burning Your Boats

by Angela Carter
foreword by Salman Rushdie

I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.

Afterword to Fireworks

I was so impressed with Fireworks (also with myself, for finishing it), that I decided to read all of Angela Carter’s short fiction. So I acquired this collection and... nothing happened for the next few years. Last summer, I finally dug it out. It took me about nine months to read it, with breaks.

The book contains four previously published collections, including Fireworks, plus six other stories. Of collected works, The Bloody Chamber is the most conceptually and stylistically coherent one, all that Gothic horror stuff with an exception of more, um, light-hearted Puss-in-Boots. Black Venus is rather uneven. The best stories there are Our Lady of the Massacre, Peter and the Wolf and The Kitchen Child, this latter providing much-needed comic relief. It looks like Ms. Carter was fascinated with wolves: the real ones, were-ones and feral children. I like that.

American Ghosts and Old World Wonders is another mixed bag, redeemed by the tasty Text-Mex-Western Gun for the Devil and delightfully Borgesian The Merchant of Shadows (it made me reach for Internet to check if Hank Mann was really born Heinrich von Mannheim: of course not, and he never made a movie called Paracelsus with Charles Laughton).

While I researched my thesis, I was rooming back there in the city in an apartment over a New Age bookshop-cum-healthfood restaurant with a science fiction freak I’d met at a much earlier stage of studenthood during the chance intimacy of the mutual runs in Barcelona. Now he and I subsisted on brown rice courtesy of the Japanese waitress from downstairs, with whom we were both on, ahem, intimate terms, and he was always talking about aliens. He thought most of the people you met on the streets were aliens cunningly simulating human beings. He thought the Venusians were behind it.
He said he had tested Hiroko’s reality quotient sufficiently and she was clear, but I guessed from his look he wasn’t too sure about me.

The Merchant of Shadows

Beasts of the Southern Wild

a film by Benh Zeitlin
music by Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin

A powerful and poetic debut feature of Benh Zeitlin starring Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry, also in their acting debuts as Hushpuppy and Wink, respectively.

According to Wikipedia, at the audition the then five-year-old Wallis “impressed the filmmakers with her reading ability, tremendous scream, and ability to burp on command, all of which are used in the film”.

This movie was shown as a part of the cycle Tiempo de memoria, memoria en el tiempo, organised by Instituto Canario de Desarrollo Cultural (ICDC).

Gagarine

a film by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh

Yuri (Alséni Bathily), together with his friends Diana (Lyna Khoudri) and Houssam (Jamil McCraven), are trying to save their home, Cité Gagarine, from demolition. A heartwarming debut feature by Liatard and Trouilh, also starring Finnegan Oldfield as Dali. Watch it.

A beautiful theme song, Ya Tara by Amine Bouhafa, is performed by Lena Chamamyan.

Pollo con ciruelas

by Marjane Satrapi
translated by Manel Domínguez

One day in November 1958 Nasser Ali Khan decides that life isn’t worth living.

What could have been as depressing as that far away day, turned out to be a warm, often humorous and even uplifting work of art. The story of Nasser Ali’s mother could have been written by García Márquez; the one with guest appearance (and disappearance) of Azrael, by Borges; altogether, utterly original graphic novel from the author of Persepolis as well as one of the most touching love stories I’ve ever read.

And what the titular chicken with plums has got to do with Sophia Loren? I’m not telling you.

After buying himself a new tar, Nasser Ali Khan quotes from Omar Khayyam: Los astros no han ganado nada con mi presencia aquí Y su gloria no aumentará cuando yo desaparezca. Y pongo a mis dos orejas por testigo de que jamás nadie ha podido decirme Por qué me han hecho venir y por qué me harán partir. This is how it appears in the original French edition, Poulet aux prunes: Les astres à ma présence ici‐bas n’ont rien gagné, Leur gloire à ma déchéance ne sera pas augmentée; Et, témoin mes deux oreilles, nul n’a jamais pu me dire Pourquoi l’On m’a fait venir et l’On me fait m’en aller. The Persian verse is here: از آمدنم نبود گردون را سود وز رفتن من جاه و جلالش نفزود وز هیچ کسی نیز دو گوشم نشنود کاین آمدن و رفتنم از بهر چه بود In English: My coming brought no profit to the sky, Nor does my going swell its glory; My two ears have never heard anyone that could say, Why I came here and why I will go away. And in Russian: Приход мой небу славы не доставил, И мой уход величья не прибавил. Мне так и не дано постичь, зачем Я в мир пришел, зачем его оставил.

More English and Russian translations here.

La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada

by Gabriel García Márquez

In early 1990s, I watched the Cuban film Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes. If it sounds like another blog post that I wrote about ten years ago, this is because it was the same mini-festival of films based on works by Gabriel García Márquez.

Back to the present: I finally finished reading this book that has stuck in our house for a few months now (that could happen in the time of pandemic). Incidentally, this is the first collection of stories by García Márquez that I read in Spanish from the beginning to the end. It contains six short stories, including Un señor muy viejo, and the title novella.

Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (1955) El mar del tiempo perdido (1961) El ahogado más hermoso del mundo (1968) Muerte constante más allá del amor (1970) El último viaje del buque fantasma (1968) Blacamán el bueno, vendedor de milagros (1968) La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (1972)

Recurring characters include Blacamán the Good, senator Onésimo Sánchez, and spider woman, while (unnamed) Eréndira and her grandmother, Catarino’s shop, and even the smiling gringo Mr. Herbert all appear in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Of all stories, I liked El último viaje del buque fantasma the least: it is just one very long sentence, and I kept losing the thread. Otherwise, it is a great book.

Márquez’ fine, understated sense of humour is omnipresent, even in the saddest stories of this collection. Take, once again, Un señor muy viejo: first, the presumed angel talks “in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice”; second, the Holy See expresses their doubts suggesting that the creature could be “just a Norwegian with wings”; third, the matter seems to be settled as we hear “the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian”. And Muerte constante más allá del amor (whose title, as I just learned, is an inverted “loan” of Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnet, Amor constante más allá de la muerte), has the best opening sentence of any story I’ve ever read, or perhaps only second to that of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Al senador Onésimo Sánchez le faltaba seis meses y once días para morirse cuando encontró a la mujer de su vida.

Muerte constante más allá del amor

Vinieron en busca de salud los enfermos más desdichados del Caribe: una pobre mujer que desde niña estaba contando los latidos de su corazón y ya no le alcanzaban los números, un jamaicano que no podía dormir porque lo atormentaba el ruido de las estrellas, un sonámbulo que se levantaba de noche a deshacer dormido las cosas que había hecho despierto, y muchos otros de menor gravedad.

Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes

Y al fondo del salón, una mujer solitaria que se abanicaba muy despacio con un cartón de propaganda.
— Y tú — le gritó el señor Herbert —, ¿cuál es tu problema?
La mujer dejó de abanicarse.
— A mí no me meta en su fiesta, míster — gritó a través del salón —. Yo no tengo problemas de ninguna clase, y soy puta porque me sale de los cojones.

El mar del tiempo perdido

— Tiene cara de llamarse Esteban.
Era verdad. A la mayoría le bastó con mirarlo otra vez para comprender que no podía tener otro nombre. Las más porfiadas, que eran las más jóvenes, se mantuvieron con la ilusión de que al ponerle la ropa, tendido entre flores y con unos zapatos de charol, pudiera llamarse Lautaro. Pero fue una ilusión vana.

El ahogado más hermoso del mundo

El músico no recibió el dinero.
— Son ciento ochenta y dos con cuarenta — dijo —. Los valses son más caros.
— ¿Y eso por qué?
— Porque son más tristes — dijo el músico.
La abuela lo obligó a que cogiera el dinero.
— Pues esta semana nos tocas dos piezas alegres por cada vals que te debo, y quedamos en paz.

La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada

The Navidad Incident: The Downfall of Matías Guili

by Natsuki Ikezawa
translated by Alfred Birnbaum

I never heard about Ikezawa before. I took this book from the library purely on the strength of its translator’s name. Could it be as good as anything by Murakami, I wondered.

I was not disappointed, although there’s no need to compare the two authors. The story is captivating and I even developed some sort of feelings towards its protagonist, President Matías Guili (undoubtedly, a criminal, but then all dictators are) and his long-time “secret partner” Angelina but, strangely, more yet towards his perpetually merry (hench)men, Ketch and Joel. The history of the fictitious Navidad Archipelago reminded me of that of equally fictitious San Lorenzo from Cat’s Cradle (“When England claimed San Lorenzo in 1706, no Dutchmen complained. When Spain reclaimed San Lorenzo in 1720, no Englishmen complained” and so on). The acute accent over the third a in “Baltasár” is never explained.

On the island of Gaspar, passengers are forbidden from drying their laundry on bus windows. During the Japanese occupation, when bus service was introduced between Baltasár City (then Shokyo, the “Showa Capital”) and the village of Diego (Dego), a rumor spread among the womenfolk that laundry hung on bus windows dried more quickly, so buses came to be used more as clothes driers than as transportation. The sight of brightly colored clothing fluttering from every window, however, conflicted with the aims of a modern conveyance, so the gravely concerned bus staff adopted a strict ban on “boarding the bus with wet clothing”. The phrasing “with wet clothing” failed, however, to specify whether the people were carrying or wearing the clothes. And in a land of sudden tropical showers, what use are buses that refuse service to someone who happened to get caught in a downpour? Thereafter, the rule was amended to read: “Passengers are forbidden from boarding the bus with wet clothing, except for what they themselves have on”. Discussions were held between the women and the transport company; the drivers maintained there was no plausible reason why laundry draped out of bus windows should dry any faster than elsewhere, and the housewives claimed from personal experience that it most certainly did.

Fireworks

by Angela Carter

On the first attempt, its strange, viscous language stopped me one-third-way through. A year and a half later, when the nights became longest, I unearthed this book and resumed reading. It gave me nightmares. The stories feature solitude, mirrors, incest, rape, murder and execution, in a variety of combinations — at times delicious, at times revolting. My three favourites are Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest and Master, both taking place in some Márquez-esque selva, and a delightfully gothic horror of The Loves of Lady Purple. Next time I need some verschrobene texts to keep my English students suitably bamboozled, I know where to look.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez
translated by Gregory Rabassa

Many years later, he will remember that rainy day when a ten-year old boy, who was spending his summer holidays in solitary daydreaming, opened a book by the author whose name did not ring any bells. The boy lived in a village which was connected with the rest of the world by a railway, although trains did not stop there very often. He didn’t think that the world around him was more interesting than the book which he was holding in his hands. The first sentence went like this:

Пройдёт много лет, и полковник Аурелиано Буэндиа, стоя у стены в ожидании расстрела, вспомнит тот далекий вечер, когда отец взял его с собой посмотреть на лёд.

He read the first paragraph and could not stop until he finished the book; then he started again from the beginning. Since then, his dream was to read this book in Spanish. That will eventually happen, although much later than “many years later”. But simply many years later he read it in English and was somewhat disappointed with the translation. In the meantime, he began discovering, or rather inventing, connections between himself and the far away country he did not even know existed until that rainy summer day.

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

The heroes of these ten tales are children on the verge of adulthood. While the title story firmly belongs in the realm of magical realism, the others, such as Ava Wrestles the Alligator and Haunting Olivia, appear to be made from the material of dreams — and, just like dreams, do not resolve, satisfactorily or otherwise. Children’s Reminiscences of the Westward Migration could be either. (Do you have dreams where you are reminiscing?) And Out to Sea, perhaps the best story of the collection, is thoroughly realistic. Maybe it is a true story.

When things first started to go missing around the cabin, Sawtooth chalked it up to the onslaught of dementia. He was relieved when he realized it was just Augie. He does little experiments to test her. He’ll leave something small on the table, a pack of Sir Puffers or a withered red starfish, and go crouch in the bathroom. When he comes back, the table is always empty, the girl smiling with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Sawtooth likes it best when she takes sentimental things, objects with no resale value whatsoever. She steals his left socks, his grocery lists; she pries the little hand off the wall clock. On her last visit, the girl stole one of his family photographs right out of the frame. He thinks this means she is starting to care about him, too. Out to Sea

Strange Pilgrims

by Gabriel García Márquez

In the early 1990s, I saw the Cuban/Mexican film El verano de la señora Forbes based on a short story from this collection. I thought the film was good, but reading Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness made me understand that only some of the possibilities suggested by the short story were realised in the movie.

In hands of a great master, each of twelve stories here could be made into a full-blown novel (or a movie, for that matter). But it takes a true genius to make and leave them short.