In translation

You like the idea of going back and choosing a better path, or at least a fresh one. But, as you read Intan Paramaditha’s The Wandering and make choices within it, you feel heavy with apprehension wrought from experience. Do different decisions lead to a different you?

One of the challenges in trying to describe what goes on in this story is that so much takes place in the interstitial spaces, the breach between what happens and what can be said about it – even what can be remembered.

Japanese author Sayaka Murata erupted onto the world stage in 2016 with the release of Convenience Store Woman, a novel which sold over a 1.4 million copies. As is often the case with non-Western authors who achieve sudden global recognition, the depth and breadth of her oeuvre was downplayed in favour of a narrative of overnight success. Easier to sell the story of an unknown author who has walked out of a vacuum and just begun.

Vernon Subutex follows a theme set in earlier books by Despentes: the status quo sucks, but we’re all complicit in it one way or another, regardless of our political leanings, sometimes even in spite of them.

Pity the poor writer whose fate is to be harried with opportunities and accolades. Erpenbeck’s deadpan portrayal of herself as a passive yet accommodating figure, somewhat nonplussed by the attention, makes a substantial claim.

for Léger the archive and literature are mutually informing. The neutral intellectualism of the former and the subjective affectivity of the latter exist in a dyadic relationship. This tension is a source of the great power of Léger’s extraordinary short books. Profoundly recondite, they are also deeply moving. Léger understands the literary power of the image and of narrative; the thing and its multiple renderings through mediation. This flickering between the real and its representation, between subject and object, is central to the effect of Léger’s triptych. It is not surprising, then, that the three subjects of her triptych are all associated with the representational power of the visual image and of (self-) performance.

While more conventional writers advertise their moral delicacy in dealing with vastly disempowered characters, Melchor’s relentlessness makes that strategy look like condescension. Hewing close to her painful material – and refusing to let her narrator philosophize about it or apologize for it – Melchor reveals something distasteful in the common notion that the task of fiction is to ‘convey the humanity’ of people in extreme circumstances. Hurricane Season demands instead that we assume the humanity of its characters. Is there a better condition of entry for a novel to set its readers?

My first response to COVID-19 was not to go back home. Home for me is in the Hunan province in the south of China, next to Hubei. It had been a difficult decision to make. The virus coincided with the Chinese New Year; it was like a bomb thrown into a mine field. But I also knew that it was the time when I was most needed at home.

Most fiction treats workers as fully external creatures, carrying their physicality as a symbol of their position within the division of labour; Weiss presents them as the authentic bearers of our collective human cultural destiny. It is a question of how these workers, who pay for the very possibility of culture with the surplus created by their labour, attain it, and even come to represent it, themselves. By sheer force of will, and the necessity of an inner compulsion, these young men and women return from the shop floor, physically exhausted but spiritually on fire, to study, debate, and reflect.

There have been, in recent years, many attempts to explain when a novel makes the definitional leap from ‘fiction’ to ‘autofiction’. It has turned out to be a difficult task. Writers of autofiction write about their lives, but then so do many authors who escape the label.