I’m away this week to work on my novel. The entries this week were pre-posted (as are the ones you’ll see next week.) But rejoice! The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday, and I’m sure she’ll have lots of good stuff for you. Be well.
“I would like to recommend Landscapes of a Distant Mother by Said, who, for security reasons, publishes only under his first name,” Treat says. “Landscapes of a Distant Mother is a memoir about exile and loss. A slight 112 pages, the book is spare but also wrenching. It centers on the reunion Said has with his mother whom he has only seen once since birth (he is 43). Exiled from his native Iran for political reasons, living in Germany, Said writes of the terrible anticipation of meeting his mother, the meeting itself, and its aftermath. Beautifully written, honest and at times, painful, Landscapes is written like a letter, addressed to his mother, “Alone with a note in my pocket, on which there is written the name of a stranger who is to lead me to you–to a mother I have never known.” It can be read as a love letter, a love that is full of misgivings.”
Jessica Treat is the author of two books of stories: A Robber in the House and Not a Chance.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
Big thanks to Randa Jarrar for taking over the site on Friday. I’m away this week to work on my novel, so any entries you’ll see pop up for the next few days were all pre-posted for your enjoyment. Be back soon.
I’m away this week to work on my novel. The entries this week were pre-posted (as are the ones you’ll see next week.) But rejoice! The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday, and I’m sure she’ll have lots of good stuff for you. Be well.
If you read the literary news even casually, you’ve no doubt heard the oft-repeated details surrounding the publication of Sightseeing, Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s debut collection: Thai-American writer, 25 years old, six-figure book deal. Unfailingly repeated in every review, they tend to work as signifiers in themselves, overshadowing what matters most: the work.
The stories in Sightseeing, all told in first-person, all set in Thailand, are narrated (mostly) by young men who journey from innocence to realization in convincingly subtle ways. “At the Cafe Lovely” tells the tale of a young boy whose older brother, Anek, takes him to see a prostitute at the tender age of 11. The boy’s admiration, his desire to emulate, lead him to follow in Anek’s footsteps, even when they lead to the abandonment of their mother. In the very touching “Draft Day,” a young man and his best friend, each from disparate social classes, spend the day together, waiting to hear the results of a rigged lottery that will decide whether they are to serve in the army or can go free. The narrator’s guilt over the bribe his parents paid to get him off, and his shame at knowing that his best friend won’t get lucky is nearly palpable.
I found it refreshing that Lapcharoensap navigates what might seem to others as exotic, but doesn’t give in to the titillating detail; his work is vivid without being gratuitously colorful. At times, though, his stylistic choices seem completely odd. The dialogue between characters is rife with American slang, even if one allows for the fact that the text is a rendering in English. And his efforts at observing foreigners (“farangs”) are too one-note, too superficial to have the effect that they were probably intended to have. But when Lapcharoensap allows himself to take the time to invest in his characters, the efforts can result in stunningly beautiful work, like the novella “Cockfighter,” in which a young girl watches as her father, a once proud fighter with the best roosters in town, starts to lose everything to his gambling habit.
“I recommend Gayle Brandeis’s The Book of Dead Birds. The novel won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize, an award in support of a literature of social responsibility, and earned praises from Toni Morrison who was one of the judges. This is an evocative and moving story narrated by Ava Sing Lo, the daughter of a Korean mother and African-American serviceman. Ava accidentally kills her mother’s pet birds before she begins to try and save endangered birds along the shores of the Salton Sea. Her story crosses cultures and merges generations. The author’s prose is pristine and I particularly appreciate the way in which she handles every character with dignity. The Book of Dead Birds is such a graceful story, as unusual as its characters.”
Sefi Atta was born in Nigeria, has lived in England and is now based in the United States. She is the author of the novel Everything Good Will Come and has completed her second novel Swallow.
If you’d like to recommend an underappreciated book for this series, please send mail to llalami at yahoo dot com.
Big thanks are due to Randa Jarrar for taking over the site on Friday. I’m away this week to work on my novel, so the entries you’ll see pop up for the next few days were all pre-posted for your enjoyment. Be back soon.
I’m away this week to work on my novel. The entries this week were pre-posted (as are the ones you’ll see next week.) But rejoice! The one and only Randa Jarrar takes over tomorrow and every Friday, and I’m sure she’ll have lots of good stuff for you. Be well.
Here’s a special treat for you while I’m away. I have an extra copy of one of my favorite books: Mohammed Choukri’s Le Pain Nu. This is a classic of Moroccan literature with a lot of history–the banning, the translation by Paul Bowles, the alleged fight between the author and the translator over the copyright, etc. But really it comes down to an amazingly honest story, one that will grab you and not let go. This is a French translation, so you’ll actually need to speak Moliere’s language to get it. I’ll give it to the first person who emails me with his/her address.
Update: The winner is Natasha T. Congrats!
Reviewed by Daniel A. Olivas
Francisco Aragon’s verse has graced the pages of several chapbooks and innumerable literary journals not to mention anthologies published by W.W. Norton, Heyday Books and Soft Skull Press. Aragon is also the founding editor and publisher of Momotombo Press which promotes emerging Latino writers and is housed at the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame where Aragon is a Visiting Fellow. His talents at translation have been utilized for a half dozen books including those by the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Aragon’s honors include an Academy of American Poets Prize and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award. With Puerta del Sol, Aragon offers us his first full-length book of poetry. And it is about time.
Each poem in this collection appears in English on the left page with its Spanish translation on the right. Aragon, who rendered the Spanish translations, offers what can only be called an apologia at the beginning of the book. As a Latino of Nicaraguan descent, he thanks his late mother for teaching him Spanish yet “as someone born and educated in the United States, English inevitably became my principal language. I spoke Spanish but was illiterate-I couldn’t read or write it-until I graduated from college.” He honed much of his Spanish while living, traveling and working in Spain for ten years. Thus, Aragon asserts that his Spanish is “hybrid, in both accent and vocabulary.” He also notes that in rendering his own words into Spanish, he felt free to make “linguistic choices” that veered from strict translation, based on “the pleasure of sound,” which “may have involved rewriting, reordering, or re-creating specific lines.”
As a native of San Francisco and long-time resident of Spain, many of Aragon’s poems derive from “place” and all that this concept brings: weather, language, history, friendships, loves, and family. In “Alaska,” the poem begins with the narrator lamenting a former lover’s painful absence and puzzling silence:
I never heard from you again.
Was it something I said, the paunch (though
a friend from Bilbao that spring didn’t
mind it at all)? . . .
Nunca supe mas de ti.
Acaso fue algo que dije, mi barriga (aunque
a un amigo de Bilbao esa primavera no
le importaba nada)? . . .
In his notes to some of the poems, Aragon tells us that Bilbao is a city in the Basque County in the north of Spain. But then the narrator brings us to Alaska where his former lover appears in a dream shoveling snow, “clearing a drive to back out a truck,” which triggers an early morning memory of “the heft of you, recalling how the rich / timbre of your voice was a well / I drank from that summer afternoon / at Kearny and California in the shade / of the bank, how we strolled down Sutter / into the Arcade.” And then back to the dream: “…you’re shifting / gears, the tires gripping, and Alaskan days / stretch getting longer, lengthening to the point / that when our limbs and lids / grow heavy with sleep, we bring / on the dark by pulling / it down- / those black / window shades; / wrapped in your arms.”
Thus, memory and place glide back and forth, from Spain to San Francisco and even to a dream-version of Alaska, offering shading and alternative feeling to the same subject. Aragon uses this place-shifting as a recurring motif. For example, in “Bridge Over Strawberry Creek,” the narrator is on the UC Berkeley campus “when I chose my place that morning / at the open window-redwoods / framed against June’s day blue….” Yet, even in choosing something as tangible as a place to sit, the narrator knows that if he closes his eyes, he would be transported to “a balcony / in Sitges those summer nights / listening to the Mediterranean breathe. . . .”
Bilingualism also becomes “place”-or rather, two places. Aragon’s deceptively simple “Mi Corazon is a Bilingual Mirror” explains:
So right for me to draw it
like this, in these times:
It gathers lint in your pocket
For him, these rhymes.
Un acierto para mi dibujarlo
asa, en este clima:
Recoge pelusa en tu bolsillo
Para el, esta rima.
Remarkably, this bilingual “mirror” rhymes in both languages. Yet the sounds are startlingly different, each version offering the ear singular experiences.
In “All Saints’ Day,” we begin in Southern California as “Laguna Beach smolders” and the “Santa Ana winds / head north now / for Malibu….” But “on the other / side of the globe” Federico Fellini’s soon-to-be-widow, Giulietta Masina, “feels a warmth / on her cheek: her husband’s gaze / awakened from sleep / speechless, saying / with his eyes, This / is all there is….” Fellini’s deathbed seeps into the image of another husband who is kidnapped but released, “his limbs and organs / intact, free / after a hundred / and seventeen days / his captors paid….” And then another shift to a husband not so lucky, a victim of a terrorist assassination in Madrid. Three husbands-one dying, one saved, one murdered-woven into a seamless fabric of fate at the hands of nature, avarice and political fanaticism.
Whether confronting terrorism on Spanish soil, memories of his late mother, or lamenting love lost, Aragon allows his images to travel from one continent to another, between English and Spanish, from hard, present tense reality to amorphous, malleable memory. Aragon’s poems are stunning little mirrors that reveal the shimmering complexity of our lives and dreams. This is an eloquent collection that deserves attention.
