Hard Fête – Anne Garréta’s In Concrete

I spent a block of last summer reading and rereading celebrated Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s delirious satire In Concrete, in the crackling English translation by Emma Ramadan. In Concrete is a novel that tells its story through puns that first bump up against each other, then melt and flow into trickles, rivulets, streams, creeks, and floods. Wild, yes. The nonstop hallucinatory allusive language sparked any number of interesting connections to other works, not all of which I could include in my review, published by the nice folks at Los Angeles Review of Books, but I did manage to discuss, or touch upon, Garréta’s first and most famous novel, Sphinx, as well as Ovid, Edgar Allen Poe, William Samuel Becket, and James Joyce, along with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Camus’ The Fall.

I hope you enjoy this review and that it inspires you to read both In Concrete and Sphinx, and any of the other works that showed up at the party.

Möbian Madness – Abe Kōbō’s Beasts Head for Home

I’m pleased as ever to share my latest book review and the fine company of the keen international literary devotees at Three Percent, the online ‘zine of Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester–that’s Rochester, New York, not Rochester, England, the latter being the city of inspiration for Charles Dickens’ final, and frustratingly unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The workaholic Dickens died of a stroke on June 9, 1870, having written only six of the novel’s planned twelve chapters. Anyhow, Beasts Head for Home, Japanese speculative fiction master Abe Kōbō’s 1957 novel about a Japanese youth named Kyūzō trying to flee Manchuria, where he’s been raised, and make it Japan–a land known to him only through his deceased parents and schoolroom lessons, is mysteriously complete and sometimes completely mysterious. I’ll leave it to curious readers to suss out the whys and wherefores of that chiasmus in the pages of the novel, smartly and elegantly translated from the Japanese by Richard F. Calichman and published by Columbia University Press. My privilege has been to read this gripping tale twice and to be able to offer a review of its powerful, dark-winged depths. The plunge, if you dare to take it, is decidedly haunting.

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/2019/11/21/beasts-head-for-home-by-abe-kobo/

 

Jorge Eduardo Benavides’ triumphant Peace of the Defeated

 

Returning to this blog for the first time in months, I’m pleased to start the spring by announcing a return to posting reviews with Three Percent, the excellent review site produced by Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester in New York State. The review is a relatively brief treatment of La paz de los vencidos (The Peace of the Defeated) a very lively, lovely, and funny diary-form novel by the award-winning Peruvian novelist Jorge Eduardo Benavides. The novel won the XII PREMIO DE NOVELA JULIO RAMÓN RIBEYRO in 2014. Please follow the link to read the review at Three Percent. And thanks to Kaija Straumanis and Chad Post for putting up the review and putting up with me. (More on that soon). La paz de los vencidos – Review by Brendan Riley at Three Percent