Category: News

The 2016 Best Translated Book Award longlist has been announced!

As I’ve said in years past, this is my favorite book prize. It has introduced me to many of my favorite books, and through them to the great publishers out there who support literature in translation.

Below, find the twenty-five books, their descriptions, and links to reviews.

Let me know what you think, whether below or over at the new GoodReads Group (here; we’d love you to come join us)!

I’ve put together some stats and thoughts at the bottom of this post.

The shortlist will be announced on April 19 (that’s soon!); the winner on May 4.

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A General Theory of Oblivion
by José Eduardo Agualusa
translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
Angola

On the eve of Angolan independence, an agoraphobic woman named Ludo bricks herself into her Luandan apartment for 30 years, living off vegetables and the pigeons she lures in with diamonds, burning her furniture and books to stay alive and writing her story on the apartment’s walls.

Almost as if we’re eavesdropping, the history of Angola unfolds through the stories of those she sees from her window.

• In a line that was surely included to bait book reviewers, one of the novel’s characters declares: “A man with a good story is practically a king.” If this is true, then Agualusa can count himself among the continent’s new royals. ~Angel Gurria-Quintana in The Financial Times
• Fragmented and densely layered, Oblivion unfolds within the possibility — and the tension — inherent between writing and identity, text and meaning, story and life. ~Dustin Illingworth in The Quarterly Conversation

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Arvida
by Samuel Archibald
translated from the French by Donald Winkler
Canada

Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald’s portrait of his hometown is filled with innocent children and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips to nowhere, bad men and mysterious women. Gothic, fantastical, and incandescent, filled with stories of everyday wonder and terror, longing and love, Arvida explores the line which separates memory from story, and heralds the arrival of an important new voice.

• Determining the exact dramaturgy of Arvida’s narrative universe can be challenging, and certain character types and situations recur like musical leitmotifs (including sexually victimized women, whose experiences are rendered vividly without crossing the line into exploitation). What’s fascinating is the sense of people haunted by a place instead of the other way around. By beginning and ending the book with references to Proust, Archibald risks over-determining his artistic motives, but he writes so eloquently about the double-edged nature of memory — of remembering as a gift and a curse — that he earns his allusions. ~Adam Nayman in Quill and Quire
• To say that Arvida skewers our expectations of a “linked” short story collection would, of course, be a gross understatement. So pungent are the stylistic shifts and contrasts in this book, that the less-generous reader may feel a bit baffled by them. But the reason this book has been such a success – 25,000 copies and counting sold in its original French; its nod from the Giller for the English translation – is because it breaks new ground in that very genre. ~Mark Sampson in Numero Cinq Magazine

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Nowhere to Be Found
by Bae Suah
translated from the Korean by Sora Kim-Russell
South Korea

A nameless narrator passes through her life, searching for meaning and connection in experiences she barely feels. For her, time and identity blur, and all action is reaction. She can’t quite understand what motivates others to take life seriously enough to focus on anything—for her existence is a loosely woven tapestry of fleeting concepts. From losing her virginity to mindless jobs and a splintered, unsupportive family, the lessons learned have less to do with the reality we all share and more to do with the truth of the imagination, which is where the narrator focuses to discover herself.

• Bae relates that distant “me alone” to us with an almost preternatural poetic vision and an architect’s structural precision. The only fully inhabited space in Nowhere to Be Found is what Bae described in the same interview as the “landscape of my youth,” which she then clarified: “anxiety.” Another symptom of the narrator’s fernweh is her inability to hold down a conversation with friends, family, acquaintances or lovers, and Bae and Kim-Russell’s dialogue is convincingly stilted. Bae’s protagonist becomes truly unsettling: moving furtively through the city, trusting no one, shunning companionship, each relating only to her own thoughts, without any explanations for her actions — he is a law unto herself; an island, never anywhere to be found because there is no one to witness her. She is, in effect, a ghost, and appropriately enough this word appears for the first time in the last scene, “the center of [her] bleak hour” where she spots, in the flesh, an allegedly murderous couple she had read about (much earlier in the novel) on an old wanted sign: “It is so dark out that I see them brushing past the car like ghosts, but he [her companion] does not.” By the end of Nowhere, the narrator has fully assumed her condition as a ghostly, impervious being: “And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time,” she concludes. ~Sophie Hughes in Music & Literature
• Nowhere to Be Found is a compact, personal account of anomie and withdrawal in a time of rapid social and economic change (something that bubbles constantly in the novel-background). The narrative conveys the sense of drift — in part in its very precision. With few wasted words or scenes — even as many of the events she describes and her observations can seem, superficially, to be almost trivial — Nowhere to Be Found is an easily digested short book that nevertheless feels much very substantial — a very full story. ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review

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The Meursault Investigation
by Kamel Daoud
translated from the French by John Cullen
Algeria

He was the brother of “the Arab” killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus’s classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling’s memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: he gives his brother a story and a name — Musa — and describes the events that led to Musa’s casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach.

In a bar in Oran, night after night, he ruminates on his solitude, on his broken heart, on his anger with men desperate for a god, and on his disarray when faced with a country that has so disappointed him. A stranger among his own people, he wants to be granted, finally, the right to die.

The Stranger is of course central to Daoud’s story, in which he both endorses and criticizes one of the most famous novels in the world. A worthy complement to its great predecessor, The Meursault Investigation is not only a profound meditation on Arab identity and the disastrous effects of colonialism in Algeria, but also a stunning work of literature in its own right, told in a unique and affecting voice.

• The novel is the poignant account of a man whose life has been warped, from the beginning, by his mother’s legacy of rage and grief. This is a familiar theme of postcolonial literature and one that Daoud will shape into a critique of revolutionary and postrevolutionary Algeria, a country that, in Harun’s view, is not much better off than in its previous incarnation. ~Claire Messud in The New York Review of Books
• When it was published in Algeria in 2013, “The Meursault Investigation” was rightly met with wide critical acclaim, but it was only after its phenomenal success in France last year (Daoud was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt) that a cleric named Abdelfatah Hamadache called the author an “apostate” and demanded that he be tried for blasphemy. Daoud remains steadfast. He continues to live and work in Oran, where he writes for the newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran. By doing so, he honors the words of another Algerian writer, Tahar Djaout, murdered by the Armed Islamic Group during Algeria’s civil war of the 1990s: “If you speak, you die. If you do not speak, you die. So, speak and die.” ~Laila Lalami in The New York Times Book Review

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French Perfume
by Amir Tag Elsir
translated from the Arabic by William M. Hutchins
Sudan

A deliriously dark comedy exploring the absurd tragedy of the human condition when left to the devices of our tech-obsessed society. “I had many things in mind that I wanted to achieve before the Frenchwoman Katia arrived . . .” So begins the story of Amir Tag Elsir’s French Perfume as told by Ali Jarjar the town gossip and schemer of a poor community rich with sleazy bachelors, desperate women, soothsayers and secret police. Tasked to introduce his impoverished town to a chic foreign visitor, Ali’s attempts to make the best first impression are left in limbo as the newcomer perpetually postpones her trip. Quickly escalating to a terrifying conclusion, Spike Jonze’s Her crashes into Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as our charming narrator allows his attraction for a stranger s online existence to become a frightening obsession in the real world.

• I cannot find a review of this book. If you know of one, please direct me to it so I can post an excerpt here.

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The Story of the Lost Child
by Elena Ferrante
translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Italy

Here is the dazzling saga of two women, the brilliant, bookish Elena and the fiery uncontainable Lila. In this book, both are adults; life’s great discoveries have been made, its vagaries and losses have been suffered. Through it all, the women’s friendship, examined in its every detail over the course of four books, remains the gravitational center of their lives. Both women once fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up — a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. But now, she has returned to Naples to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood. Yet somehow this proximity to a world she has always rejected only brings her role as unacknowledged leader of that world into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable!

Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, this story of a lifelong friendship is told with unmatched honesty. Lila and Elena clash, drift apart, reconcile, and clash again, in the process revealing new facets of their friendship.

• The notion of tracing the stories of two women over the long arc of their lives is hardly new — Arnold Bennett and Richard Yates both drew powerful portraits of two very different sisters in their novels “The Old Wives’ Tale” (1908) and “The Easter Parade” (1976) — but Ms. Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is utterly distinctive, immersing us not just in a time and place, but deep within the psychological consciousness of its narrator, Elena (who, not coincidentally, shares the first part of her creator’s pen name). ~Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times
• Ferrante’s writing seems to say something that hasn’t been said before – it isn’t easy to specify what this is – in a way so compelling its readers forget where they are, abandon friends and disdain sleep. It would be enough to have books in which we recognise the truth of women’s lives in all its darkness, but the Neapolitan quartet also has an almost deranging narrative pleasure, delivered in a style that’s more of an admission that the author cares too much about the truth to bother with style. ~Joanna Biggs in The London Review of Books

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Sphinx
by Anne Garréta
translated from the French by Emma Ramadan
France

Sphinx is the remarkable debut novel, originally published in 1986, by the incredibly talented and inventive French author Anne Garréta, one of the few female members of Oulipo, the influential and exclusive French experimental literary group whose mission is to create literature based on mathematical and linguistic restraints, and whose ranks include Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, among others.

A beautiful and complex love story between two characters, the narrator, “I,” and their lover, A***, written without using any gender markers to refer to the main characters, Sphinx is a remarkable linguistic feat and paragon of experimental literature that has never been accomplished before or since in the strictly-gendered French language.

• The porous membranes of Sphinx let it be a novel of openness, as if a living being, letting you in and out, affected and changed each time you begin or cease reading. Those membranes are all over, walls put up so they can be phased through. ~P.T. Smith in The Mookse and the Gripes
• At times a frustrating read, Sphinx unexpectedly prompts feelings of liberation, too. While je’s description of the first time they have sex—“Crotches crossed and sexes mixed, I no longer knew how to distinguish anything”—isn’t lush with details, it also doesn’t rely on gender tropes to move the action forward. It’s easier to focus on emotions as well, without associating them with female or male points of view. ~Jane Yong Kim in Words without Borders

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The Physics of Sorrow
by Georgi Gospodinov
translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Bulgaria

Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organizing image, the narrator of Gospodinov’s long-awaited novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mindset and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Incredibly moving—such as with the story of his grandfather accidentally being left behind at a mill—and extraordinarily funny—see the section on the awfulness of the question “how are you?”—Physics is a book that you can inhabit, tracing connections, following the narrator down various “side passages,” getting pleasantly lost in the various stories and empathizing with the sorrowful, misunderstood Minotaur at the center of it all.

• Despite this playfulness and deliberate “obvious discrepancies,” the book is surprisingly coherent, both in narrative and theme, though that’s not to suggest it isn’t rich. After all, along with the consistent playfulness in structure, theme, and tone, loneliness exists. The book is highly personal, so how could it not? Children are placed in basements or abandoned. There’s the confusion of life. ~Trevor Berrett in The Mookse and the Gripes
• Readers who tire of the endless parade of triteness of contemporary life and contemporary creative work will no doubt find solace in Gospodinov’s work, and that is a commendable feat on the author’s part. Gospodinov tells us the truth, and that is a rare and wonderful thing indeed. ~Jordan Anderson in The Quarterly Conversation

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Signs Preceding the End of the World
by Yuri Herrera
translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman
Mexico

Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of the most arresting novels to be published in Spanish in the last ten years. Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there’s no going back.

Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the USA carrying a pair of secret messages – one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld.

• Signs is a novel of language, meant to be translated because it is so aware of the journeys language takes, from one to another, and within their boundaries. ~P.T. Smith in Bookslut
• Packed into a tidy hundred and seven pages, some will view Signs Preceding the End of the World as a forthright comment on the imagination of national boundaries, the shared fate of all to be experienced at the end of the world, or the eternal separation between “us” and “them.” But all will be sure to regard this novel as an enduring document of world literature. ~Ethan Perets in Asymptote

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The Sleep of the Righteous
by Wolfgang Hilbig
translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole
Germany 

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Moods
by Yoel Hoffmann
translated from the Hebrew by Peter Cole
Israel 

Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann’s Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul’s hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee — with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by “that great big pill of Prozac.” Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction — a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to “a praying mantis inclined to melancholy.”

• Despite what seem like so many tangents, and the short chapters with their often stray bits and pieces, Moods is far from a halting narrative and it easily pulls readers in. The structure appears loose, almost preciously delicate, in contrast to the concrete blocks of so much essay-argument, but the ultimate impression is one of considerable resonant substance. ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review
• Reading Moods is not unlike the experience of reading the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, as it compels an immediate reassessment upon conclusion, and rewards an immediate rereading. The work that particularly comes to mind is “Borges and I,” which contains a sentence that could have been written by Hoffmann, “So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away — and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man,” and it shares the contemplative, almost despairing mood over creation that seems to recur most frequently in Moods, hits the same minor key of a book that Hoffmann describes as “mostly blues.” And if the reader passes through the book’s short passages a second time, noting the finer patterning that contributed to the book’s ultimate success, and is left recalling this passage, “We realize that these words don’t amount to what’s usually called belles letters. If there were a bank where one could exchange literary currency for the currency of life we’d go there and ask for the latter, even if it cost us greatly,” which is unambiguous about the relative importance of writing novels, even good novels, in the face of death, they need only need to read the first line and remember that the beginning is everything: Hoffmann has undoubtedly begun again.~Sho Spaeth in Full Stop

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Beauty Is a Wound
by Eka Kurniawan
translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker
Indonesia

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan’s gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation’s troubled past:the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million “Communists,” followed by three decades of Suharto’s despotic rule.

Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years . . . . Drawing on local sources — folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope — and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan’s distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.

• Disaster upon disaster has been visited upon Dewi Ayu’s daughters and grandchildren. She realizes that her family has been targeted by an evil spirit, the ghost of a long-dead fisherman exacting revenge for an injustice committed by her grandfather, the Dutch plantation owner. You can read that as a metaphor for how Dutch colonial rule caused generations of tragedy in Indonesia, or you can read it as a tale of the supernatural. It works either way. ~Sarah Lyall in The New York Times
• Beauty is a Wound is a sweeping saga, focused on one family in a provincial Indonesian city, but reaching far beyond, as the complicated family-tree, like Indonesia’s own complicated history, lead repeatedly to terrible tragedy. Yet for all that, and its length, Kurniawan’s novel never bogs down, flitting across the decades, Indonesian history passing through it yet never weighing it down too much. There’s also considerable humor to it — even if it is often sharp, and sly — making for a welcome lightness (though it never becomes a complete relief). ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review

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The Complete Stories
by Clarice Lispector
translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson
Brazil

The recent publication by New Directions of five Lispector novels revealed to legions of new readers her darkness and dazzle. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: from teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Clarice’s stories take us through their lives — and ours.

From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.

• On the very first page of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s “The Complete Stories,” she signals that hers was never an ordinary sensibility, but one capable of perceiving anxiety and menace in even the most routine phenomena. ~Larry Rohter in The New York Times
• While some stories appear whimsical and read like exercises, and others muse at length and almost absent-mindedly, almost abstractly, on habit and motive, or something that happened, others have an exquisite sharpness, the fruit of a most original and daring mind. In the best stories, something deeply strange is fully visualized by Lispector, as though it had come in a waking dream and it needed to be given urgent substance. ~Colm Tóibín in The New York Review of Books

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The Story of My Teeth
by Valeria Luiselli
translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Mexico

Highway is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the “notorious infamous” like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, Teeth is an elegant, witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli’s own literary influences.

• Valeria Luiselli is as much a cartographer as a writer, interested in finding areas still unmapped. As in her first novel, “Faces in the Crowd,” she combines fictional narrative with historical and intellectual points of reference, and the result is writing without preconceptions, as airy and open as a soccer field. Prefigured by her excellent book of essays, “Sidewalks,” “The Story of My Teeth” is playful, attentive and very smart without being for a minute pretentious. ~Jim Krusoe in The New York Times Book Review
• Translated into a colloquial, idiosyncratic, and thoroughly enjoyable English by Christina MacSweeney (who also created a timeline at the end of the novel, which, according to Luiselli, “both destabilizes the obsolete dictum of the translator’s invisibility and suggests a new way of engaging with translation”), The Story of My Teeth ends up containing the truths and delusions of a fabulist, elements of the picaresque, unresolved preoccupations, wonderful asides, and a whole house of mirrors constructed with so much mirth and skill that it seems to avoid the glumly highbrow label of “postmodernism.” Instead, Luiselli’s work echoes Mann’s appraisal of Don Quixote: falling into that category of writers who, with style and ease, engage the reader on an intellectual level yet are compulsively readable, without all that self-seriousness or reckless headiness. ~Tynan Kogane in Words without Borders

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Tram 83
by Fiston Mwanza Mujila
translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Democratic Republic of the Congo 

Two friends, one a budding writer home from abroad, the other an ambitious racketeer, meet in the most notorious nightclub — Tram 83 — in a war-torn city-state in secession, surrounded by profit-seekers of all languages and nationalities. Tram 83 plunges the reader into the modern African gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic, using jazz rhythms to weave a tale of human relationships in a world that has become a global village.

• For years now, postcolonial studies have battled ethnocentrism, and writers like Mujila’s compatriot, V.Y. Mudimbe, have asserted Africa’s centrality to any thorough understanding of human history. Still, an interest in the continent’s art, literature, or cinema has an air of the exotic or offbeat. Eventually, this will have to change. With Deep Vellum’s release of this remarkable debut and such honorable initiatives as Tilted Axis Press, which will be publishing translations exclusively from outside of Europe, perhaps this will happen sooner rather than later. ~Adrian Nathan West in Words without Borders
• Structured more around refrains than it is around plot, Tram 83 is as much a musical work as it is a fictional one. The most frequent refrain is “Do you have the time?,” the come-on repeated by the baby-chicks, single-mamas, and other carefully delineated species of hookerdom who pass their days and nights at Tram 83. ~Geoff Wisner in The Quarterly Conversation

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The Body Where I Was Born
by Guadaulpe Nettel
translated from the Spanish by J.T. Lichtenstein
Mexico

From a psychoanalyst’s couch, the narrator looks back on her bizarre childhood — in which she was born with an abnormality in her eye into a family intent on fixing it. In a world without the time and space for innocence, the narrator intimately recalls her younger self — a fierce and discerning girl open to life’s pleasures and keen to its ruthless cycle of tragedy.

With raw language and a brilliant sense of humor, both delicate and unafraid, Nettel strings together hard-won, unwieldy memories — taking us from Mexico City to Aix-en-Provence, France, then back home again — to create a portrait of the artist as a young girl. In these pages, Nettel’s art of storytelling transforms experience into inspiration and a new startling perception of reality.

• One of the fascinating qualities of this book is the unsparing testimony, somewhere between religious confession and secular disclosure, that gives a sharp sense of a woman’s harrowing girlhood. Nettel’s candid, unaffected prose hews closely to the strictures of the therapy session. In this, she runs the risk of turning her story into a “case.” We’re listening to a voice tell of the speaker’s childhood, often with metaphor in place of reflection. ~Amy Rowland in The New York Times
• The present-tense version of Nettel’s narrator is never developed; “The Body” is told as a series of disconnected stories from the narrator’s past. Is this deliberate obfuscation of the present central to the narrator’s idea of how she defines her adult self? If so, a piece is missing that would orient the reader. Nettel hints that she wants to blur what is real. “Perhaps when I finally finish [telling my story],” the narrator says, “for my parents and brother this book will be nothing but a string of lies. I take comfort in thinking that objectivity is always subjective.” ~Heather Scott Partington in The Los Angeles Times

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The Things We Don’t Do
by Andés Neuman
translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
Argentina 

Playful, philosophizing, and gloriously unpredictable, Andrés Neuman’s short stories consider love, lechery, history, mortality, family secrets, therapy, Borges, mysterious underwear, translators, and storytelling itself.

Here a relationship turns on a line drawn in the sand; an analyst treats a patient who believes he’s the real analyst; a discovery in a secondhand shop takes on a cruel significance; a man decides to go to work naked one day. In these small scenes and brief moments Neuman confounds our expectations with dazzling sleight of hand.

With a variety of forms and styles, Neuman opens up the possibilities for fiction, calling to mind other greats of Latin American letters, such as Cortázar, Bolaño, and Bioy Casares. Intellectually stimulating and told with a voice that is wry, questioning, sometimes mordantly funny, yet always generously humane, The Things We Don’t Do confirms Neuman’s place as one of the most dynamic authors writing today.

• After reading his coda to this collection, I realized that Neuman is the rare storyteller who not only understands but also feels how to go about his job. He takes it seriously because it’s part of what keeps his own heart beating. I went back and admired his work even more. ~Trevor Berrett in The Mookse and the Gripes
• Neuman’s forte is observational philosophy. On occasion, this means too much technical analysis of the emotions while his storylines are suggestive and implicit. The autobiographical pieces which allude to his East European Jewish-Argentine roots come nearest to a satisfying narrative. The sketches of totalitarian politics may be the most accessible but the more abstract jottings compliment them well. ~Joseph Crilly in The Irish Times

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I Refuse
by Per Petterson
translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett
Norway

Per Petterson’s hotly anticipated new novel, I Refuse, is the work of an internationally acclaimed novelist at the height of his powers. In Norway the book has been a huge bestseller, and rights have already been sold into sixteen countries. In his signature spare style, Petterson weaves a tale of two men whose accidental meeting one morning recalls their boyhood thirty-five years ago. Back then, Tommy was separated from his sisters after he stood up to their abusive father. Jim was by Tommy’s side through it all. But one winter night, a chance event on a frozen lake forever changed the balance of their friendship. Now Jim fishes alone on a bridge as Tommy drives by in a new Mercedes, and it’s clear their fortunes have reversed. Over the course of the day, the life of each man will be irrevocably altered. I Refuse is a powerful, unforgettable novel, and its publication is an event to be celebrated.

• Yet Petterson also transforms the unremarkable into magic. ~Harriet Lane in The New York Times Book Review
• The Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano claims to have written a version of the same novel throughout his career; in a sense so has Petterson, but his anguished precision is such that no one should complain. ~Catherine Taylor in The Telegraph

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War, So Much War
by Mercè Rodoreda
translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño
Spain 

Despite its title, there is little of war and much of the fantastic in this coming-of-age story, which was the last novel Mercè Rodoreda published during her lifetime.

We first meet its young protagonist, Adrià Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.

As in Rodoreda’s Death in Spring, nature and death play an fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagoric quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.

• What we take away mostly, then, from this overwhelmingly honest work of fiction is less the power of this author’s imagination and capacity for human excavation — though that of course is there, and an artistic truth if there ever was one; it’s more the sense that there are some truths too painfully real to be relayed as such, and thus need a scrim of fiction to be bearable at all. Fashioning a dream-self, tree-self, or any non-self provides a necessary counterpart to what would otherwise be a state of constant incarceration: where “my prison is not these walls, but my own flesh and bones.” ~Jennifer Kurdyla in Music & Literature
• The war described in this book is mostly internal, and the large conflicts are more conceptual—young and old, life and death, present and past. Rodoreda’s dreamy, poetic prose is served well by Relaño and Tennent’s remarkable translation. A significant entry among the works in the Catalan language. ~Publishers Weekly

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One Out of Two
by Daniel Sada
translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver
Mexico

The most distinctive thing about the Gamal sisters is that they are, essentially, indistinguishable (except for a modest mole). The twin spinsters spend their time trying to mask any perceptible differences they have while working hard at their thriving tailoring business in a small town in rural northern Mexico. When? Thirty years ago? Fifty years ago? Who can say — the world seems not to intrude on Ocampo very much.

Gloria and Constitution take an almost perverse delight in confusing people about which one is which. But then a suitor enters the picture, and one of the sisters decides that she doesn’t want to live a life without romance and all the good things that come with it. The ensuing competition between the sisters brings their relationship to the breaking point until they come up with an ingenious solution that carries this buoyant farce to its tender and even liberating conclusion.

Suffused with the tension between our desire for union and our desire for independence, Daniel Sada’s One Out of Two is a giddy and comic fable by one of the giants of contemporary Latin American literature.

•  This brief book lacks the emotional heft of some of Sada’s longer novels, but for readers new to his work, “One Out of Two” offers a bewitching introduction to one of Mexico’s most inventive prose stylists of the last 50 years. ~Idra Novey in The New York Times Book Review
• Despite the hazards of translation, this ticklish, deceptively slim treat of a novel is suffused with the timelessness of a fable. ~Marie Mutsuki Mockett in The Los Angeles Book Review

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Berlin
by Aleš Šteger
translated from the Sloven by Brian Henry, Forrest Gander, and Aljaz Kovac
Slovenia 

Berlin is a lyrical account of the city as well as a book of discoveries, allusions, and traces, an homage to great literary figures who have lived in Berlin. 31 prose miniatures are combined with 21 black-and-white photos taken by Šteger in the city. Instead of describing, Šteger works to create a web of Benjaminian passages and allusions, a flaneurian book full of small details that takes the reader on a smooth yet unpredictable journey through the city, which turns out to be a city of texts.

•  Berlin is a book of quick prose pieces by a Slovenian poet about his time in Berlin. Most of the miniature essays are accompanied by photos, some of which make up the most stunning parts of the book. There are allusions to other great writers who walked the Berlin streets, as well as a humorous exchange with a fellow poet, and tiny details (food, bakeries, the weather) that add up to something indeed, though I will admit that I am not exactly sure what. This is evidence of my response as a reader, not Šteger’s failure as a writer, though it makes an objective review difficult. ~Vincent Francone in Three Percent

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The Big Green Tent
by Ludmilla Ulitskaya
translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon
Russia

With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys — an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets — struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the prospects for individual integrity in a society defined by the KGB. Each of the central characters seeks to transcend an oppressive regime through art, a love of Russian literature, and activism. And each of them ends up face-to-face with a secret police that is highly skilled at fomenting paranoia, division, and self-betrayal. A man and his wife each become collaborators, without the other knowing; an artist is chased into the woods, where he remains in hiding for four years; a researcher is forced to deem a patient insane, damning him to torture in a psychiatric ward. Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel belongs to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: it is a work consumed with politics, love, and belief — and a revelation of life in dark times.

• Ludmila Ulitskaya’s latest novel, “The Big Green Tent,” is as grand, solid and impressively all-encompassing as its title implies. ~Lara Vapnyar in The New York Times Book Review
• A book can be an inspiration or a murder weapon. Ulitskaya is fascinated by these transformations, but even more so by the peculiar trajectories that create fate — the travels of a person, a picture, a book. If there is a strange journey to be traced, she cannot resist the retelling. ~Masha Gessen in The New Yorker

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Murder Most Serene
by Gabrielle Wittkop
translated from the French by Louise Rogers Lalaurie
France

In the last days of the Venetian Republic, the successive wives of Count Alvise Lanzi suffer mysterious, agonizing deaths. Murder Most Serene offers a cruel portrait of a beautiful but corrupt city-state and its equally extravagant and corrupt inhabitants. Redolent of darkness, death, poison and transgression, it is also an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek Venetian romp. Rich in historical detail and bursting with bejeweled putrescence, Gabrielle Wittkop’s chilling memento mori eschews the murder mystery in which it is garbed for a scintillating depiction of physical, moral, societal and institutional corruption, in which the author plays the role of puppeteer–“present, masked as convention dictates, while in a Venice on the brink of downfall, women gorged with venom burst like wineskins.”

• This is dark, rich, deeply disturbing writing, conscious of its artifice and expertly manipulating that. ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review

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The Four Books
by Yan Lianke
translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas
China

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Mirages of the Mind
by Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi
translated from the Urdu by Matt Reek and Aftab Ahmad
India

Basharat and his family are Indian Muslims who have relocated to Pakistan, but who remain deeply steeped in the nostalgia of pre-Partition life in India. Through Mirages of the Mind’s absurd anecdotes and unforgettable biographical sketches — which hide the deeper unease and sorrow of the family’s journey from Kanpur to Karachi — Basharet emerges as a wise fool, and the host of this unique sketch comedy. From humorous scenes in colonial north India, to the heartbreak and homesickness of post-colonial life in Pakistan, Mirages of the Mind forms an authentic portrait of life among South Asia’s Urdu speakers, rendered beautifully into English by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad.

• Written in 1990, Yousufi’s Mirages of the Mind describes with acuity the changed ambience of India after the Partition, We, twenty-five years after the novel’s release, having witnessed the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the rising military violence in Kashmir, the 2002 genocide in Gujarat, the innumerable fake encounter cases, the victory and rise of Hindutva politics, and the very recent execution of Yakub Memon (to name a few incidents) know that Yousufi’s understanding of the Indian situation was nothing but prescient. ~Saudamini Deo in Words without Borders
• Mirages of the Mind is nothing like any sort of traditional novel, yet there’s no question that it is a larger, cohesive whole — just that instead of slowly building up a larger picture-portrait, Yousufi leaps all across his canvas, pointing here and then there and then adding a bit more about this or that corner. It makes for a work that can be exhaustingly anecdotal — but readers open to the experience can have a lot of fun with this. This is a very funny work, but there’s also more to it than just the humor. ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Reivew

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The 2016 judging panel:

• Amanda Bullock
• Heather Cleary
• Kevin Elliott
• Kate Garber
• Jason Grunebaum
• Mark Haber
• Stacey Knecht
• Amanda Nelson
• P.T. Smith

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Let’s have some fun with statistics, even though the books themselves are far more important:

• This list features books from an astounding twenty-one countries. Only two countries feature more than once: France has two books on the list, and Mexico excelled with four.
• The books represent sixteen languages, with a few taking a larger portion: Portuguese has two on the list, but both Spanish and French have five apiece.
• Though still outnumbered, female authors did better on this year’s longlist than in years past. Nine of the authors above are female.
• As for U.S. publishers, there are eighteen represented. Those with multiple books are Deep Vellum (2), Graywolf Press (2) New Directions (4), and Open Letter (3).
• There is overlap with the recently unveiled longlist Man Booker International Prize: seven of the thirteen titles on that longlist were eligible for this year’s Best Translated Book Award, and four of those are on both lists: A General Theory of Oblivion, The Story of the Lost Child, Tram 83, and The Four Books (though Eka Kurniawan has a book on each list).
• I myself have read only four of the twenty-five titles: Arvida (which I read because it was shortlisted for last years Giller Prize), The Physics of Sorrow, The Things We Don’t Do, and Murder Most Serene. All were strong books in their ways, though I only pegged The Physics of Sorrow and Murder Most Serene (which I just finished) as personal longlistees. I’m personally happy to see The Things We Don’t Do on here. On this site we also have a review of Sphinx, from none other than judge P.T. Smith — we should have seen that coming . . . of course, we did.
• What didn’t make it that I expected would?
  • Any books by Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano. He had three eligible books: After the Circus, Paris Nocturne, and So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood. Did they work against each other, splitting Modiano’s votes?
  • Speaking of Nobel laureates who failed to make the cut, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Discreet Hero and Orhan Pamuk’s A Strangeness in My Mind (which did make the Man Booker International list) were left off.
  • While not Nobel laureates, Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance and Haruki Murakami’s Wind/Pinball are also not going to win the BTBA this year.
• What didn’t make it that I hoped would?
  • Any of the three excellent books by Enrique Vila-Matas, though my preferred title was Because She Never Asked. Perhaps as I speculated above with Modiano, they counted against each other, splitting Vila-Matas’s votes.
  • Either of the two César Aira books that were eligible, and I’m very surprised The Musical Brain didn’t. Here we are waiting for a collection of Aira’s stories for years, and when we get it it’s as brilliant as we’d hoped! Oh well . . . we can still go out and enjoy it even if it isn’t on the list.
• What’s going to be on the shortlist? I don’t know, but we’ll be speculating about just this thing while we discuss the books over at the new GoodReads Group (here). Please come join in!

In 2012 I created a forum called The Mookse and the Gripes Forum. It didn’t have much of an identity at the time, but just a week or two after I started it The Man Booker Prize website took down what had been a very active forum for discussing that prize. I loved to go there — went there for years before starting this site — and so I made the new Mookse and Gripes forum a kind of new home for those discussions. It has featured discussions on several book prizes since.

But such forums are not the kind of snazzy destinations they used to be, though spammers still come by droves. Because of those two very things, the forum has felt a bit like a walled community, and though I have loved the members’ conversations there I’ve been worried that we’re missing out on engaging with other interested folks.

I’ve decided to move that forum over to GoodReads, where we can not only continue to have the same types of discussions, in the same general type of open format, but we have a greater ability to reach out and start new conversations. I’d like to invite any interested to check out the new page and join in!

Right now, I’ve put up a discussion folder with individual threads for all of the books on The Man Booker International Prize. Soon I will be putting up another for The Best Translated Book Award. And it won’t be long before July comes around again and we can get to discussing the Man Booker Prize longlist.

Beyond discussions of book prizes, which is what the original forum became, I’m happy to see what else is of interest. I hope to see you there!

Today The Criterion Collection announced their June line-up, which includes six new releases! Not a one I do not care for! Yet again, continuing their unsettling trend, for the fifth time in six months, there are zero upgrades.

The blurbs are from The Criterion Collection’s website (so are the links) — go there to see the details on the supplements.

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June 7, 2016

Le amiche (1955)
d. Michelangelo Antonioni

From The Criterion Collection:

This major early achievement by Michelangelo Antonioni bears the first signs of the cinema-changing style for which he would soon be world-famous. Le amiche (The Girlfriends) is a brilliantly observed, fragmentary depiction of modern bourgeois life, conveyed from the perspective of five Turinese women. As four of the friends try to make sense of the suicide attempt of the fifth, they find themselves examining their own troubled romantic lives. With suggestions of the theme of modern alienation and the fastidious visual abstraction that would define his later masterpieces such as L’avventura, L’eclisse, and Red Desert, Antonioni’s film is a devastating take on doomed love and fraught friendship.

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June 14, 2016

La chienne (1931)
d. Jean Renoir

From The Criterion Collection:

Jean Renoir’s ruthless love triangle tale, his second sound film, is a true precursor to his brilliantly bitter The Rules of the Game, displaying all of the filmmaker’s visual genius and fully imbued with his profound sense of humanity. A hangdog Michel Simon cuts a tragic figure as an unhappily married cashier and amateur painter who becomes so smitten with a prostitute that he refuses to see the obvious: that she and her pimp boyfriend are taking advantage of him. Renoir’s elegant compositions and camera movements carry this twisting and turning narrative—a stinging commentary on class and sexual divides—to an unforgettably ironic conclusion.

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June 14, 2016

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941)
d. Alexander Hall

From The Criterion Collection:

A sophisticated supernatural Hollywood comedy whose influence continues to be felt, Here Comes Mr. Jordan stars the eminently versatile Robert Montgomery as a working-class boxer and amateur aviator whose plane crashes in a freak accident. He finds himself in heaven but is told, by a wry angel named Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains), that his death was a clerical error, and that he can return to earth by entering the body of a corrupt (and about-to-be-murdered) banker—whose soul could use a transplant. Having inspired a sequel with Rita Hayworth and two remakes (the first starring Warren Beatty and the second Chris Rock), Alexander Hall’s effervescent Here Comes Mr. Jordan is comic perfection.

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June 21, 2016

Fantastic Planet (1973)
d. René Laloux

From The Criterion Collection:

Nothing else has ever looked or felt like director René Laloux’s animated marvel Fantastic Planet, a politically minded and visually inventive work of science fiction. The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans (Oms) are the playthings of giant blue natives (Draags). After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.

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June 28, 2016

Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
d. Olivier Assayas

From The Criterion Collection:

This multilayered, immensely entertaining drama from the great contemporary French director Olivier Assayas is a singular look at the intersection of high art and popular culture. The always extraordinary Juliette Binoche is stirring as Maria, a stage and screen icon who is being courted to star in a new production of the play that made her famous—only this time she must assume the role of the older woman. Kristen Stewart matches her punch for punch as her beleaguered assistant, called upon to provide support both professional and emotional for her mercurial boss. And Chloë Grace Moretz is Maria’s arrogant new castmate, a starlet waiting in the wings. An amorphous, soul-searching tale, filled with ethereal images of its Swiss Alps setting, Clouds of Sils Maria brilliantly dramatizes one woman’s reckoning with herself and
the world.

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June 28, 2016

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
d. Stanley Kubrick

From The Criterion Collection:

Stanley Kubrick’s painfully funny take on Cold War anxiety is without a doubt one of the fiercest satires of human folly ever to come out of Hollywood. The matchless shape-shifter Peter Sellers plays three wildly different roles: Air Force Captain Lionel Mandrake, timidly trying to stop a nuclear attack on the USSR ordered by an unbalanced general (Sterling Hayden); the ineffectual and perpetually dumbfounded President Merkin Muffley, who must deliver the very bad news to the Soviet premier; and the titular Strangelove himself, a wheelchair-bound presidential adviser with a Nazi past. Finding improbable hilarity in nearly every unimaginable scenario, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a genuinely subversive masterpiece that officially announced Kubrick as an unparalleled stylist and pitch-black ironist.

The 2016 Man Booker International Prize longlist has been announced!

Though it has been around for just over a decade, 2016 is the prize’s first year since its merger with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The Man Booker International Prize used to be awarded every two years for an author’s complete work. This included authors writing in English; indeed, somewhat controversially, four of the prize’s six winners write in English. That’s in the past now, though, as in this new incarnation it takes on the general characteristics of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and will be awarded annually to a single book translated into English and published in the United Kingdom (this year’s longlist is from books published between January 1, 2015 and April 30, 2016). The £50,000 prize is split equally between the author and the translator of the winning book.

Below, find the thirteen books, their descriptions, and links to reviews.

Let me know what you think!

Me? I think this is fantastic! I’ve read only one of the books (Han Kang’s The Vegetarian), and I’m genuinely excited by the tone and character this particular longlist sets up for this new iteration of The Man Booker International Prize!

The shortlist will be announced on April 14; the winner on May 16.

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A General Theory of Oblivion
by José Eduardo Agualusa
translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
Angola

A General Theory of Oblivion is a wild patchwork of a novel that tells the story of Angola through Ludo, a woman who bricks herself into her apartment on the eve of Angolan independence. For the next 30 years she lives off vegetables and pigeons, and burns her furniture to stay warm. But the outside world seeps in, through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace. With the author’s trademark playfulness, humor and warmth, A General Theory of Oblivion is a dazzling novel of human drama and the thrills, hopes and dangers of radical change.

• Agualusa won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2007, with his translator Daniel Hahn, for The Book of Chameleons. This is the pair’s fifth collaboration and Hahn is one of our most experienced translators. Such experience shows in tiny interventions to guide the English reader through the chaos of the Angolan battlefield (“Portuguese mercenaries”, for example, when the original has just “mercenaries”), and in his taking confident ownership of certain descriptive passages, ensuring the music of the original is conveyed along with the meaning (packs of stray dogs, for instance, are made up of “gangly greyhounds, asthmatic mastiffs, demented Dalmations, disappointed pointers”).
       ~Jethro Soutar in The Independent
• Easy answers are not provided, nor should they be. And to give away too much about the novel’s many revelatory concluding moments would be to spoil Agualusa’s exceptional artistry. A General Theory of Oblivion is both more and less than its title; it certainly provides a kind of blueprint of the encroaching obscurity inherent to living and dying — at times bemoaning its certainty, at times celebrating the assured darkness — but it is also a general theory of love, of life, and, finally, of literature.
       ~Dustin Illingworth in The Quarterly Conversation

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The Story of the Lost Child
by Elena Ferrante
translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
Italy

The fourth and final installment of the Neapolitan Novels series, The Story of the Lost Child is the dazzling saga of the friendship between two women: brilliant, bookish Elena and fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up: a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Having moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books, Elena returns to be with the man she has always loved. Lila, on the other hand, never succeeded in freeing herself from Naples. Her entrepreneurial success draws her into closer proximity to the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect her neighborhood; she becomes the unacknowledged leader of the world she has always rejected. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, this story of a lifelong friendship is told with unmatched honesty.

• Indeed, Ms. Ferrante’s writing — lucid and direct, but with a cyclonic undertow — is very much a mirror of both her heroines. Elena has a decidedly linear approach to life, and, as a narrator, she often takes a matter-of-fact tone, but that appearance of control belies the roiling, chaotic, Lila-like emotions beneath. This constant pull between detachment and turmoil (or, to put it in terms of the classics that the author loves, between Apollonian rationality and Dionysian ferocity) creates a kind of alternating electrical current that lends these novels a compelling narrative tension.
       ~Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times
• Elena’s books attempt to decode her friend, to plot the dividing line between them. But she is continually frustrated by the inherent expectations of unity and order that such a task involves: “I’m wrong, I said to myself in confusion, to write as I’ve done until now, recording everything I know. I should write the way she speaks, leave abysses, construct bridges and not finish them, force the reader to establish the flow.”
        ~Alex Clark in The Guardian

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The Vegetarian
by Han Kang
translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
South Korea

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, commits a shocking act of subversion. As her rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, Yeong-hye spirals further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming — impossibly, ecstatically — a tree. Fraught, disturbing, and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire, and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.

• The failure to comprehend the very people with whom we should be closest is an underlying theme of the novel. Kang punctuates our erroneous faith in the ability to understand one another by silencing Yeong-hye and instead allowing her story to be told by her husband, her sister, and her brother-in-law. Their inability to “know” Yeong-hye creates frustration, disillusionment, and isolation. Only In-hye, who, in the midst of her own personal crisis, rejects the temptations of the primal, ultimately finds some meaning in Yeong-hye’s choices. Kang’s provocative novel calls into question our reliance on others for emotional sustenance when the primal side of our natures remains always unpredictable, always incomprehensible.
       ~Lori Feathers in Words Without Borders
• It is the women who are killed for daring to establish their own identity. The narrative makes it clear it is the crushing pressure of Korean etiquette which murders them. Han Kang is well served by Deborah Smith’s subtle translation in this disturbing book.
       ~Julia Pascal in the  Independent

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Mend the Living
by Maylis de Kerangal
translated from the French by Jessica Moore
(note, U.S. edition is The Heart and was translated by Sam Taylor)
France

Early one blustery day near Le Havre, three teenagers head down to the sea together to go surfing. They are old friends: Chris, Johan and Simon. But life will never be the same again. A terrible accident rips them apart, and while Chris and Johan escape with only a few broken bones, Simon ends up in a coma and on life-support. Meanwhile, in Paris, Claire Mejan is desperately waiting for a heart transplant. Suffering from myocarditis, a transplant offers her the only chance for survival. As Simon’s parents face a heart-breaking decision, Simon and Claire’s lives will be fatefully joined.

• The Heart [the book’s title in the U.S. edition] is an exceptionally good novel; Kerangal does almost everything very well, and the lapses of language or characterization are fairly few and mild. But this is a transplant novel. A medical novel, with a tragedy at its heart. It’s not so much that it isn’t for the squeamish — Kerangal does describe some of the medical procedures in detail, but here she is appropriately clinical, and it’s hardly very gory — but many readers might find the story unsettling and disturbing, given that it deals so closely with death and the organs from a loved one’s body being harvested. In real life, too, of course, such a situation would seem too much and too hard to handle so quickly — that’s part of what Kerangal wants (and manages) to convey — but that doesn’t make it easy reading.
       ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review
• De Kerangal’s structures are unflinchingly efficient. Scenes unroll like the labelled sections of a synopsis, converting the fierce inevitabilities of organ donation — its fine balance of emotion, ethics and pragmatism — into a filmically powerful narrative. The author is as implacable as circumstance. That’s what the subject requires, and it’s one measure of her ability. The other is her voice, a long, rolling swash, warm, sensuous and human, which invites you into life.
       ~M. John Harrison in The Guardian

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Man Tiger
by Eka Kurniawan
translated from the Indonesian by Labodalih Sembiring
Indonesia

A wry, affecting tale set in a small town on the Indonesian coast, Man Tiger tells the story of two interlinked and tormented families, and of Margio, a young man ordinary in all particulars except that he conceals within himself a supernatural female white tiger. The inequities and betrayals of family life coalesce around and torment this magical being. An explosive act of violence follows, and its mysterious cause is unraveled as events progress toward a heart-breaking revelation.

• When introducing a writer from a region underrepresented in the Western literary consciousness, one must fight the temptation to overstate the extent to which his work is “about” his home country; writing fiction is hard enough without forcing authors to bear the yoke of representation. Pramoedya, of course, accepted that yoke willingly. Whether Kurniawan, who is only 39 years old, will choose to do the same remains to be seen. But judging from these two novels, whatever he chooses to write will be well worth reading.
       ~Jon Fasman in The New York Times (also reviewing Kurniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound)
• Man Tiger may not seem like much of a murder mystery, given that the opening words reveal who killed whom, yet in retracing the steps that led to the crime, as “cut and dried” as it seems, and in exploring the motive behind it — revealed only at the book’s conclusion — Kurniawan keeps the reader in mystery-like suspense.
       ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review

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The Four Books
by Yan Lianke
translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas
China

In the ninety-ninth district of a sprawling labour camp, the Author, Musician, Scholar, Theologian and Technician are undergoing Re-education, to restore their revolutionary zeal and credentials. In charge of this process is the Child, who delights in draconian rules, monitoring behaviour and confiscating treasured books. The inmates — and hundreds of intellectuals just like them — must meet challenges set by the higher-ups: to grow an ever-spiraling amount of wheat, and to smelt vast quantities of steel. The stakes are high: they can win their freedom if they are awarded enough of the small red blossoms. Medium red blossoms and pentagonal stars are given out for effort, obedience, and informing on others. But when bad weather arrives, followed by the ‘three bitter years’ of The Great Famine, the intellectuals are abandoned by the regime and left on their own to survive. Divided into four narratives, echoing the texts of Confucianism and the four Gospels of the New Testament, The Four Books tells the story of one of China’s most controversial periods. It shows us the power of camaraderie, love and faith against oppression and the darkest odds.

• As in his previous work, Yan is interested in how morality collapses in extreme circumstances. The members of the 99th compete to survive, informing on each other to win the Child’s favour; collectivisation, in practice, means every man for himself. Punishments for misbehaviour range from the bizarre — one recidivist is forced to pull his trousers over his head and wander out into the night to count the stars — to the relatively prosaic: a bullet to the head. The Child, meanwhile, jostles with other cadres to win the approval of his own superiors at Orwellian regional assemblies.
       ~David Evans in The Financial Times
• Yan has written that The Four Books took him 20 years to plan and two to write. He wrote it exactly as he wanted to, without regard for the censor. It was rejected by 20 publishers, all of whom understood that publishing it would mean they would be shut down.
       ~Isabel Hilton in The Guardian

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Tram 83
by Fiston Mwanza Mujila
translated from the French by Roland Glasser
Democratic Republic of Congo

In a war-torn African city-state tourists of all languages and nationalities converge with students, ex-pats and locals. They have only one desire: to make a fortune by exploiting the mineral wealth of the country, both mineral and human. As soon as night falls, they go out to get drunk, dance, eat and abandon themselves in Tram 83, the only night-club of the city, the den of all iniquities.

Lucien, a professional writer, fleeing the exactions and the censorship, of the Back-Country, finds refuge in the city thanks to Requiem, a friend. Requiem lives mainly on theft and on swindle while Lucien only thinks of writing and living honestly. Around them gravitate gangsters and young girls, retired or runaway men, profit-seeking tourists and federal agents of a non-existent State.

Tram 83 plunges the reader into the atmosphere of a gold rush as cynical as it is comic and colorfully exotic. It’s an observation of human relationships in a world that has become a global village, an African-rhapsody novel hammered by rhythms of jazz.

• Fiston evokes the textures of the city in all its deliriousness, blowing marvelous riffs on everything from the sleaziness of foreign visitors to the differing shapes of streetwalkers’ buttocks to the way the poor patrons of Tram 83 like jazz, because it’s so classy. Virtually every scene is punctuated by the come-ons of the prostitutes — too lewd to quote here — that serve almost like a Greek chorus repeatedly saying, “Live for now, live for now, live for now.”
       ~John Powers at NPR Books
• Playful, even with all its dark edges, Tram 83 is a different kind of modern urban novel — City-State so alien and removed (it is very much a city apart) that much of this feels closer (especially in Mwanza Mujila’s presentation) to dystopic science fiction than the usual gritty realism.
       ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review

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A Cup of Rage
by Raduan Nassar
translated from the Portuguese by Stefan Tobler
Brazil

A pair of lovers — a young female journalist and an older man who owns an isolated farm in the Brazilian outback — spend the night together. The next day they proceed to destroy each other. Amid vitriolic insults, cruelty and warring egos, their sexual adventure turns into a savage power game. This intense, erotic cult novel by one of Brazil’s most infamous modernist writers explores alienation, the desire to dominate and the wish to be dominated.

• A Cup of Rage is a burning coal of a work, superbly translated by Stefan Tobler. You may consider a book this short to be scarcely worthy of the name, but it packs more power into its scant 47 pages than most books do into five or 10 times as many. Each of its seven chapters comes not only as an unbroken paragraph but as a single sentence: you have to read carefully to keep track, and once you have finished you will want to read it again. The writing is chewy — dense, tough, but well worth the effort.
       ~Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian
• While reading, and marveling at, that novel and novella — both of them set on farms in the Brazilian outback, both of them stylistically bold achievements — we are struck by two other feelings: disappointment that Nassar wrote so little, and disbelief that it took so long to render his unique voice into English.
       ~Malcom Forbes in The National (also reviewing Nassar’s Acient Tillage)

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Ladivine
by Marie NDiaye
translated from the French by Jordan Stump
France

Clarisse Rivière’s life is shaped by a refusal to admit to her husband Richard and to her daughter Ladivine that her mother is a poor black housekeeper. Instead, weighed down by guilt, she pretends to be an orphan, visiting her mother in secret and telling no-one of her real identity as Malinka, daughter of Ladivine Sylla. In time, her lies turn against her. Richard leaves Clarisse, frustrated by the unbridgeable, indecipherable gulf between them. Clarisse is devastated, but finds solace in a new man, Freddy Moliger, who is let into the secret about her mother, and is even introduced to her. But Ladivine, her daughter, who is now married herself, cannot shake a bad feeling about her mother’s new lover, convinced that he can bring only chaos and pain into her life. When she is proved right, in the most tragic circumstances, the only comfort the family can turn to requires a leap of faith beyond any they could have imagined if it is to be embraced. Centred around three generations of women, whose seemingly cursed lineage is defined by the weight of origins, the pain of alienation and the legacy of shame, Ladivine is a bewildering, beguiling story of secrets, lies, guilt and forgiveness by one of Europe’s most unique literary voices.

• NDiaye’s manner of writing has often been compared to Proust’s, with long sentences and much use of the imperfect subjunctive that many modern writers avoid. Here she has created a world of mystery, dream, and sensuality in a very controlled style.
       ~Adele King in World Literature Today
• This strangely hypnotic novel exudes anguish and loneliness.
       ~The Library Journal

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Death by Water
by Kenzaburo Oe
translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliner Boem
Japan

For the first time in his long life, Nobel laureate Kogito Choko is suffering from writer’s block. The book that he wishes to write would examine the turbulent relationship he had with his father, and the guilt he feels about being absent the night his father drowned in a storm-swollen river. But how to write about a man he never really knew? When his estranged sister unexpectedly calls, she offers Choko a remedy — she has in her possession an old and mysterious red trunk, the contents of which promise to unlock the many secrets of the man who disappeared from their lives decades before.

• So why read Oe at all? Because he’s an eloquent spokesman for a generation that can remember, vividly and viscerally, all sides of Japan’s ambiguities — a generation that’s beginning to exit the stage. “I am the last author who practices the old, very heavy or sincere way of writing,” Oe has said. The combination of this seriousness with a fearsome, graphic candor — trained on himself most of all — makes him formidable, whether he’s describing the challenges of being a parent or the sins of history.
       ~Janice P. Nimura in The New York Times
• Death by Water is almost Knausgaardian in its detailed accounting of the intimate and personal, right down to the soiled underwear. Yet like Knausgaard, Oe’s reflections on life and the creative process are often fascinating and compelling. Like Knausgaard, too, Oe’s willingness to be openly — and even harshly — self-critical helps keep all this from becoming simple, boring navel-gazing.
       ~M.A. Orthofer in The Complete Review

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White Hunger
by Aki Ollikainen
translated from the Finish by Emily Jeremiah & Fleur Jeremiah
Finland

1867: a year of devastating famine in Finland. Marja, a farmer’s wife from the north, sets off on foot through the snow with her two young children. Their goal: St Petersburg, where people say there is bread. Others are also heading south, just as desperate to survive. Ruuni, a boy she meets, seems trustworthy. But can anyone really help? This extraordinary Finnish novella questions what it takes to survive.

• Despite his remarkable facility for empathy, the author occasionally succumbs to his alter-ego-photographer’s ideal of objective depiction. As a result, several moments of acute grief are unfortunately stunted, moments when the potential for expressing psychological trauma or turmoil has not been fully seized upon. There is, however, a fine line between this being a fault and a virtue: one of the powers of the narrative is that it cauterizes sentiment as frostbite does to the exposed parts of the body. In many ways I was glad that it didn’t deviate too emotionally from the people’s own arduous physicality.
       ~Ben Paynter in The Los Angeles Review of Books
• It’s a short book that feels more substantial, because Ollikainen (who lives in the north of the country, and so presumably has some personal investment in its history) shows us the white expanses, and follows the trudging figures with pitiless fidelity, as they slowly move from one starving, hovel-ridden village to the next.
       ~Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian

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A Strangeness in My Mind
by Orhan Pamuk
translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap
Turkey

A Strangeness in My Mind is the story of boza seller Mevlut, the woman to whom he wrote three years’ worth of love letters, and their life in Istanbul. In the four decades between 1969 and 2012, Mevlut works a number of different jobs on the streets of Istanbul, from selling yoghurt and cooked rice to guarding a car park. He observes many different kinds of people thronging the streets, he watches most of the city get demolished and re-built, and he sees migrants from Anatolia making a fortune; at the same time, he witnesses all of the transformative moments, political clashes, and military coups that shape the country. He always wonders what it is that separates him from everyone else – the source of that strangeness in his mind. But he never stops selling boza during winter evenings and trying to understand who his beloved really is. What matters more in love: what we wish for, or what our fate has in store? Do our choices dictate whether we will be happy or not, or are these things determined by forces beyond our control? A Strangeness In My Mind explores these questions while portraying the tensions between urban life and family life, and the fury and helplessness of women inside their homes.

• Through [Mevlut’s] eyes, Pamuk describes the main events in Turkish history over the last half century: political coups, strife between Turks and Kurds, earthquakes, even a Turk’s-eye view of 9/11. Mevlut remains on the edge of all this action; like a novelist, a peddler sees life from outside, at an angle. But that allows him to see it more vividly and poetically than most people. This makes “A Strangeness in My Mind” one of Pamuk’s most enjoyable novels and an ideal place to begin for readers who want to get to know him.
       ~Adam Kirsch in Washington Post
• There are many things to praise in “A Strangeness in My Mind,” which I’ll get to in a moment. What first needs to be said about this amiable novel is that, like boza, its alcohol content is not very high. At nearly 600 pages, it has the stretch of an epic but not the impact of one. Like boza, it leaves a bit of film on your lip.
       ~Dwight Garner in The New York Times

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A Whole Life
by Robert Seethaler
translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
Austria

Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn’t ask for her hand in marriage but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas’s heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII — where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus — and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven. Like John Williams’ Stoner or Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, A Whole Life is a tender book about finding dignity and beauty in solitude. It looks at the moments, big and small, that make us what we are.

• Yet again its power rests in its candid simplicity. A Whole Life has the mood of an Alistair MacLeod story and will resonate with Irish readers for its physical evocation of the remote mountain village as well as for its understated melancholy, which is reminiscent of Sam Hanna Bell’s classic December Bride (1951).
       ~Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times
• Against the backdrop of a literary world that often seems crowded with novels yelling “Look at me!”, it’s refreshing to read a story marked by quiet, concentrated attention. Robert Seethaler’s novella about a man living his life in a single mountain valley is a bestseller in Germany, and its success may in part be a reaction to all around us that is prolix, narcissistic and mindlessly technology-worshipping. The world of Andreas Egger, by contrast, is slow, taciturn and definitely “unplugged”.
       ~Adam Lively in The Sunday Times

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The 2016 judging panel:

• Chair Boyd Tonkin
• Tahmima Anam
• David Bellos
• Daniel Medin
• Ruth Padel

Here is the judges’ statement:

For the first longlist in its new form, the Man Booker International Prize invites readers to share a thrilling journey of discovery across the finest fiction in translation. The 13 books that the judges have chosen not only feature superb writing from Brazil to Indonesia, from Finland to South Korea, from Angola to Italy. Our selection highlights the sheer diversity of great fiction today. From intense episodes of passion to miniature historical epics; from eerie fables of family strife to character-driven chronicles of urban life, this list showcases fiction that crosses every border. It also pays tribute to the skill and dedication of the first-rate translators who convey it to English-language readers. Please join us on this fantastic voyage.

Today The Criterion Collection announced their May line-up, which, like last month, includes four new releases (but one of which is a nice box set). Again, setting an unsettling trend, for the fourth time this year, there are zero upgrades, unless (again like last month) you count the unboxing of a title that was in a boxset an upgrade. But, to reiterate: though I’d love to see more upgrades, I’m still over the moon about Criterion’s 2016 line-up.

The blurbs are from The Criterion Collection’s website (so are the links) — go there to see the details on the supplements.

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May 3, 2016

Easy Rider (1969)
d. Dennis Hopper

Last month, the Criterion Collection unboxed David Lean’s Brief Encounter, one of my favorite films. This month, they are unboxing Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, which I like much less and which was in the great boxset America Lost and Found: The BBS Story.

From The Criterion Collection:

This is the definitive counterculture blockbuster. The down-and-dirty directorial debut of former clean-cut teen star Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider heralded the arrival of a new voice in film, one pitched angrily against the mainstream. After the film’s cross-country journey—with its radical, New Wave–style editing, outsider-rock soundtrack, revelatory performance by a young Jack Nicholson, and explosive ending—the American road trip would never be the same.

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May 10, 2016

In a Lonely Place (1950)
d. Nicholas Ray

The Criterion Collection continues its beautiful trend of releasing strong films noir with Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, based, at least in some aspects, upon Dorothy B. Hughes’ novel (which itself was part of the amazing Women Crime Writers boxset from The Library of America last year). Interesting bit of trivia: this is the first film with Humphrey Bogart to join the collection in its DVD/Blu-ray era, and it’s a great one by my estimation!

From The Criterion Collection:

When a gifted but washed-up screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper — Humphrey Bogart, in a revelatory, vulnerable performance — becomes the prime suspect in a brutal Tinseltown murder, the only person who can supply an alibi for him is a seductive neighbor (Gloria Grahame) with her own troubled past. The emotionally charged In a Lonely Place, freely adapted from a Dorothy B. Hughes thriller, is a brilliant, turbulent mix of suspenseful noir and devastating melodrama, fueled by powerhouse performances. An uncompromising tale of two people desperate to love yet struggling with their demons and each other, this is one of the greatest films of the 1950s, and a benchmark in the career of the classic Hollywood auteur Nicholas Ray.

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May 17, 2016

The Naked Island (1960)
d. Kaneto Shindo

I have never seen Shindo’s film, though I’ve heard it’s beautiful. I’m personally always excited when another Japanese film comes to the collection, so this year has been fantastic by that count.

From The Criterion Collection:

Director Kaneto Shindo’s documentary-like, dialogue-free portrayal of daily struggle is a work of stunning visual beauty and invention. The international breakthrough for one of Japan’s most innovative filmmakers — who went on to make such other marvelous movies as Onibaba and Kuroneko — The Naked Island follows a family whose home is on a tiny, remote island off the coast of Japan. They must row a great distance to another shore, collect water from a well in buckets, and row back to their island — a nearly backbreaking task essential for the survival of these people and their land. Featuring a phenomenal modernist score by Hikaru Hayashi, this is a truly hypnotic experience, with a rhythm unlike that of any other film.

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May 24, 2016

The Player (1992)
d. Robert Altman

It’s been a long time since I saw this clever film, but I remember really enjoying it. Another Altman film — and another Warner Bros. film — is always welcome!

From The Criterion Collection:

A Hollywood studio executive with a shaky moral compass (Tim Robbins) finds himself caught up in a criminal situation that would fit right into one of his movie projects, in this biting industry satire from Robert Altman. Mixing elements of film noir with sly insider comedy, The Player, based on a novel by Michael Tolkin, functions as both a nifty stylish murder story and a commentary on its own making, and it is stocked with a heroic supporting cast (Peter Gallagher, Whoopi Goldberg, Greta Scacchi, Dean Stockwell, Fred Ward) and an astonishing lineup of star cameos that make for a remarkable Hollywood who’s who. This complexly woven grand entertainment (which kicks off with one of American cinema’s most audacious and acclaimed opening shots) was the film that marked Altman’s triumphant commercial comeback in the early 1990s.

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May 31, 2016

The Road Trilogy
–Alice in the Cities (1974)
–Wrong Move (1975)
–Kings of the Road (1976)
d. Wim Wenders

In January, The Criterion Collection released Wim Wenders’ great The American Friend. I know a lot of folks have been even more excited for The Road Trilogy. I’ve never seen any of these, but I’m thrilled that I’ll soon have the opportunity to fix that.

From The Criterion Collection:

In the 1970s, Wim Wenders was among the first true international breakthrough artists of the revolutionary New German Cinema, a filmmaker whose fascination with the physical landscapes and emotional contours of the open road proved to be universal. In the middle of that decade, Wenders embarked on a three-film journey that took him from the wide roads of Germany to the endless highways of the United States and back again. Starring Rüdiger Vogler as the director’s alter ego, Alice in the Cities, Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road are dramas of emotional transformation that follow their characters’ searches for themselves, all rendered with uncommon soulfulness and visual poetry.

Alice in the Cities:

The first of the road films that would come to define the career of Wim Wenders, the magnificent Alice in the Cities is an emotionally generous and luminously shot journey. A German journalist (Rüdiger Vogler) is driving across the United States to research an article; it’s a disappointing trip, in which he is unable to truly connect with what he sees. Things change, however, when he is forced to take a young girl named Alice (Yella Rottländer) with him on his return trip to Germany, after her mother (Lisa Kreuzer) — whom he has just met — leaves the child in his care. Though they initially find themselves at odds, the pair begin to form an unlikely friendship.

Wrong Move:

Wim Wenders updates a late-eighteenth-century novel by Goethe with depth and style, transposing it to 1970s West Germany and giving us the story of an aimless writer (Rüdiger Vogler) who leaves his hometown to find himself and befriends a group of other travelers. Seeking inspiration to help him escape his creative funk, he instead discovers the limits of attempts to refashion one’s identity. One of the director’s least seen but earthiest and most devastating soul searches, Wrong Move features standout supporting performances from New German Cinema regulars Hanna Schygulla and Peter Kern and, in her first film appearance, Nastassja Kinski.

Kings of the Road:

A roving film projector repairman (Rüdiger Vogler) saves the life of a depressed psychologist (Hanns Zischler) who has driven his Volkswagen into a river, and they end up on the road together, traveling from one rural German movie theater to another. Along the way, the two men, each running from his past, bond over their shared loneliness. Kings of the Road, captured in gorgeous com-positions by cinematographer Robby Müller and dedicated to Fritz Lang, is a love letter to the cinema, a moving and funny tale of male friendship, and a portrait of a country still haunted by war.

Today The Criterion Collection announced their April line-up, which includes four new titles, but, for the third time this year, zero upgrades, unless you count the unboxing of Brief Encounter or the boxing of the Whit Stillman films an upgrade. Though I’d love to see more upgrades, I’m still over the moon about Criterion’s 2016 line-up.

The blurbs are from The Criterion Collection’s website (so are the links) — go there to see the details on the supplements.

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April 12, 2016

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
d. Howard Hawks

A wonderful way to start the month!

From The Criterion Collection:

Electrified by the verbal wit and visual craftsmanship of the great Howard Hawks, Only Angels Have Wings stars Jean Arthur as a traveling entertainer who gets more than she bargained for during a stopover in a South American port town. There she meets a handsome yet aloof daredevil pilot, played by Cary Grant, who runs an airmail company, staring down death while servicing towns in treacherous mountain terrain. Both attracted to and repelled by his romantic sense of danger, she decides to stay on, despite his protestations. This masterful and mysterious adventure, featuring Oscar-nominated special effects, high-wire aerial photography, and Rita Hayworth in a small but breakout role, explores Hawks’s recurring themes of masculine codes and the strong-willed women who question them.

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April 19, 2016

Barcelona (1994)
d. Whit Stillman

I know little about Whit Stillman’s works, though for months people have been excited at the prospect of this one arriving on Blu-ray. This will be available as a standalone edition or as part of a new box-set, shown below. Stillman’s films don’t look to be my type of film, but I’m excited to give them a shot.

From The Criterion Collection:

Whit Stillman followed his delightful indie breakthrough Metropolitan with another clever and garrulous comedy of manners, this one with a darker edge. A pair of preppy yet constitutionally mismatched American cousins—a salesman and a navy officer—argue about romance and politics while working in the beautiful Spanish city of the film’s title. Set during the eighties, Barcelona explores topics both heady (American exceptionalism, Cold War foreign policy) and hilarious (the ins and outs of international dating, the proper shaving method) while remaining a constantly witty delight, featuring a sharp young cast that includes Taylor Nichols, Chris Eigeman, and Mira Sorvino.

From The Criterion Collection:

Over the course of the 1990s, writer-director Whit Stillman made a trilogy of films about the acid tongues and broken hearts of some haplessly erudite young Americans in New York and abroad. Set in the eighties, these films would trace the arc of that decade, led by Stillman’s Oscar-nominated debut, Metropolitan, which introduced moviegoers to a strange, endangered species of privileged New Yorker dubbed the “urban haute bourgeoisie.” Chronologically, the tale continues with The Last Days of Disco, in which, with an earnest wink, Stillman mourns the close of New York’s nightclub era via the story of two young party-going women juggling day jobs in book publishing. Finally, Barcelona plunks down a pair of love-starved upper-class men in a foreign city riddled with anti-American sentiment. At once effervescent and melancholy, these are comedies about the ends of eras, social change as seen through the eyes of reluctant, unflaggingly sardonic romantics.

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April 26, 2016

Phoenix (2014)
d. Christian Petzold

I’ve heard great things about this one, with some critics calling it the best film of its year. Always intrigued by the contemporary films Criterion chooses to release.

From The Criterion Collection:

This evocative and haunting drama, set in a rubble-strewn Berlin in 1945, is like no other film about post–World War II Jewish identity. After surviving Auschwitz, a former cabaret singer (Nina Hoss, in a dazzling, multilayered performance), her face disfigured and reconstructed, returns to her war-ravaged hometown to seek out the gentile husband who may or may not have betrayed her to the Nazis. Without recognizing her, he enlists her to play his wife in a bizarre hall-of-shattered-mirrors story that’s as richly metaphorical as it is preposterously engrossing. Revenge film or tale of romantic reconciliation? One doesn’t know until the superb closing scene of this marvel from Christian Petzold, perhaps the most important figure in contemporary German cinema.

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April 26, 2016

The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates
-Primary (1960)
-Adventures on the New Frontier (1961)
-Crisis (1963)
-Faces of November (1964)
d. Robert Drew

This is an exciting announcement of four documentaries (three at around an hour and one short at 12 minutes) that really take us close to some aspects of Kennedy’s election and administration.

From The Criterion Collection:

Seeking to invigorate the American documentary format, which he felt was rote and uninspired, Robert Drew brought the style and vibrancy he had fostered as a Life magazine correspondent to filmmaking in the late fifties. He did this by assembling an amazing team—including such eventual nonfiction luminaries as Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles—that would transform documentary cinema. In 1960, the group was granted direct access to John F. Kennedy, filming him on the campaign trail and eventually in the Oval Office. This resulted in three films of remarkable, behind-closed-doors intimacy—Primary, Adventures on the New Frontier, and Crisis—and, following the president’s assassination, the poetic short Faces of November. Collected here are all four of these titles, early exemplars of the movement known as Direct Cinema and featuring the greatest close-up footage we have of this American icon.

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April 26, 2016

Brief Encounter (1945)
d. David Lean

This film has already been released on Blu-ray from Criterion, but only as part of a larger box set. With this, more film fans can come to know this amazing film without having to pick up all of the others at a higher price (though I’d still recommend the box).

From The Criterion Collection:

After a chance meeting on a train platform, a married doctor (Trevor Howard) and a suburban housewife (Celia Johnson) enter into a muted but passionate, and ultimately doomed, love affair. With its evocatively fog-enshrouded setting, swooning Rachmaninoff score, and pair of remarkable performances (Johnson was nominated for an Oscar for her role), this film, directed by David Lean and based on Noël Coward’s play Still Life deftly explores the thrill, pain, and tenderness of an illicit romance, and has influenced many a cinematic brief encounter since its release.

Yesterday, The Story Prize announced its finalists for books published in 2015.

• There’s Something I Want You to Do, by Charles Baxter
• Fortune Smiles, by Adam Johnson
• Thirteen Ways of Looking, by Colum McCann

The winner (who will also get $20,000 and an engraved silver bowl) will be announced on March 2. The two runners-up will each get $5,000.

After hearing what Criterion was releasing in January and February 2016 it was clear that they were off to a great start for the new year. Today they announced their March line-up, and it looks even better, with four new titles and one upgrade! Two of the titles have been sought after for as long as I can remember, and the upgrade has been expected for years.

The blurbs are from The Criterion Collection’s website (so are the links) — go there to see the details on the supplements.

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March 8, 2016

Since I started really following the online Criterion community I’ve been hearing the question: when are you going to give us Rivette. The answer is next March, when Criterion releases its first title by the director of the French New Wave. I’ve never seen it, and from what I’ve heard I’m not sure Rivette is up my street, but I’m very excited to try his work out!

Paris Belongs to Us (1961)
d. Jacques Rivette

From The Criterion Collection:

One of the original critics turned filmmakers who helped jump-start the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette began shooting his debut feature in 1957, well before that cinema revolution officially kicked off with The 400 Blows and Breathless. Ultimately released in 1961, the rich and mysterious Paris Belongs to Us offers some of the radical flavor that would define the movement, with a particularly Rivettian twist. The film follows a young literature student (Betty Schneider) who befriends the members of a loose-knit group of twentysomethings in Paris, united by the apparent suicide of an acquaintance. Suffused with a lingering post–World War II disillusionment while evincing a playful temperament, Rivette’s film marked the provocative start to a brilliant directorial career.

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March 15, 2016

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
d. John Frankenheimer

Recently we learned that Criterion was involved in restoring this classic Frankenheimer film. It’s a good one, though I haven’t seen it for fifteen years or so. It should be fun to revisit it with Criterion’s supplements!

From The Criterion Collection:

The name John Frankenheimer became forever synonymous with heart-in-the-throat filmmaking when this quintessential sixties political thriller was released. Set in the early fifties, this razor-sharp adaptation of the novel by Richard Condon concerns the decorated U.S. Army sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), who as a prisoner during the Korean War is brainwashed into being a sleeper assassin in a Communist conspiracy, and a fellow POW (Frank Sinatra) who slowly uncovers the sinister plot. In an unforgettable, Oscar-nominated performance, Angela Lansbury plays Raymond’s villainous mother, the controlling wife of a witch-hunting anti-Communist senator with his eyes on the White House. The rare film to be suffused with Cold War paranoia while also taking aim at the frenzy of the McCarthy era, The Manchurian Candidate remains potent, shocking American moviemaking.

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March 22, 2016

A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
d. Edward Yang

This is the one I’ve been waiting for the longest. Though I’ve had chances to see it in a terrible edition over the past few years, rumors Criterion was working on a restoration always led me to just wait so I could see this 237-minute film in the best edition possible. Criterion is not exaggerating in their first sentence below.

From The Criterion Collection:

Among the most praised and sought-after titles in all contemporary film, this singular masterpiece of Taiwanese cinema, directed by Edward Yang, finally comes to home video in the United States. Set in the early sixties in Taiwan, A Brighter Summer Day is based on the true story of a crime that rocked the nation. A film of both sprawling scope and tender intimacy, this novelistic, patiently observed epic centers on the gradual, inexorable fall of a young teenager (Chen Chang, in his first role) from innocence to juvenile delinquency, and is set against a simmering backdrop of restless youth, rock and roll, and political turmoil.

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March 29, 2016

A Poem Is a Naked Person (1974)
d. Les Blank

I love Les Blank’s work, and Criterions boxset from November of last year is one of my favorite releases (see my thoughts here). This is the first time this documentary is getting a release.

From The Criterion Collection:

Les Blank considered this free-form feature documentary about beloved singer-songwriter Leon Russell, filmed between 1972 and 1974, to be one of his greatest accomplishments. Yet it has not been released until now. Hired by Russell to film him at his recording studio in northeast Oklahoma, Blank ended up constructing a unique, intimate portrait of a musician and his environment. Made up of mesmerizing scenes of Russell and his band performing, both in concert and in the studio, as well as off-the-cuff moments behind the scenes, this singular film—which also features performances by Willie Nelson and George Jones—has attained legendary status over the years. It’s a work of rough beauty that serves as testament to Blank’s cinematic daring and Russell’s immense musical talents.

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March 29, 2016

Bicycle Thieves (1948)
d. Vittorio De Sica

The lone upgrade of 2016 so far, Criterion has picked one we’ve been clamoring for for a long time! What will we talk about next when we talk about upgrades that should have happened by now?

From The Criterion Collection:

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for his work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodies the greatest strengths of the Italian neorealist movement: emotional clarity, social rectitude, and brutal honesty.