I don’t know, man. Shit’s fucked. It’s 93 degrees Fahrenheit and 40% atmospheric humidity here in KCMO — closer than I ever want to be to wet-bulb territory, and the worst is yet to come! Here’s some locals trying to do something about that, and here’s some books. Links go to Bookshop, as per.

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I lead off May by finally finishing Willis Barnstone’s The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice, which I read in a print edition scavenged from the KU Libraries. I had tentatively high hopes: Barnstone, in addition to engaging in translations from a wide variety of languages ancient and modern, had also worked closely with Borges, who I have loved for many years. (As an aside, many single-author works on translation can’t make it to the 100-page mark before name-checking Borges. I’m not sure what to do with that, but it is entertaining.) And while Barnstone’s writing, on a prose level, was good, the book itself was an absolute mess. Written after Barnstone had had an active career in translation for something like 40 years, I guess I can see how it got published (by Yale University Press, no less!), but if Barnstone had not already been well-established in his niche, it would have been an impossible sell. And it’s a frustrating read: while the book intermittently engages with its ostensible subject (i.e. the consideration of translation as an art form and a poetic practice, as opposed to the more science-y, linguistics-oriented approach), Barnstone makes a long and largely uncited excursion through biblical translation, includes an abecedary at the end for some reason, offers a truly bizarre (mis)reading of a Walter Benjamin essay, and generally rambles self-indulgently. The relative lack of citations in the section on biblical translation was especially annoying, because Barnstone had some cool thoughts about the practice — but based as they were solely on his own assertion, I cannot accept them as readily as I would like. Ultimately, The Poetics of Translation was a frustrating and time-consuming slog.

An edited version of the Dell Yearling 1990 edition of *The High King*, from this appreciation in *Vox.*

Fortunately, as I was struggling through the Barnstone, I was also finally making my way through the entirety of Lloyd Alexander’s classic children’s novels, the Chronicles of Prydain. Despite my avowed love of Alexander’s work, I had somehow never made it past the second of the five Prydain stories; I am delighted to learn how the story concludes. The novels, of course, follow Taran, an assistant pig-keeper, as he adventures with a motley band of friends and hangs-on through Prydain, a land inspired by (but, as Alexander points out in his introductions to the books, adamantly not based on) the Wales of the Mabinogion and early Arthuriana. While these books predate some of my favorites of Alexander’s, as such they provide an interesting look at the author’s unfolding abilities. Some of the elements that would make, for example, the Westmark books so striking in their portrayal of the psychological impact of violence, or the healing power of making things, appear here in a kind of nascent form — the writing on craft work towards the end of Taran Wanderer was especially striking. I’m not surprised that I loved them, and if anything, I am only more excited to foist them on children of my acquaintance.

Since I’m apparently two years late on poetry happenings, and since I wanted something truly satisfying to follow on my bitter disappointment at Barnstone’s hands, I next dove into Natalie Diaz’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem. I had encountered Diaz’s work first on the podcast Poetry Unbound, to which I listen very occasionally, and the piece in question blew my fuckin’ socks off, so I was very excited. And Postcolonial Love Poem did not disappoint. In addition to exploring themes of colonialism, post- and otherwise — Diaz is herself Native American — and queerness, the collection is also bursting with honest-to-god love poems, which for some reason came as an unexpected surprise. Diaz writes with real passion of lovers’ bodies, and the joys of language, and systemic and personal violence. I am thrilled to have had the experience of reading it.

I had purchased the Diaz from a beloved local indie bookstore, and on that same excursion, I also picked up Margaret Killjoy’s A Country of Ghosts; I want to thank past me for both of these selections, and The Raven Bookstore for stocking them, because both were great. Killjoy, whose work I’ve encountered mostly in podcast form (I specifically listened to an episode of It Could Happen Here because she appeared as a guest), was also active in online steampunk outlets around the same time I was, and it shows in this novel: Dimos, a writer from the imperialistic Borol, is dispatched as a kind of embedded journalist to write some jingoistic pieces about a military hero — but soon, the hero is dead and Dimos finds himself among the mountain anarchists the Borolian military was trying to stamp out. I mention Killjoy’s steampunk past in large part because it’s very clear in this story, which tapped right into the part of my brain that latched onto China Mieville’s Bas-Lag and Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris and just kind of never left. Killjoy, however, writes with the sensual pleasure of those guys, but with much brisker prose and more attention to pacing, and I consider this a win. I’ll definitely be looking out for other entries in the Black Dawn series, of which this novel is a part; if they’re at all similar, I’ll be in for a string of treats.

I next finished rereading The Magician King by Lev Grossman; more later.

While waiting for another audiobook to become available through the library, though, I picked up Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books, translated by Louise Heal Kawai. A novella, the book follows Rintaro, a high school student raised in his grandfather’s bookshop; when Rintaro’s grandfather dies, though, he is visited by a talking cat, who enlists Rintaro’s aid in combatting pernicious tendencies in approaches to books and publishing. I’ll be honest: it’s a weird one! I liked it, overall, though largely in spite of its occasionally prescriptive approach to reading (to the book’s credit, it does interrogate these towards the end). I couldn’t help but wonder, too, how much I was missing by being less-than-familiar with the ins and outs of Japanese publishing and book culture. Still, it was fun and tender, and did a good job of balancing the dream-like encounters with, for example, publishers who treat books as mere content against the relative realities of high school (Rintaro also learns that he has more friends among his peers than he had thought).

The cover, from this NPR review by Amal El-Mohtar

I followed that with Everfair by Nisi Shawl, a sprawling alternate history of a fictional African country as it is born from the overthrow of Belgian Congo and achieves independence in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Despite Shawl’s long tenure as a short story writer, garnering a plethora of genre fiction awards, this is her first novel, and it shows, but not to its detriment. By telling a massive, country-hopping story in very short chapters from many different points of view, Shawl is able to engage with the many issues presented by such a project in a very nuanced way: whether she’s discussing the clashes between traditional religions among the colonized people and the Christianity espoused by the cohort seeking to found the titular country, attitudes towards interracial and queer relationships, or magic and technology, Shawl offers a thoughtful and character-focused exploration. I definitely had to keep a close eye on the dates and locations that make up the chapter titles, but that was scarcely an impediment to my enjoyment. I’m excited to delve further into her back catalog.

I’ll wrap this up with The Magician’s Land, the third and final installment in Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy. Technically I finished this one right at the beginning of June, but I’m putting it here because it’s not like anyone gives a shit, right? I’ve talked about them before, but this go-round was in audiobook form, and while this isn’t necessarily linked to the form, it was an even more rewarding experience. The novels follow Quentin Coldwater as he learns that he is a magician, attends a very exclusive magic university, and then adventures into the multiverse, arriving eventually at Fillory, the setting of Quentin’s own childhood favorites. If anything, I enjoyed the novels more this time: the section of the first book set at Brakebills, the aforementioned magic college, felt agonizing, a sort of edgelord Harry Potter redux; this time, especially with advance knowledge of where the series goes, it felt like a necessary step on Quentin’s journey to well-rounded personhood. Because for all the magic and all the trashy sex and, yes, abundant edgelordism, part of the genius of the series is Grossman’s ability to keep the reader in Quentin’s worldview — which grows and changes as the series progresses. Quentin, like anyone moving from their late teens into their early thirties, gains self-awareness and self-knowledge along with magical ability; he comes to understand how he misunderstood the nature of things when he was younger, and learns how to do better. Grossman also handles even the edgiest of material with real care and respect, which I had sort of glossed over in the relative shock of reading it the first time.

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That’s it; that’s all I’ve got and all I read in May of this benighted year two thousand and twenty-two. Follow me and Cameron on Twitter if you want.

Edgar's Book Round-Up, May 2022