![]() Lozano writes their stories, and their growing connection, with such warmth that often reading Witches feels like sneaking into Feliciana's house with Zoe. Paloma, who had "wings where other people have regrets and fears," was Feliciana's model of joyful resistance Feliciana, who believes that "you can't really know another woman until you know yourself," becomes a model for Zoe. Still, their proximity - and Zoe's plain desire to learn from Feliciana - cannot help but highlight their shared experiences as women making their own way in a world too often defined by male desires. Witches' swift, intertwined narrative never elides Feliciana and Paloma's life in rural southern Mexico with Zoe's life in Mexico City. At the end of each Feliciana chapter, I was excited to return to Zoe's voice, and vice versa. The contrast between them is irresistible. Feliciana's sections are looping and abstract, while Zoe's are as clipped and sharp as any journalist's writing would be. Zoe and Feliciana sound nothing alike - a real feat on both Lozano and Cleary's parts. Not so in Brenda Lozano's Witches, which braids the life story of a Zapotec curandera named Feliciana with that of Zoe, a reporter who travels to interview Feliciana after her cousin Paloma, who taught her to heal, is murdered for being Muxe, a third gender American readers would understand as trans. Often, one narrator is more winning or more fully developed than the other, and I find myself speeding through half the story to get back to my preferred protagonist. I'm usually wary of novels that alternate narrators. It's impossible not to want better for Hassan and her family before the first chapters are done. Reading it is, for that reason, as infuriating as it is moving. As a girl, she imagines the Iranian army "besiege all of us like some giant serpent." Later in the Iran-Iraq War, when she falls briefly in love with a soldier named Anwar, the romance has an effect that astounds her: "For the first time since 1980, I felt I was inhaling air imbued with peace." Unfortunately, in War and Me, peace is nearly always inner, and nearly always ephemeral. Hassan offsets her chatty narrative with bursts of lyrical language, especially on the too-often-twinned subjects of love and war. Reading War and Me often feels like listening to a new friend tell her life story, complete with jokes, dreams, and detours. She proceeds in purely chronological order, starting at her birth and writing her way up to the present day - a mode that can seem artless, especially if you're used to the highly focused, novelistic memoirs that are in style these days, but that is all the more successful because it seems so natural. Instead, her narrative is highly personal and lushly detailed. William HutchinsĪt the start of War and Me, Faleeha Hassan, a major Iraqi poet now living in exile in New Jersey, writes, "ext to my name in the Unknown World or beside it at the moment I was born, the only comment inscribed must have been: 'Faleeha Hassan will coexist with war for most of the years of her life.'" Her memoir is the tale of that coexistence, which includes the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, both George Bushes' invasions of Iraq, and the 1990 United Nations sanctions against Iraq, which Hassan sees as economic warfare that "resulted in our suffering pitiful hunger, deprivation, and exposure to various maladies." But rarely does Hassan tell her story from a wide political vantage. Beyond that, they need nothing to unite them. For these three books - Iraqi poet Faleeha Hassan's memoir War and Me Mexican novelist Brenda Lozano's Witches and Uyghur novelist and social critic Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets - their commonalities are very broad: All three books engage explicitly and intensely with injustice, and all three are terrifically written and translated. But also, I am always wary of treating translation as its own genre: I never want to pretend that books are similar, or related, by virtue only of not having been written in English first.Īll that said, today's books have almost nothing in common. has miles to go in terms of publishing international literature, there's still an abundance of newly translated works to choose from - so linking books by theme or genre can help narrow the focus. I've focused on the surreal and the creepy - and highlighted the role of the translator and the colonial history of the author's country.Īlthough the U.S. When I write roundups of books that have been translated into English, I often concentrate on choosing works that play well together.
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