#WITMonth and Quotations

Above: One of the more normal sights in Marfa.

Friends,

Welcome to August. It’s so hot our tomato plants are on strike and refuse to produce any larger than a size that can only be referred to as “disappointing.” The school year is close to beginning, which brings a huge mix of emotions all across the positive/negative spectrum. In a few weeks I’ll be in the thick of it: struggling to remember names, trying to interpret my notes on what went well/wrong last year, and figuring out the best time to have both a not terrible commute and a not terrible time trying to find parking.

One bright point in August is that it’s Women in Translation month . While you should be reading women writers in translation year round, it’s very nice to see the outpouring of reading and resources all over Twitter. Only about three percent of all books published in the US each year are translations, which is a crappy statistic on its own, but of that three percent only ~25–30% are books originally written by women . I can’t find a statistic on gender parity among the translators themselves. Long story short: you should read more in translation, you should especially read more women in translation, and when you do talk about works in translation, make sure to always #namethetranslator (this hashtag shames reviews that leave them out) to spotlight both the important role translators have in literature but also to draw attention to the fact that the book is translated, a fact that often gets swept under the rug.

You can also see some of my own writing on works in translation, either from last year’s #WITMonth TinyLetter , Twitter thread , or by perusing my 2016 translator interview series at Ploughshares . You’ve seen me recommend these multiple times before, but my absolute favorites from recent years are A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, Willful Disregard by Lena Andersson, The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, and A Fortune Foretold by Agneta Pleijel. Additional recommendation: an anthology of Venezuelan shortform pieces called Crude Words . It has both male and female authors and one of its three editors is a woman, which means it’s not a great fit for #WITMonth, but as far as I can tell there are zero books from Venezuela by non-men that have been translated. I’ve found myself drawn to the work of writers from Sweden and Japan (with the glaring exception of Murakami, whom I should probably give another shot one of these days) especially as I read more and more in translation, but how much of that is a real preference and how much of it is what gets translated from other languages? Hard to say, hard to say. The only choice is to keep reading more.

I’ve managed an unusual streak of books without quotation marks in my reading recently, both as part of #WITMonth and separate from it. I’ll be honest and say that a lack of quotation marks turns me off from a book pretty quickly. There are situations where it makes sense. When there is confusion about who is speaking, when the narrator is under mental duress, or when the narration is in a style where quotations might not make sense (like telling the story to someone orally), sure, leave out some quotations. But when entire books do it I have to question its effectiveness. Books teach you how to read them. If you read a 250-page book without quotations, they’re going to lose their impact pretty quickly, to the point where it really doesn’t matter in the last fifty pages. Take, for example, The Sympathizer . Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has good reasons in the story for the narration to be difficult. The narrator is both under mental duress and telling the story in a confessional mode. And I think the lack of quotations worked well in the beginning of the book and the end of the book, but in the large swath of the middle it just felt tedious/annoying. Then there are books where I don’t know what the narrative reason is at all for removing quotation marks — it sometimes seems to just be an aesthetic decision.

Obviously other people are going to have different tastes (I mean, The Sympathizer did win the Pulitzer) when it comes to playing with form in this and similar manners, but I think the interesting question to ask is how does a writer make this decision. When does the difficulty, tediousness, or annoyingness of a stylistic choice outweigh the benefits? The awful thing about the decision is that there are factors outside the text to consider. Would 2666’s relentless section “The Part about the Crimes” work if not for Bolaño’s previously attained authorial stature (plus the timing of his death in relation to its publication)? And then it changes based on length of the project. Can you imagine having a character who spoke like Yoda as the main character in a novel? Probably not, but plenty of successful novels have main characters with small speech oddities, and it might work fine for a short story.

What are some projects with aesthetic choices that you found annoying? When was the last time you had to reread a page due to a lack of speech tags? Do footnotes in non-researched work enrage you?

Further reading:

• If you’re into science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative fiction, another place to get #WITMonth recommendations is Rachel Cordasco’s excellent blog collecting all non-English speculative fiction.
• August 2nd was James Baldwin’s birthday. Read or watch him (The textbook scan for the essay has good art but how depressing is it that they have a full page bio of Baldwin and don’t mention his sexuality, which was central to both his work and his life?).
• I guess Anne Helen Petersen should just have a permanent slot on this list. Here’s a Twitter thread of her following the Beto campaign that has good observations and fantastic photos.
• RO Kwon’s new book is good. Read her on skincare, religion, and ritual .
• Semi-related to the concept of #WITMonth, Rebecca Makkai has a great Twitter thread recommending books that “flew under the radar” in the last ten years . Reading that thread is great both for discovering books and learning what wildly different definitions people have about “flying under the radar.” There’s a Kevin Brockmeier book listed!
• Want a weird summer food project? Try the Appalachian recipe “sour corn.” It’s a relish that’s great on soups, salads, and tacos, and it’s a solid ease-your-foot-into-the-swimming-pool-of-fermentation-addiction recipe. I got my recipe from Ronni Lundy’s beautiful book, Victuals , but Garden & Gun has almost the exact same recipe here .
• And I’ll close with the juicy lit-world drama you needed. Anna March .

If you want some more specific reading recommendations, let me know. I hope this note finds you well, and I hope your summer has been what you’ve needed it to be.

-g