Getting Lost in Translations

This is one that’s on my read-sooner-rather-than-later TBR list. This is because of her other book, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I mentioned in last week’s newsletter. With Flights, the Nobel prize winner explores her love of travel after having been barred from it until the age of 28 because of Soviet isolationism. There are 116 nonlinear, existential vignettes here, both fictional and nonfictional.

These vignettes are all connected through travel– travel through space, time, memory, thoughts– and often seem to land in unexpected places. Within these tales there is a story of a flight that lands at the same time it takes off and one about how Chopin’s sister smuggled his heart into Warsaw in her skirt. The author actually took a class on the history of anatomy in Amsterdam as research for this collection, if that tells you anything about what you should expect.

Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé tells the story of the Salem Witch Trials through the eyes of Tituba, the enslaved woman who was among the first to be accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch trials. TItuba was orphaned at seven as her enslaved mother dared to defend herself from assault. She goes on to be raised by Mama Yaya, a woman with a great understanding of nature and the invisible. Of course, she shares her knowledge of magic and healing with Tituba, and in doing so, one could say she passes her womanhood to her. There are themes that explore womanhood represented as magic and the unknown.

It was Tituba’s love for an enslaved man, John, that led her back into the maw of slavery, by which she would eventually be accused of being a witch. Sis was down bad for John, smh, but I can’t judge the decisions of a Black woman living in the late 17th century too harshly.

It’s interesting to think of the act of erasure and all the resultant lost stories. This ties nicely into what’s going on in public schools in some of the southern and western states.

M is a seven year old girl whose understanding of life seems to revolve around her father’s career as a traveling salesman. So much so that she eventually starts accompanying him during his travels. Their journeys from town to town are often humorous and filled with wonder. M’s innocence and ignorance of impending change is contrasted against the reality of life in Chile under Pinochet’s rule. When they meet a mysterious photographer who sees ghosts, M’s world gets turned upside down. This has been added to my TBR with the swiftness.

This is technically written by a wife-husband duo, but was translated by a woman. When the subject of books in translation come up, this one immediately springs to mind as I’m still waiting for the second in the series to be translated *grumbles*.

Sixteen year old Sasha Samokhina is vacationing with her mom when she notices a strange man following her. She finds out he’s there to recruit her by coercion for a magic school no one has ever heard of. Now, before you get it twisted thinking this is just another story of a magical high school, just know that the magic studied here is unlike anything you’ve read before. The students also have to do things that other magical high school students don’t (it gets dark, y’all). It flirts with metaphysical philosophy, teeters on the biblical, and is plum gibberish at times. This story has been described as what those popular wizard school books would be like if they were written by Kafka. It’s an all around darker take on the magical high school subgenre that’s definitely for adults.