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shorshewitch's reviews
326 reviews
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century by Alice Wong
informative
sad
fast-paced
5.0
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, วีรพร นิติประภา
5.0
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, translated from Thai by Kong Rithdee
I came across a recommendation for this book when on my fav #translatedgemsbookclub someone spoke about crip time theory and queer temporality. The title fascinated me. So obviously I went and got the book.
The writing is captivatingly lyrical. Metaphors abound. The book largely revolves around sisters Chareeya and Chalika, and their friend Pran. All three are orphaned at very young ages and try to find their footing in a world desperately trying to throw them off any love or affection. Plenty of characters come and go in their lives each with their own complexities. The author seems to have made a personal decision that time would not mean anything in the story. Various worlds collide to bring out a tragically beautiful story of human intricacies. Generous descriptions of Thai culture, food and if you love gardens, then the book is a gorgeous treat.
Here is something from the translator, Kong Rithdee's note, that sums up the writing.
//She disassembles words and clauses and then reconstructs them – a near-inimitable trick in the English language – and she deploys a range of devices from irony to digression, symbolism to fabulism, rhapsodic dramatisation to cinematic scene-sketching.//
I came across a recommendation for this book when on my fav #translatedgemsbookclub someone spoke about crip time theory and queer temporality. The title fascinated me. So obviously I went and got the book.
The writing is captivatingly lyrical. Metaphors abound. The book largely revolves around sisters Chareeya and Chalika, and their friend Pran. All three are orphaned at very young ages and try to find their footing in a world desperately trying to throw them off any love or affection. Plenty of characters come and go in their lives each with their own complexities. The author seems to have made a personal decision that time would not mean anything in the story. Various worlds collide to bring out a tragically beautiful story of human intricacies. Generous descriptions of Thai culture, food and if you love gardens, then the book is a gorgeous treat.
Here is something from the translator, Kong Rithdee's note, that sums up the writing.
//She disassembles words and clauses and then reconstructs them – a near-inimitable trick in the English language – and she deploys a range of devices from irony to digression, symbolism to fabulism, rhapsodic dramatisation to cinematic scene-sketching.//
Mothers Don't by Katixa Agirre
5.0
It has been years since I declared my intent to never become a mother, but some of my relatives and friends still haven’t fathomed my choice of not wanting to bear kids. Time and again I get to hear how fulfilling it is, how I will regret at a later age, what will I do when I get old, etc. But I know who I am. There are days I fear myself. I have not had a very frolicking childhood. I have battled madness very closely. But that is not the only reason I don’t want to bring kids in this world. There are layers and layers of thoughts that have gone into the decision.
“Mothers Don’t”, as the name suggests, is about mothers. The book is a translation from the original Basque. The premise is based on a story of a mother who drowns her twins in a tub of bath water and does not feel remorse. Elsewhere, another to-be-mother, who is also a writer, gets this news and recollects that she knows this woman. She feels the need to write about this and embarks on a journey to research and understand more about the child murderer she had once known as a young woman with promise. In that this book is also about the process of writing a book.
Understandably, the book does not offer any answers for the many critical questions it raises. The author accepts that in her closing paragraph -
//Because I have to talk about that muddy territory. It is neither a moral obligation nor a social accusation. It is something much more basic. The muddy land is there, as Everest is there, irresistible. Especially for those of us who are like me.
Defective. We are defective.//
What the book does offer, is a meticulous commentary on mental illnesses in women, the misdiagnosis, the loneliness, boredom and exhaustion of mothers, societal pressures, medical procedures, laws, history, literature, patriarchy and neoliberalism, and implores us to look at mothers as flesh and blood people. It’s a grim book, fast-paced in its narrative, satire is used as a device to assuage the intensity in some places. I am reading another book parallelly that is translated from Thai with a protagonist who was resented by her mother all her life - a fact that continues to define and underline all her future relationships. Mothers are not just capable of great injustice, but also great apathy, just like any of us are. Cultures across the world need to start to either provide structural and systemic support needed to rear children, or stop glorifying non-existent selflessness of mothers, that is often the cause of intense disgruntlement and confusion, not just for them, but also for their offspring. We need to truly keep it real.
Sigh! There is plenty to write, but I need time to process the book.
For now, I am going to give a shoutout to @3timesrebel for being who they are. I hope you all keep doing what you are doing and folks like me get to access books from languages we had never known before. Thank you to Dan from #translatedgemsbookclub for bringing the book to my notice.
“Mothers Don’t”, as the name suggests, is about mothers. The book is a translation from the original Basque. The premise is based on a story of a mother who drowns her twins in a tub of bath water and does not feel remorse. Elsewhere, another to-be-mother, who is also a writer, gets this news and recollects that she knows this woman. She feels the need to write about this and embarks on a journey to research and understand more about the child murderer she had once known as a young woman with promise. In that this book is also about the process of writing a book.
Understandably, the book does not offer any answers for the many critical questions it raises. The author accepts that in her closing paragraph -
//Because I have to talk about that muddy territory. It is neither a moral obligation nor a social accusation. It is something much more basic. The muddy land is there, as Everest is there, irresistible. Especially for those of us who are like me.
Defective. We are defective.//
What the book does offer, is a meticulous commentary on mental illnesses in women, the misdiagnosis, the loneliness, boredom and exhaustion of mothers, societal pressures, medical procedures, laws, history, literature, patriarchy and neoliberalism, and implores us to look at mothers as flesh and blood people. It’s a grim book, fast-paced in its narrative, satire is used as a device to assuage the intensity in some places. I am reading another book parallelly that is translated from Thai with a protagonist who was resented by her mother all her life - a fact that continues to define and underline all her future relationships. Mothers are not just capable of great injustice, but also great apathy, just like any of us are. Cultures across the world need to start to either provide structural and systemic support needed to rear children, or stop glorifying non-existent selflessness of mothers, that is often the cause of intense disgruntlement and confusion, not just for them, but also for their offspring. We need to truly keep it real.
Sigh! There is plenty to write, but I need time to process the book.
For now, I am going to give a shoutout to @3timesrebel for being who they are. I hope you all keep doing what you are doing and folks like me get to access books from languages we had never known before. Thank you to Dan from #translatedgemsbookclub for bringing the book to my notice.
The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt
5.0
The narration is so beautiful. The points are all for the way it's narrated.
Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change by Naomi Klein, Susan Abulhawa, Shalini Singh, John Bellamy Foster, Amitav Ghosh, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Rafia Zakaria, Masturah Alatas, Ghassan Hage, Vijay Prashad
4.0
That climate change activism is interconnected with all other left activisms is not a very novel thing to know. At least I know this for folks in my circle. But at times, it's very encouraging to read things that validate and build on your worldview, give you a more robust vocabulary to review your own understanding, and study specific cases that broaden your mind. This slim book of essays by various writers serves this very purpose for me. The book rests on the philosophy of Edward Said, Palestinian-American political activist and literary critic. Various writers from different geographical and socio-political regions flesh it out further from their respective contexts.
Marginalized will always be the first to bear the consequences of the changing climate, a phenomenon for which theirs will be the least contribution. I found the book hopeful in its despair. The call to action is clearly to visualize and work towards a society radically different than the one we are living in, and to stop acting like idealism is a bad thing. #climatechange #booksaboutclimatechange #leftwordbooks #essays #climatechangeessays
Marginalized will always be the first to bear the consequences of the changing climate, a phenomenon for which theirs will be the least contribution. I found the book hopeful in its despair. The call to action is clearly to visualize and work towards a society radically different than the one we are living in, and to stop acting like idealism is a bad thing. #climatechange #booksaboutclimatechange #leftwordbooks #essays #climatechangeessays
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda
4.0
Where the Wild Ladies are by Aoko Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton
Book 22/100
🍁 quick read
🍁 was a recommendation by amazing folks on #translatedgemsbookclub
🍁 inspired by and reinvents a lot of Japanese folktales
🍁 now I want to read more Japanese folktales. Sarath tells me we have a huge collection of them. So yay for me.
🍁 the stories are interconnected but not chronological, so a certain level of suspension of the concept of conventional time is required.
🍁 Stories deal with pretty heavy issues and yet are kept light and fun.
🍁 some stories end abruptly but since you will find some connection at a later point it does not feel cliffhanger-y.
Book 22/100
🍁 quick read
🍁 was a recommendation by amazing folks on #translatedgemsbookclub
🍁 inspired by and reinvents a lot of Japanese folktales
🍁 now I want to read more Japanese folktales. Sarath tells me we have a huge collection of them. So yay for me.
🍁 the stories are interconnected but not chronological, so a certain level of suspension of the concept of conventional time is required.
🍁 Stories deal with pretty heavy issues and yet are kept light and fun.
🍁 some stories end abruptly but since you will find some connection at a later point it does not feel cliffhanger-y.
A Red-necked Green Bird by Ambai
3.0
A decent collection of short stories. This is my first by Ambai. Some of the stories are beautiful while I felt some others were trying way too much. In a few stories, I found stuff crammed without having a lot of relevance to the story. In a few others, I found confusing narration like someone else spoke here. I am not exactly sure if that's supposed to be language barrier. I am not sure how it reads in the original Thamizh, but there is a big chance I lost some nuance in translation. There are descriptions of food, places, music, movies, science, and the stories touch a wide variety of themes. It was an interesting read except for a few of them. I am curious enough to pick more by the author.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
5.0
I mean, I didn't understand a lot of things but I couldn't stop reading. I will have to mostly read it again, and yet this was so absolutely fascinating. I am going to look up more by the author.