#WITMonth, II: Bélem, Blažević, Enríquez, Lebda, Pacheco and Yu (#17 of 20 Books)
Catching up with my Women in Translation month coverage, which concluded (after Part I, here) with five more short novels ranging from historical realism to animal-oriented allegory, plus a travel book.
The Rarest Fruit, or The Life of Edmond Albius by Gaëlle Bélem (2023; 2025)
[Translated from French by Hildegarde Serle]
A fictionalized biography, from infancy to deathbed, of the Black botanist who introduced the world to vanilla – then a rare and expensive flavour – by discovering that the plant can be hand-pollinated in the same way as pumpkins. In 1829, the island colony of Bourbon (now the French overseas department Réunion) has just been devastated by a cyclone when widowed landowner Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont is brought the seven-week-old orphaned son of one of his sister’s enslaved women. Ferréol, who once hunted rare orchids, raises the boy as his ward. From the start, Edmond is most at home in the garden and swears he will follow in his guardian’s footsteps as a botanist. Bélem also traces Ferréol’s history and the origins of vanilla in Mexico. The inclusion of Creole phrases and the various uses of plants, including for traditional healing, chimed with Jason Allen-Paisant’s Jamaica-set The Possibility of Tenderness, and I was reminded somewhat of the historical picaresque style of Slave Old Man (Patrick Chamoiseau) and The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho (Paterson Joseph). The writing is solid but the subject matter so niche that this was a skim for me.
With thanks to Europa Editions, who sent an advanced e-copy for review.
In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević (2022; 2025)
[Translated from Croatian by Anđelka Raguž]
“My name is Ivana. I lived for fourteen summers, and this is the story of my last.” Blažević’s debut novella presents the before and after of one extended family, and of the Bosnian countryside, in August 1993. In the first half, few-page vignettes convey the seasonality of rural life as Ivana and her friend Dunja run wild. Mother and Grandmother slaughter chickens, wash curtains, and treat the children for lice. Foodstuffs and odours capture memory in that famous Proustian way. I marked out the piece “Camomile Flowers” for its details of the senses: “Sunlight and the scent of soap mingle. … The pantry smells like it did before, of caramel, lemon rind and vanilla sugar. Like the period leading up to Christmas. … My hair dries quickly in the sun. It rustles like the lace, dry snow from the fields.” The peaceful beauty of it all is shattered by the soldiers’ arrival. Ivana issues warnings (“Get ready! We’re running out of time. The silence and summer lethargy will not last long”) and continues narrating after her death. As in Sara Nović’s Girl at War, the child perspective contrasts innocence and enthusiasm with the horror of war. I found the first part lovely but the whole somewhat aimless because of the bitty structure.
With thanks to Linden Editions for the free copy for review.
Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys by Mariana Enríquez (2013; 2025)
[Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell]
This made it onto my Most Anticipated list for the second half of the year due to my love of graveyards. Because of where Enríquez is from, a lot of the cemeteries she features are in Argentina (six) or other Spanish-speaking countries (another six including Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru and Spain). There are 10 more locations besides, and her journeys go back as far as 1997 in Genoa, when she was 25 and had sex with Enzo up against a gravestone. I took the most interest in those I have been to (Edinburgh) or could imagine myself travelling to someday (New Orleans and Savannah; Highgate in London and Montparnasse in Paris), but thought that every chapter got bogged down in research. Enríquez writes horror, so she is keen to visit at night and relay any ghost stories she’s heard. But the pages after pages of history were dull and outweighed the memoir and travel elements for me, so after a few chapters I ended up just skimming. I’ll keep this on my Kindle in case I go to one of her other destinations in the future and can read individual essays on location. (Edelweiss download)
Voracious by Małgorzata Lebda (2016; 2025)
[Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones]
Like the Blažević, this is an impressionistic, pastoral work that contrasts vitality and decay in short chapters of one to three pages. The narrator is a young woman staying in her grandmother’s house and caring for her while she is dying of cancer; “now is not the time for life. Death – that’s what fills my head. I’m at its service. Grandma is my child. I am my grandmother’s mother. And that’s all right, I think.” The house has just four inhabitants – the narrator, Grandma Róża, Grandpa, and Ann – and seems permeable: to the cold, to nature. Animals play a large role, whether pets, farmed or wild. There’s Danube the hound, the cows delivered to the nearby slaughterhouse, and a local vixen with whom the narrator identifies.
Lebda is primarily known as a poet, and her delight in language is evident. One piece titled “Opioid,” little more than a paragraph long, revels in the power of language: “Grandma brings a beautiful word home … the word not only resonates, but does something else too – it lets light into the veins.” The wind is described as “the conscience of the forest. It’s the circulatory system. It’s the litany. It’s scented. It sings.”
In all three Linden Editions books I’ve read, the translator’s afterword has been particularly illuminating. I thought I was missing something, but Lloyd-Jones reassured me it’s unclear who Ann is: sister? friend? lover? (I was sure I spotted some homoerotic moments.) Lloyd-Jones believes she’s the mirror image of the narrator, leaning toward life while the narrator – who has endured sexual molestation and thyroid problems – tends towards death. The animal imagery reinforces that dichotomy.
The narrator and Ann remark that it feels like Grandma has been ill for a million years, but they also never want this time to end. The novel creates that luminous, eternal present. It was the best of this bunch.
With thanks to Linden Editions for the free copy for review.
Full review forthcoming for Foreword Reviews:
Pandora by Ana Paula Pacheco (2023; 2025)
[Translated from Portuguese by Julia Sanches]
The Brazilian author’s bold novella is a startling allegory about pandemic-era hazards to women’s physical and mental health. Since the death of her partner Alice to Covid-19, Ana has been ‘married’ to a pangolin and a seven-foot-tall bat. At a psychiatrist’s behest, she revisits her childhood and interrogates the meanings of her relationships. The form varies to include numbered sections, the syllabus for Ana’s course “Is Literature a personal investment?”, journal entries, and extended fantasies. Depictions of animals enable commentary on economic inequalities and gendered struggles. Playful, visceral, intriguing.
#17 of my 20 Books of Summer:
Invisible Kitties by Yu Yoyo (2021; 2024)
[Translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang]
Yu is the author of four poetry collections; her debut novel blends autofiction and magic realism with its story of a couple adjusting to the ways of a mysterious cat. They have a two-bedroom flat on a high-up floor of a complex, and Cat somehow fills the entire space yet disappears whenever the woman goes looking for him. Yu’s strategy in most of these 60 mini-chapters is to take behaviours that will be familiar to any cat owner and either turn them literal through faux-scientific descriptions, or extend them into the fantasy realm. So a cat can turn into a liquid or gaseous state, a purring cat is boiling an internal kettle, and a cat planted in a flowerbed will produce more cats. Some of the stories are whimsical and sweet, like those imagining Cat playing extreme sports, opening a massage parlour, and being the god of the household. Others are downright gross and silly: Cat’s removed testicles become “Cat-Ball Planets” and the narrator throws up a hairball that becomes Kitten. Mixed feelings, then. (Passed on by Annabel – thank you!)
I’m really pleased with myself for covering a total of 8 books for this challenge, each one translated from a different language!
Which of these would you read?
Three Recent Review Books: Holmes, Tokarczuk & Whitaker
Where the Road Runs Out by Gaia Holmes (2018)
A gem of a poetry collection. Gaia Holmes is a creative writing tutor in Halifax, Yorkshire. This is her third volume of poetry. A major thread of the book is caring for her father at home and in the hospital as he was dying on the Orkney Islands – a time of both wonder and horror. It felt like she could never get anything right and kept angering him, as she recounts in “Feckless.” Even after his death, she continued to see him. I especially loved the food metaphors in “Kummerspeck” (a German term for emotional overeating; literally, “grief bacon”), where sweets, meat and salt cannot sate the cravings of ravenous grief.
Other themes include pre-smartphone life (“Before All This” – not everything needed to be documented, you could live where you were and not rely on others’ constant approval), the lengths women will go to impress men (“The Audition”), being the only childless person in a room (“Ballast”) and a marriage falling apart (“Your Orange Raincoat”). Also notable are a multi-part tribute to the Chilean miners trapped in 2010 and an imagined outbreak of violence between runners and ramblers. Holmes channels Anne Sexton in “Angel of the Checkout,” with its wonderful repeated line “do you know the price of love?”, and Mary Oliver in the first stanza of “Wild Pigeons.”
There are no rhymes, just alliteration and plays on words, with a lot of seaside imagery. I would highly recommend this to poetry lovers and newbies alike.
A favorite passage:
I have no manual
for dying
so I do what I think
you’re supposed to do
in this situation.
I light the stub
of last night’s candle,
utter something holy
and stand
at your bedside
with the unfamiliar taste
of the Lord’s Prayer
clinging to my lips.
(from “The Lord’s Prayer”)
My rating: 
My thanks to Comma Press for the free copy for review.
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (2009; English translation, 2018)
[Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones]
What a bizarre novel! Janina Dusezjko is a delightfully twisted Miss Marple type who lives in a remote forest cabin in Poland, near the Czech border. She’s determined to learn the truth of what happened to her two beloved dogs, whom she calls her Little Girls. When four different men who were involved in local hunting – her unpleasant neighbor, a deer poacher whom she nicknamed Big Foot; a police commandant; a fox farm owner; and the president of the mushroom pickers’ association – are all found murdered, her theorizing runs wild. She believes the animals are taking revenge, and intends to use her astrology skills to glean more information about these untimely deaths. The police, meanwhile, dismiss her as a hysterical old crone.
The title comes from William Blake, whose writing is an undercurrent to the book: Dizzy, Janina’s former English pupil, is reading and translating Blake, and I reckon Janina’s nutty philosophy and capitalization of random words, especially abstractions, may be an homage to Blake. I probably missed some of the more intricate allusions, and my attention wandered for a while during the middle of the book, but this was an offbeat and mostly enjoyable read. I struggled with Flights, but I’m glad I tried Tokarczuk again.
A representative passage:
“We have this body of ours, a troublesome piece of luggage, we don’t really know anything about it and we need all sorts of Tools to find out about its most natural processes.”
My rating: 
My thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the free copy for review.
Chicken Unga Fever: Stories from the Medical Frontline by Dr. Phil Whitaker (2018)
This is a selection of Whitaker’s “Health Matters” columns from the New Statesman magazine. In his time as a GP he’s seen his fair share of common and unusual illnesses, and has so honed his diagnosing skills that he can start to figure out what’s wrong based on how someone stands up and walks towards his office from the waiting room. That’s why he’s a “meeter” (calling names in person and escorting patients down the hallway) rather than a “buzzer” (waiting for them to come to him, having being called via a digital screen).
In digestible essays of 2.5 pages each, Whitaker discusses mental health sectioning, home visiting, the rise of technology and antibiotic resistance, the culture of complaint, zealous overscreening and overtreatment (he’d have an ally there in Barbara Ehrenreich: see her Natural Causes) and the tricky issue of getting consent from teenagers. He also recreates individual cases that have left an impression on him. When it comes to diagnoses, he recognizes that sometimes it’s a matter of luck – like when he landed on Cushing’s disease based on a rare combination of common symptoms – and that sometimes you have to admit you don’t know and turn to the Internet. That’s where the title comes from – an out-of-hours caller’s approximation of suspected chikungunya fever.
This is an enjoyable book for medically minded laymen to read a few pieces at a time, though I suspect its take on various issues could soon be outdated.
My rating:
My thanks to Salt Publishing for the free copy for review.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 