World Literature Today – July 01, 2019

Books in Review

end like this, circling back the way preda-
tory birds and abusive relationships do. The
section of the book entitled “Circle” does
exactly that after the troubled but empow-
ered section “Girl Saints.” It is here in the
third epigraph that we discover the origin
of the book’s title—Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”—
and, in “Four Hawks,” are reminded of the
torturous work that must be undertaken to
mentally escape abuse even after one has
physically escaped: “why // am I the chased
thing horrified / to overtake myself in the
b r u s h .”
There are a number of elegies threaded
through the work that lend a certain soft-
ness to the narrative lace, like tree bark in
the rain or bodies in the earth. At other
times, the elegies move at a clip that out-
paces their strange and unbridled language;
the form itself a metaphor for the uncom-
fortableness of grief and inheritance that we
try desperately and failingly to outrun.
Love and violence; cartography and the
damages of water; “Small witchery,” in the
face of a history that remains unrepentant
of its sins against women and girls. These
themes are mapped in repetition and layer,
often woven into perilously shared spaces.

“We bled on our white clothes –  we

bore them redly // to the table. Our

fathers said Tell me, will you ever //

feed me something that isn’t your own

trouble? / We cast away stones. There

was room at the inn. // There was time

to be floated as witches.”

Chosen by Joy Harjo as the 2018

Walt Whitman Award winner, the

book is shaped by its radical hon-

esty and a sharply honed craft. Its story

arrives at no easy conclusions, with the

closest thing to clarity coming in the

final section, when the book is at its

most dreamlike: “Soon we were eat-

ing peonies & lilacs with bees inside /

All these marriages had come out to

watch me deliver my speech / I filled

my mouth with bees I tried to speak

through the bees / Everyone if we’re

going to talk about love please we have

to talk about violence / I was stung my

tongue swelled I was spitting crushed

bees / A special crew came to sweep

them up before anyone could see.”

Within these lines the surreal pro-

vides cover, protection as we near a

certain disquieting truth: that the spec-

trum of violence—physical, emotional,

generational—is often entangled with

love in ways not easily swallowed. So

unlike the champagne, the buttercream

roses, and yet it is common practice

here for the bride and groom to care-

fully cut the cake, turn joyfully to each

other, and send their frosting-filled

fists into each other’s faces.

Bailey Hoffner

University of Oklahoma

Yoko Ogawa

The Memory Police

Trans. Stephen Snyder. New York.

Pantheon. 2019. 274 pages.

We are on an island. No inhabitant knows

its size, its shape, or where it is. About fif-

teen years earlier, things started vanishing:

the narrator begins, “I sometimes wonder

what was disappeared first—among all the

things that have vanished from the island.”

Things that are disappeared may be all

objects of a type—emeralds, say—or entire

categories—birds, say. Disappeared objects

don’t literally vanish; rather, they lose all

meaning in the mind. A disappearance is

not limited to cognition: when perfume

was disappeared, “the ability to smell the

perfume... faded, along with all memory

of what it meant.”

Guillermo Saccomanno

77

Trans. Andrea G. Labinger. Rochester, New

York. Open Letter. 2019. 262 pages.

When one thinks of Argentine literature,

particularly contemporary literature, Gui-

llermo Saccomanno (b. 1948, Buenos Aires)

does not come immediately to mind. One

need not look as far back as Borges, Cortázar,

Ocampo, or Bioy Casares, all of whom lived,

wrote, and died in the twentieth century, to

find writers—Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer,

and César Aira—who are familiar to Eng-

lish readers. Even much younger authors,

Samanta Schweblin and Martín Felipe Cast-

agnet, for example, are more recognizable, if

for no other reason than their presence on

the Bogotá39 list. Hopefully, with the release

of 77 , Saccomanno’s relative obscurity will

quickly fade.

The fifth of Saccomanno’s nine novels,

77 is only the second to be translated, fol-

lowing Gesell Dome, which was also trans-

lated by Andrea Labinger for Open Letter.

In addition to Argentina’s Premio Nacional

de Literatura, Saccomanno is also the recipi-

ent of the Premio Biblioteca Breve for El

oficinista (The party-liner) and a two-time

recipient of the Hammett Prize from the

International Association of Crime Writers,

for 77 and Gesell Dome.

GUILLERMO SACCOMANNO

84 W LT SUMMER 2019