22 S UNDAY, MARCH 13, 2022
THE OLD WOMAN WITH THE KNIFE
By Gu Byeong-mo
Translated by Chi-Young Kim
280 pp. Hanover Square. $19.99.
The original Korean title of Gu’s “The Old
Woman With the Knife” — her third book,
and her first to be translated into English —
is “Pagwa,” which means “bruised fruit,”
and it’s arguably an even better description
of the protagonist, Hornclaw, than the Eng-
lish title. An assassin for hire (or “disease
control specialist,” as the novel euphemistically puts it),
Hornclaw killed her first victim at the age of 15, in self-
defense, by stabbing him in the mouth with a hooked
skewer. She is now 65, and the sort of older woman
known affectionately in Korean as an ajumma. The novel
opens on the subway, where, as a “model senior citizen,
wholesome and refined,” Hornclaw “skates under the
radar, sitting with her head bowed, reading the enlarged
words” of her pocket-size Bible. But when her mark, a
man in his 50s, gets off the train, she strikes with lethal
efficiency, stealthily stabbing him in the back with a
poisoned dagger. The target dies instantly, “his frozen,
open pupils in his bluish face... like tunnels filled with
deep, compacted darkness containing the end of the
world.”
After half a century in this dangerous and physically
taxing occupation, Hornclaw is beginning to feel her age
(like, say, a bruised fruit) and is contemplating retire-
ment. She lives alone with her aging rescue dog, Dead-
weight, whom she occasionally forgets to feed. But she
makes a point of never missing her annual physical
(with a doctor who knows not to ask questions about her
numerous work-related injuries), on the logic that “the
moment you accept your changing, sagging body, you’ll
fail at your next job or, if you’re lucky, the one after that,
and failure in this line of work often results in the dis-
ease control specialist’s death.”
However, an unfortunate series of mishaps draws her
inexorably back into the action, yielding a brisk narra-
tive that offers a thoughtful reflection on societal atti-
tudes on the aging process in Korea and elsewhere. In
Kim’s fluid translation, the novel resembles recent South
Korean narratives that became popular in the United
States, like Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 film “Parasite” and
Hwang Dong-hyuk’s 2021 television series “Squid
Game”; like these works, “The Old Woman With the
Knife” uses occasionally cartoonish action and horror
sequences to offer a broader social commentary.
STRANGERS I KNOW
By Claudia Durastanti
Translated by Elizabeth Harris
294 pp. Riverhead. $27.Like Durastanti herself, her protagonist, also
named Claudia, is a CODA — a child of deaf
adults. Although her painter mother and
inveterate gambler father divorced when
Claudia was young, they remain very
present in her and her brother’s lives. Com-
munication within the family is a constant
challenge, however, and not only because her childhood is
split between Brooklyn and southern Italy. Claudia’s
parents never teach her sign language, and are often
disinclined to use it at all — they don’t want to be per-
ceived as disabled. As a result, Claudia becomes highly
attuned to the sorts of miscues, gaps and silences that
arise in all human relationships.
But, also like Durastanti — who has translated Ocean
Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” as well as
“The Great Gatsby” into Italian — Claudia is fascinated
by words generally, their etymologies and evocations. She
traces the roots of her favorite word in English, marshes,
to the Old English morand the Proto-Indo-European mer,
“meaning ‘to hurt,’ ‘to die’ or even ‘sea.’” She then amus-
ingly adds that “mor also reminds me of Mordor, the
dark, evil wasteland in ‘The Lord of the Rings,’” and then
connects her memory of reading Tolkien in high school to
her impression of London, where she lives as an adult:
“Those living in the city always feel the influence of a
dark, distant tower, an unease carried in the air.”
“Strangers I Know” is Durastanti’s fourth novel, and
her second to be translated into English. In all her work,
the author draws on her autobiography: She has said she
calls the book “a novel from life, because I was aware that
if I went to a publisher and presented my parents’ story
as fiction, they would say it’s highly unrealistic.”
And though the novel was written in Italian, portions of
Harris’s lively translation read as though this were the
original, containing references to English books, movies
and songs, as well as detailed discussions of the language
itself. Claudia notes that her grandmother, who “didn’t
understand Italian very well anymore” after having lived
in New York for years, “spoke in a dialect that was delib-
erately strange: She said ‘Bruklì’ instead of Brooklyn,
‘aranò’ rather than I don’t know.” She knows how to pro-
nounce these words, the narrator says, but their distor-
tions are “her means of staking out a personality.”PYRE
By Perumal Murugan
Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan
202 pp. Black Cat. Paper, $17.Murugan’s “Pyre” is haunted by its title
(“Pookuzhi,” in Tamil) — a word that ap-
pears nowhere in the novel, but contributes
to the growing sense of dread and despera-
tion that shadows it. The narrative begins in
an unassuming manner, with the newlyweds
Kumaresan and Saroja getting off a bus in
the groom’s home village for the first time. They are
arriving from the town of Tholur, where they met, and
where Kumaresan works at a soda bottling shop; and he
now instructs Saroja to speak as little as possible when
interacting with his family and neighbors. It quickly
becomes clear that Kumaresan fears his village will
reject Saroja if they learn that she belongs to a different
caste, and he has yet to come up with a way of allaying
their suspicions. As these suspicions mount, the walls
begin to close in on the young couple, still working to
build intimacy with each other.
A professor of Tamil literature in southern India, Mu-
rugan is a prolific author of nonfiction, story collections
and novels, including the 2010 novel “One Part Woman,”
which sparked protests from fundamentalists in India
who felt the plotline (a couple struggling with infertility)
brought dishonor upon Hindu women. (The protests led
Murugan to declare his own death on Facebook in 2015.)
This very readable English version by Vasudevan, the
American anthropologist and writer who also translated
“One Part Woman” in 2018, includes a sprinkling of
transliterated terms, some (samba, a small-grained rice;
and dey!, an informal way of addressing a man) defined
in a short glossary at the end. In addition to drawing the
reader into Murugan’s Tamil-language environment,
Vasudevan also signals the subtle differences in dialect,
distinguishing Saroja’s speech from Kumaresan’s. The
translation succeeds in reminding the reader of the
work’s non-Western, multilingual setting, without com-
promising the fluency of the narrative.ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL
CARLOS ROJASis a translator and professor of Chinese literature at Duke University.
(^) The Shortlist/Fiction in Translation/By Carlos Rojas