Read 237 of 2021. The Women I Could Be by Sangita Jogi. English Text by Gita Wolf.

Title: The Women I Could Be
Author: Sangita Jogi
English Text by Gita Wolf
Publisher: Tara Books
ISBN: 9788193448533
Genre: Feminism
Pages: 68
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

This is hands down one of the best books I have read this year. It is intricate, empathetic, gives a world view in its own manner, feisty, feminist, and above all makes you check your privilege, and look at the world differently.

Sangita Jogi’s mother Tejubehan is an artist herself and has been working with Tara books since a while now. Sangita Jogi brings her own style to the fore. “My women are modern” she says, which is seen beautifully in this book.

The book is divided into sections – modern women, women I could be, roaming the world, appearing in public, good times, and the world has progressed.

Through each section, Sangita Jogi most uniquely tells us about her life, her dreams, her aspirations, how she had to get married early – tradition being what it is, and how she manages to still draw and paint and be her own person.

I love the part when she speaks of her daughter and how she will not be who her mother is. She wants better for her daughter, which she intends to give.

“The Women I Could Be” shows you a different India – of women who have the same dreams and ambitions – yet give in to circumstances and even then, dare to be who they want to. Jogi’s art is stunning, liberating, and makes you want to have it all. I was stumped looking at it and kept coming back to it again and again.

The text is sparse, honest, and hard-hitting. She admits to only wanting to draw modern women – they make her dream big and think even bigger. I guess that’s the power of imagination. Jogi’s women are feisty and fantabulous. Through her art we see how they only want to have fun and be themselves. Through her art, we get a glimpse of the person she is and one can do nothing but applaud her talent and what she stands for.

Read 207 of 2021. The Lost Soul by Olga Tokarczuk. Illustrations by Joanna Concejo. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Title: The Lost Soul
Author: Olga Tokarczuk
Illustrator: Joanna Concejo
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 978-1644210345
Genre: Graphic, Illustrations, Picture Book
Pages: 48
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

The Lost Soul is one of the best reads of the year, where I am concerned. It not only makes you introspect about life and everything in-between, but also makes you want to stop in your tracks and just be for a while.

The entire book is told in pictures, with very few pages taking up text. It is about John, a workaholic businessman in existential crisis who feels he has lost his soul, and all is gone. A doctor diagnosis his malaise as his soul has been left out in the running game and all he needs to do is wait for his soul to catch-up. This is the plot. The story of our lives.

Tokarczuk is empathetic, poetic, and above all has a sensibility that matches Concejo’s beautiful illustrations, and though the text isn’t so much, yet the translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones hits the spot, like a tonic that you need to get you rid of your ailment.

I think most picture books that I have read my entire life have been more philosophical in nature than literary tomes. They say what they have to quite simply and you have no choice but to go back and reread them. Concejo’s illustrations change with every emotion on page – from sepia tones to being monochromatic to colourful, they are breathtaking in every way.

The Lost Soul teaches us about stopping, slowing down, about the grace in standing still and doing nothing. I think I need to follow this in my life for sure. To just be calm and breathe. To try not to think so much.

Read 202 of 2021. Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro. Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle

Title: Elena Knows
Author: Claudia Piñeiro
Translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle
Publisher: Charco Press
ISBN: 978-1999368432
Genre: Literary Fiction, Women in Translation
Pages: 173
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

Elena, all of sixty-three years old, knows that her daughter did not die by hanging herself. She knows there is more to it and wants to find out what happened to Rita. Why do they claim that Rita hung herself in the church belfry? How could that have been possible since it was raining that night and Rita would’ve never gone out in the rain as she was petrified of lightning? Elena wants answers about her daughter’s death, and no one is willing to help her. She is determined to find the culprit. Even if it means she has to venture out and journey through the suburbs of the city, to call on a favour from a woman named Isabel, who she and her daughter met twenty years ago. Even if it means that she has to do this as she suffers from Parkinson’s – the disease that will not let go of her and will obstruct her search to some extent. What happens next is what the novel is all about.

Piñeiro is well-known as a “thriller” or “crime” writer in Argentina and even around the world. Elena Knows, according to me is a good start to get to know her writing and fall in love with it. I’m surprised that with almost four books translated in English, Piñeiro is still not that well-known. I hope that changes when more people read Elena Knows.

Elena Knows is so much – a detective novel, a woman dependent on her disease to make all basic decisions – that of walking, turning her neck, seeing someone, and even sometimes breathing. It is a lucid and most disturbing commentary on mother-daughter relationships, and what happens when the child becomes a caregiver. It is also about the role of the government when it comes to providing medical care to its citizens – the red tapism, the bureaucracy, and the narrow-mindedness of it all. The book is political. It is about the agency of women and who controls their bodies. Piñeiro doesn’t hesitate to show society the mirror and make them realize what they stand for or not.

The plot unfolds in a day with clearly marked sections – Morning, Midday, and Afternoon – the times that are governed by Elena’s medication schedule. If she misses this, she will not be able to function. She will not be in control of her body and has to follow the schedule. This is another important element of the book. Let me also add here that Elena is not a likeable protagonist. There are shades and layers to this character and that’s what makes her also so endearing to some extent. There is no maudlin expression of her coping with her disease. There are facts, there are emotions, and sometimes the two converge most beautifully in the book.

Elena knows is so much more and I am stunned at how Piñeiro managed to say so much in such a small book. At the same time, Frances Riddle’s translation is on-point and makes you wonder what it would sound like in Spanish. The sentences gleam and I often found myself underlining passages.

Elena Knows is a book about patriarchy, structures, narrative (italics for dialogues), time, gender, motherhood, illness, and law and what we do with it, as we move on – day to day, hoping for a better tomorrow.

Eve Out of Her Ruins by Ananda Devi. Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Title: Eve Out of Her Ruins
Author: Ananda Devi
Translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
ISBN: 9789386338709
Genre: Literary Fiction, Women in Translation
Pages: 174
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5 stars

Life isn’t easy. Life isn’t easy for those who live on the margins. It isn’t easy when you are surrounded by poverty and bitterness. How do you love when all you have seen is hate? How do you bring yourself to live then? Eve does that. She lives, on her terms. She doesn’t live, she merely survives, day after day, trying to get out. Hoping for a better future, till she doesn’t. You witness her story, her life, and hope and pray that she is redeemed – that others are as well, that at seventeen and perhaps a little older, they deserve better, but you don’t know how the story will turn out, and where will it go.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is set in Troumaron, an impoverish area of Port-Louis, the capital of Mauritius Island. You see what you haven’t seen or thought of Mauritius to be. There is fear, there is violence, there is sexual assault, the air heavy with stench of yearning to get away, of dashed dreams, and broken hopes.

We meet four youngsters – fighting to survive. Eve, the seventeen-year-old that time forgot to nourish, that kindness overlooked, who moves from one man to another, always looking to get out but doesn’t want to. Savita, Eve’s soulmate in a sense, the only one who loves her selflessly. Saad, who is in love with the idea of Eve – who wants to save her and knows that she will never love him back. Clélio, a rebel waiting for life to happen to him, waiting for his brother to call him to France, waiting almost perpetually.

Through these characters Ananda Devi creates a world that is raw, belligerent, sometimes tender, warily poetic, and even forgiving. The world of Troumaron that is exploding at the seams – waiting to burst with energy that will only ruin these four. Ananda Devi’s characters are similar and so dissimilar to each other. In the sense they are all stuck, all perhaps wanting out, and yet don’t even know it. Her writing hits you hard. The poetry and the prose merge beautifully – they make you imagine as you read – the characters became more real than ever, and their emotions became mine.

Eve Out of Her Ruins is a small book with so much to unpack and undo. The lives of people on the margins, the lives they lead forever fluctuating between hope and hopelessness, brought out beautifully by the translator, Jeffrey Zuckerman. I could sense the French, and the Mauritian Creole rolling off my tongue as I attempted to read it when encountered it in the pages. This is a book that is not to be missed. I urge you to read it. Ananda Devi, we need more writing from you. A lot more.

Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández. Translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches

Title: Slash and Burn
Author: Claudia Hernández
Translated from the Spanish by Julia Sanches
Publisher: And Other Stories
ISBN: 978-1911508823
Genre: Literary Fiction, Translated Fiction, Women in Translation
Pages: 352
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

This is war fiction to an extent. This is about the aftermath of a civil war and revolution, and what it mainly does to women. It is fascinating and almost entirely from the perspective of female protagonists. A conflict created by men, whose consequences the women have to suffer – almost every single day.

The country and the characters are unnamed. At the core of the novel is a woman who joins a guerrilla movement as a teenager, eventually becoming a comrade (compañera), suffering abuse by soldiers who terrorise the locals. The book is about family as well. It is about how several years after the war, the woman has four daughters, one of which she is forced to give up who is then sold to a French family in Paris (adopted) and lives there. The woman after getting to know of this decides to pay her a visit.

The novel moves from the past to the present and navigating back to the past. The sentences are long winding, the narrative moves slowly, sometimes it becomes a little difficult to figure who is being spoken about, direct speech is omitted, and yet it all flows smoothly. At no point did I feel exhausted by the writing. I was actually wondering how it would’ve been for the translator in terms of pronouns and no names structure.

Slash and Burn is an intense read. I am glad that men have taken a backseat in the novel and like I said it is all about the women. The idea of starting afresh after a period of war is indeed difficult and Hernández draws on that with great skill. Readers are constantly reminded of what it means to be in a state of war for normal people, how their lives change forever, and how nothing is in our control.