Lavender Ink / Diálogos

Ian Brinton reviews Hank Lazers COVID19SUTRAS at Tears in the Fence.

What was immediately recognised by Rae Armantrout when commenting on the importance of this collection of poems was that it ‘brings us the news in the way that 18th century ballad broadsides did to Londoners’:

‘Quatrain by quatrain, Lazer sings the present world, its viruses (covid and structural racism), and its beauties (animals, friendship, the shape of a sentence).’

Just as Hank Lazer’s earlier collection had presented the reader with the poem radiating outward this new collection offers us a world in which

‘each day is
rich
in its
specifics’

The Modern Novel site continues its focus on Diálogos books, this time with some long overdue attention to Ruxandra Cesereanu‘s Angelus. Like many of our authors, Cesereanu is little known in the US but well-known in her own country, Romania. Angelus is a thoughtful parable, complex and multi-faceted. Marius Conkan writes:

…Angelus raises a series of questions regarding the society in which we live, offering, at the same time, possible solutions to (or at least, hypotheses on) the revitalisation of the sacred and the resurrection of symbolic depth for a (post)humanity characterised by the atrophy of imagination and the hypertrophy of pragmatic reason.…Ruxandra Cesereanu, in her parable-like novel, begins with the following question: what would happen if angels were to descend upon a Metropolis one day?

John Alvey at The Modern Novel sums it up this way:

I have mentioned on various occasions that I generally do not enjoy the navel-gazing novels that seem to be particularly in vogue at this time but much prefer a novel that has a thoroughly original and, preferable, complex story, that is totally unpredictable, that discusses a realm of interesting ideas, that delves into the dark recesses of the human (and, at times, extra-human) mind and raises as many questions as it answers. If you share my view, you will thoroughly enjoy this novel. You will get lost. You will wonder what is going on but you will also smile, you will be surprised, you will have much food for thought and, above all, you will have a first-class read.

“Blue Note is a novel short in length but enormous in its depth…” says Benedicto Víquez Guzmán, and Diálogos is happy to announce the release of the English translation by Elaine S. Brooks this month. Fernando Contreras Castro continues his humane approach to the novel, this time with the story of a jazz group, told through the eyes of a precocious feline. “During the first instances of emancipation,” writes the author, “the slaves appropriated the language of those in power and their instruments. Through language they entered the culture of the oppressor, but they never renounced their music, that shined through by way of the remembered blue note.…”

François Bon, the French writer, translator, and activist, traveled to the Lorraine region of France in 2002 to study the effects of the sudden closing of two Daewoo factories there on the “factory town” of Fameck. In an inventive, imagined reportage combining fiction, theater, and interview forms, Bon writes a record of the social devastation wrought by the closures on the mostly women workers, creating a document that is both moving and sociologically important. Carefully translated over the past three years by Youna Kwak, winner of the French Voices Grand Prize,  Daewoo is a genre-bending and compelling work. 

Despite its title, Miloš Crnjanski‘s  A Novel of London is far more than just a novel about London. As its hero wanders the streets and the bureaucracy of the bombed-out city in the wake of WWII, he encounters a host of émigrés from around the world, whose stories also unfold. A pan-European portrait of class structures and the real effects of the war emerges, a vision whose depth and scope may be unmatched in 20th century literature. 

Crnjanski’s 600+ page masterpiece of European Modernism is now available for the first time in English, thanks to Will Firth’s labor of translation, three years in the making, with deep discounts offered this month. Pick this one and other special deals from our sale rack.

As everyone probably already knows, concerns over the spread of COVID-19 have cancelled most public events this season. While the Crnjanski and London panel discussion went on as scheduled at the British Library (see below and also this write-up in the British press), the London Book Festival was cancelled, as was the New Orleans Poetry Festival. 

We remain shut-in but still in operation.