The term "dumpster fire" has been used in reference to 2017 at least several million times. At one point in October, I considered taking some classes on how to cope with anxiety and insomnia that were organized specifically in response to our collective ongoing sense of doom. I didn't though—because I was overwhelmed! Ha.Despite everything, I need to celebrate 2017 on a personal level. Daughters of the Air, which I'd toiled over for years, finally came out, and people are reading it and telling me they are enjoying it! Michael and I celebrated the holiday season with candles and latkes and lights and dim sum and snow (!) and The Shape of Water (a beautiful love story!) and chocolate peanut butter pie and New Year's Eve back at the Hotel Sorrento's Fireside Lounge for reading (me, Teffi's Subtly Worded, him Hanna Krall's Chasing the King of Hearts, which I'm happily adding to my Women in Translation Month queue), writing, live jazz, people watching, and bubbles. What more could I ask for?The day after Shelf Awareness called Daughters "a striking debut from a writer to watch," The Seattle Review of Books included it among five Seattle novels that made Paul Constant's year:

Anca Szilágyi’s Daughters of the Air is a fantastic debut — a magical realist fairy tale set in gritty New York City. It’s the kind of book that leaves you utterly confounded at the end, as you try to remember all the twists and turns that you took along the way. It feels like an impossible book, somehow — a product of alchemy, a creation of unearthly talents.

Wow! The book hasn't been panned yet, but when it does, I'll hang on to these two reviews for dear life. I was also super happy to see Tara Atkinson's novella Boyfriends included in the end-of-year list; I gobbled it one sitting and highly recommend it.Yesterday afternoon, I was thrilled to see The Seattle Times reviewed Daughters too—my first review in a major American newspaper!

Anca L. Szilágyi’s intense debut novel, "Daughters of the Air," locates a deeply personal story against the surreal backdrop of [Argentina's Dirty War].

  [gallery ids="4953,4952" type="rectangular"]I'll be moseying up to a newsstand later today so I can rustle up the paper and feel the newsprint on my fingers.In other news...

• Every year, I strive to collect 100 rejections. (Why? See this wonderful Lit Hub article by Kim Liao.) In 2016, I made it to 106, plus eight acceptances. In 2017, I garnered 93 rejections and 16 acceptances. This is actually bad in terms of my other annual goal, which is to be rejected 90% of the time. I need to aim higher.
• There are just four spots left in my online Fiction II class at Hugo House, which begins on January 14. You can sign up here.

Thank you for reading all the way to the end of this longer-than-usual blog post! As a gift, here is a Goodreads giveaway for you. Already read Daughters? Leaving a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or Powell's would help spread the word! You can do this regardless of how you obtained the book (other bookstores, my publisher, the library, and all that fun stuff).Onward!

Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

10:30 on a Summer Night operates at a slow boil. The noir-ish 80-page novella follows a French couple, Pierre and Maria, on vacation in Spain with their four-year-old daughter Judith and their friend Claire.  The story opens with talk of a murder in the small town where they've landed, their plans to get to Madrid thwarted by a storm. Rodrigo Paestra, having killed his wife and her lover, is on the run. With that crime of passion in the background, tension between Pierre, Maria, and Claire builds, complemented by the landscape's moody weather:

"The afternoon's dark blue, oceanlike mass moved slowly over the town. It was coming from the east [....] The water that ran between their feet was filled with clay. The water was dark red, like stones of the town and the earth around it."

Maria drinks manzanilla after manzanilla. Customers in a local cafe talk about the horror of Paestra's crime while "eating, more or less heartily." Like many tourists stuck in the town for the night, the family and Claire must sleep in a hotel hallway.  In Maria's wooziness, her thoughts drift between Paestra's whereabouts (they say he's on the rooftops), and the possible budding infidelity between Pierre and Claire. Her restlessness tears her from the claustrophobic hotel hallway, out into the wet night, looking for Paestra:

"He had gone around the chimney. Maria kept singing. Her voice clutched her throat. You can always sing. She couldn't stop singing once she had started. He was there."

The novella twists and turns into scarier and scarier landscapes.The extreme weather of the lightening storm is followed by extreme mid-day heat of the open country. Maria wonders, "What would you save, if you took Rodrigo Paestra to France?" The double love triangle leads to a bizarre chain of events I have no intention of spoiling. But the last image of the three adult travelers at a night club, finally in Madrid, watching a man with a "chalky laugh" singing with "loving, languorous, nauseous drunkenness," evokes the complexity, the utter tangled thorniness, of this story.

You can get a copy here.

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For Women in Translation Month, I'm reviewing three novellas right here on this blog, as well as tweeting poetry in translation daily. The first of the three novellas is "Love in a Fallen City" by Eileen Chang. Stay tuned for a selection from Alexandra Kollontai's Love of Worker Bees and Marguerite Duras' "10:30 on a Summer Evening."

Eileen Chang has long been on my to-read list. So when I learned about Women in Translation Month I put her at the top of my agenda. You may know her through Ang Lee's adaptation of her 1979 novella Lust, Caution. Born in Shanghai in 1920, she straddled two radically different worlds. Translator Karen S. Kingbury writes in her introduction to Love in a Fallen City that "Chang's worldly form of the sublime was achieved [...] by viewing her father's [aristocratic, traditional] Qing world from her mother's [modern, Edwardian] perspective, but with an artist's compassionate detachment." This straddling of eras is apparent from the start of "Love in a Fallen City." Liusu, a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee, struggles to live with her stifling family in Shanghai. Their clocks are literally one hour behind the rest of the city to "save daylight," and, "The Bai household was a fairyland where a single day, creeping slowly by, was  a thousand years in the outside world."

When news of her ex-husband's death arrives, her family tries to convince her to return to his family as his widow--thus relieving themselves of her burdensome presence.  Rather bleakly, her elderly mother says, "Staying with me is not a feasible long-term plan. Going back is the decent thing to do. Take a child to live with you, get through the next fifteen years or so, and you'll prevail in the end." A matchmaker suggests Liusu find a new husband or become a nun and eventually convinces the Bai family to allow Liusu to travel with her to Hong Kong. There, the major conflict unfolds, when it becomes clear that Fan Liuyuan, "an overseas Chinese" had contrived to have Liusu come to Hong Kong. He wants "a real Chinese girl," "never out of fashion," and when she calls him a modern man he replies, "You say 'modern,' but what you probably mean is Western." Their uncertain budding relationship takes Liusu into territory as ambiguous and unsettling as being a widow in her mother's home, but with the frightening freedom of being more or less alone in a huge, unknown city.

Chang's writing is intensely visual, influenced by modernism while maintaining sparkling clarity. On Hong Kong's waterfront:

"it was a fiery afternoon, and the most striking part of the view was the parade of giant billboards along the dock, their reds, oranges, and pinks mirrored in the lush green water. Below the surface of the water, bars and blots of clashing color plunged in murderous confusion. Liusu found herself thinking that in a city of such hyperboles, even a sprained ankle would hurt more than it did in other places."

Her binocular vision (to borrow the the title of Edith Pearlman's collection, another straddler of worlds) is the kind of perspective I find endlessly fascinating. The invasion of Hong Kong has serious repercussions for Liusu and Liuyuan's future together. It's the sort of widening out, from the deeply intimate to the global, that I love to encounter in fiction and strive to achieve in my own work. I'm so glad I finally got to this novella and look forward to reading the rest of the collection. "The Golden Cangue," another novella in the volume, is translated by Chang herself--it'll be a real treat to get a sense of how she viewed her own work and how it should feel in English.

For more Women in Translation Month goodness, check out Meytal Radziniski's wonderful blog Biblibio.

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