The National Book Awards (US): the best-written work on the translated fiction shortlist

Plus the best-written previous winner

COMING SOON:

—The recording of my discussion yesterday with Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes of what we mean by the term ‘literary’; of the demise of popular modernism, and the slow cancellation of the future; of Eleanor’s disco moves; and of Alexis Wright’s absurdist masterwork Praiseworthy. Thanks to those of you who joined us.

—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes. To avoid sending you too many posts, we’ll leave the recent releases until December.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘Arms raised, as if a rifle were pointed at her, she pontificated in pizzicato, and we, in our tattered rags, as still as salt statues, indifferent to heat or cold, to famine, fatigue, or fear of the next cave-in, we swallowed her reminiscences like bread rolls spread with soya paste’: the best-written work on this year’s shortlist for the National Book Award for translated fiction. The winner will be announced on the 20th of November.

—’it’s going to be a fight, and not just with our own heads, but with other people’s too, you know? we’ll fight if we have to because nothing can keep us apart anymore, they’ll have to literally cut us off, our flesh, to tear us off piece by piece’: the best-written winner of the NBA for translated fiction. This choice is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century.

If you’d like us to consider your own recent release or a work you’ve serialised on Substack, sign up for a paid subscription via the button below and email a copy of your book to auraist@substack.com. If we pick your submission we’ll invite you to write an article on prose style that will be included in the published collection of these pieces.

A paid subscription also gives readers access to our full archive of dozens of author masterclasses on prose style, hundreds of picks from recent releases and prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.,

Or you can join the 24K discerning readers who’ve followed us or subscribed for free access. Please note, though, that after a few weeks posts are only available to paid subscribers.

Or you can join the 500 Substacks recommending Auraist and receive a complimentary six-month subscription.

---

THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS (US) 2024 SHORTLIST FOR TRANSLATED FICTION

Bothayna Al-Essa (tr. Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain), The Book Censor’s Library

Linnea Axelsson (tr. Saskia Vogel), Ædnan

Fiston Mwanza Mujila (tr. Roland Glasser), The Villain’s Dance

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (tr. Lin King), Taiwan Travelogue

Samar Yazbek (tr. Leri Price), Where the Wind Calls Home

The best-written of these is

1.​ The incendiary and outlandish life of Tshiamuena, nicknamed (posthumously and entirely appropriately) Madonna of the Cafunfo Mines—notwithstanding the jealously of certain diamond panners short on ambition, enthusiasm, and charisma.

The Madonna was not some little madam under the influence of alcohol and other beverages bereft of dosage instructions. She was no prophetess of misfortune and tall tales derived from some unknown gutter. Not even a vendor of dreams, questionable expectations, chimeras … well, you’re quite cognizant of where such trinkets lead as they stream into your ears without cease. We were only too familiar with the petulant refrains of those curmudgeons who quibbled over such details. They rehashed the same remarks all day long as if there were fuck all else to do on this earth but poke fun at the Madonna—“Tshiamuena this, Tshiamuena that. Tshiamuena’s got wings, big wings, and as soon as night falls, this witch takes off and flits about for miles and miles without a drop of kerosene, jinxing us from above and sabotaging any chance of finding diamonds in the otherworld.” We’d heard it all! Pointless babbling, rumor-mongering, pure humbuggery; for when it came to Tshiamuena, all ears were pricked; everyone became a scientist, a university professor, a sociologist, a linguist, an ethnologist; each proffered their own two-bit philosophy to dissect her every word and deed. Even the most crestfallen rediscovered a taste for life, the necessary inspiration, the appropriate panache, the smooth words of a politician on the stump. Go hard on the drink if you will, but concocting poppycock just to sink a person (and an authority like the Madonna no less)—that beggars belief. How can people equipped with a cock, a belly, arms, legs, and a brain spend eight hours a day trying to hamstring someone? All the blame for the woes of tropical Africa they laid at her door: miscarriages, failed coups, wars, Emperor Bokassa’s delusions of grandeur … They speculated without a break, concocted conspiracy theories, strived to detect relationships of cause and effect between the Madonna (blessed be her memory) and any reversal of fortune that befell the Zairian diaspora. And always (and ever still) those rumors of cannibalism. What a topsy-turvy world! The Madonna, a habitual witch with a fancy for flesh and fresh blood? Even if you detest an individual (for plausible reason) it is still insane to make them carry the can for each cave-in, bout of diarrhea, or act of mischief. They’d not even slept off their beer, polished their teeth, and zipped up their pants than they were opening their gobs to erratically gun down a living legend.

They made you want to puke, the whole greasy lot of them. Weirdest of all was that the scandalmongers proliferated in direct proportion to the quantity of energy and cash Tshiamuena expended in assisting the masses. Without going back as far as the Flood, you could spread gossip and tittle-tattle and tell tall tales, yet the truth would not budge by one iota: Tshiamuena was a grande dame, an exceptional being, a mother to many of us, a queen, a powerful woman. She lacked an opera singer’s figure, a beauty queen’s splendor, or a duchess’ imperial bearing, but she captivated and hypnotized as soon as you met her gaze. Look her straight in the eye and you’d be seized with epilepsy on the spot. We Zairians (mostly born after 1960) would burst into tears as soon as we started to chew the fat with her. When Tshiamuena talked of smuggling in the 1970s, just after Angola’s independence, not one man dared lift his little finger to challenge the veracity of her words. She rattled off entire family trees of the diggers, be they patrocinadors, dona moteurs, lavadors, plongeurs, or karimbeurs. She was not the memory of Angola, she was Angola, the other Angola, the Angola of mines, money, diamonds, cave-ins, the diamantiferous River Kwango; the Angola that any man dreams of at least once in his life (be he a lover of money or not). Tshiamuena was informed of all the rackets going on between Zaire and Angola; she had a detailed knowledge of the Zairians’ comings and goings; she knew when such and such had entered Angola for the first time, which back road they had taken, and what capital they carried in their haversack. In her rare moments of madness (for Tshiamuena did lose her marbles, going by her long tirades and her agitated brow) she enumerated the deceased: long lists of kids, all Zairian, felled in their frantic quest for hasty enrichment by way of someone else’s diamonds—that is to say Angolan stones. Not a hiccough, credulous utterance, or laugh interrupted her narrative flow, even though it was normal in the Cafunfo Mines to come across young Zairians laughing, mouths agape, for no apparent reason. Her beaming features gave everyone the chance to admire her dimples.

Tshiamuena was born to reign. What a woman! Arms raised, as if a rifle were pointed at her, she pontificated in pizzicato, and we, in our tattered rags, as still as salt statues, indifferent to heat or cold, to famine, fatigue, or fear of the next cave-in, we swallowed her reminiscences like bread rolls spread with soya paste. Tshiamuena was raving, but with such nonchalance. Her fantasies, we lapped them up. Toxic and excessive masculinities were crushed in the bud. Her words touched you, plunged down your esophagus, smashed your cerebral system, and you emerged exhausted, truly breathless, as if you’d escaped a nasty pogrom or done a thousand years’ forced labor. Her uncontrolled exhaustions, her nervous breakdowns, her secretions of drool, her vomitings, her momentary losses of speech, of hearing, and of smell too, her tremoring feet and head, and her inopportune drowsiness added grist to the mill of those who accused her of belonging to a sect and sabotaging people’s fortunes, not to mention preventing them from hitting pay dirt without sacrificing a member of their family. Her incantations concluded with sumptuous moments of silence that even the foot soldiers of the UNITA rebellion didn’t dare transgress. This natural silence fell heavier than starved bodies gorged on digging or the despair of returning to Kinshasa empty-handed. The silence, along with her grating voice and the rare assurance with which she recounted her inanities, was the daily fare of those protracted nights deprived of light bulbs, oil lamps, or even the Good Lord himself.

Zaire. Late 90's. Mobutu's thirty-year reign is tottering. In Lubumbashi, the stubbornly homeless Sanza has fallen in with a trio of veteran street kids led by the devious Ngungi. A chance encounter with the mysterious Monsieur Guillaume seems to offer a way out . . . Meanwhile in Angola, Molakisi has joined thousands of fellow Zairians hoping to make their fortunes hunting diamonds, while Austrian Franz finds himself roped into writing the memoirs of the charismatic Tshiamuena, the "Madonna of the Cafunfo Mines." Things are drawing to a head, but at the Mambo de la Fête, they still dance the Villain's Dance from dusk till dawn.

---

RECOMMENDED:

when things are other things

How to keep going...

---

THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED FICTION - PREVIOUS WINNERS

2018: Yoko Tawada (tr. Margaret Mitsutani), The Emissary

2019: László Krasznahorkai (tr. Ottilie Mulzet), Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming

2020: Miri Yu (tr. Morgan Giles), Tokyo Ueno Station

2021: Elisa Shua Dusapin (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins), Winter in Sokcho

2022: Samanta Schweblin (tr. Megan McDowell), Seven Empty Houses

2023: Stênio Gardel (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato), The Words That Remain

The best-written of these is

Raimundo

“Raimundo Gaudêncio de Freitas,” in a tentative stroke, barely touching the paper. He tamed that damn pencil and wrote, for the first time, his full name. Seventy-one years old and he starts getting ideas, as he likes to say, about learning to read and write as an old man. Raimundo came easy. But Gaudêncio was complicated, dense with longing, with its five vowels and an accent. Freitas was made of blood.

Not for lack of wanting, ever since he was a boy. But his father said writing was for people who don’t need to put food on the table. Raimundo went to work young. At night, his arm, tuned to the rhythm of the scythe, needed rest, there was more the next day. His desire to learn slowly gave way to need. His future was written out in front of him, a gift from his father, a family man who owned a bit of land, who signed with a thumbprint when his word wasn’t enough. What couldn’t be said, was kept silent, a thought. Raimundo never became a family man or owned any land. He pulled up his roots, carrying the letter in his shirt pocket.

A whole letter. One word after another, how many of them? Sending a letter to someone who can’t read, imagine that. The tip of the pencil hovered over the line. The next name was the one of the person who’d written the letter, fifty-two years ago. Next to the notebook, the hardened envelope, still sealed. Raimundo never let anyone read it and grew old wishing to know what it said, the desire growing with him. An elderly fetus, late blooming. A lifetime kept in that letter.

*

Cícero

Next to his own, he wrote Cícero’s name. Did it end with a u? It looked nicer with an o. Only six letters, but it could hold so much, it was heavy. Like the cross, which started with a c, like caring and cock.

*

They’d known each other since they were kids, born in the same community. When they were seventeen, at a forró dance at the square, Cícero’s eyes, the color of the earth, plowed right through Raimundo.

“Nice party, huh, Gaudêncio? A lot of pretty girls.”

“Yeah.”

Raimundo thought Cícero was handsome, with a beauty similar to the one he saw in the girls.

Beating heart, blood rushing to the pit of his stomach. Stalk planted.

Lying in the hammock, wild images in his mind tossed and turned his body. A man’s body, both his and Cícero’s. Man with woman, because man with man wasn’t right, that’s what everyone said, a man needs to think women look good, a man who thinks other men look good isn’t a real man. But he was a man, and he thought Cícero was handsome! And did Cícero think he was handsome too? He’d come to talk about girls and dance with them. With their hair fragrant with coconut oil, soft breasts, plump thighs. Cícero eagerly held the pretty girls rubbing against his leg, straddling.

A few days later, the two of them were out alone, working the land that belonged to Cícero’s father. A quick light drizzle moistened the ground. Raimundo’s gaze slipped over to Cícero’s body, his bare chest hard, covered in sweat and dust. Landscape that would stir a desire to fly in any caged bird. Caged Raimundo. When Cícero noticed, Raimundo looked away, but the gleam of the scythe soon cut through his patience, and again he ventured another glance at his friend, hoping his mind would decide whether it wanted what his body wanted.

“What is it, Gaudêncio?”

And now what? he’s going to pick a fight with me, tell the whole town, Raimundo is a fag, What’s with all the staring? why did you have to go and do that, Raimundo? but he’s my friend, he won’t say anything, it didn’t mean anything anyway, nothing, really.

He wanted to answer. He didn’t answer, but in a way he did. Cícero slowly moved closer, then even closer, his face only a few inches from Raimundo’s. With one hand, he grabbed the nape of his neck, from the left, taking hold of the lock of white hair there, while he clasped his waist with the other. Raimundo didn’t move. He buried himself in those brown eyes, feeling the warmth firing up his body and dilating his veins, not knowing where to put his head, his hands, his feet, or his member, growing between his thighs. Dirt saliva tongues arms legs mouths hunger life.

*

They met almost every day. It was risky. Always in the bushes. In the bushes they hid from everyone else while they revealed themselves to each other. Man and man, they got along very well, they liked each other. A good taste, but that left something sour in the back of their minds.

*

It lasted two years.

“What the fuck is going on?”

Cícero’s father caught his son on all fours, clenched his right hand into a fist, and knocked him to the ground with a punch.

Seu Nonato, he’s your son, we’re friends, I grew up going to your house and Cícero coming to mine, we started to like each other a little while ago, we aren’t hurting anybody, you didn’t have to hit him like that, Seu Nonato, please don’t hurt him, he’s your son, get up, Cícero, get up.

In the end, Raimundo didn’t say any of this, while Cícero wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand.

Seu Nonato yanked his son by the arm.

“Get up, Cícero, get up, put on your clothes and go home.”

*

Raimundo looked like he was going to help, but then stopped. Seu Nonato’s face was red, twisted in a grimace.

“And what about you, huh? You just wait until I tell your father. He’s going to beat you to a pulp.”

Cícero looked back one more time.

We shouldn’t have been here, out in the open, The shade from the cashew tree is nice, Gaudêncio, but today I want to be in the sun, we took too many chances, that’s what happened, staying out here by the river, but at the time, at the time we knew it couldn’t be any other time, all those days without seeing each other, touching each other, when one body leaned into the other, it was all the yearning from those ten days, talking, it was the yearning from much longer than that, a whole lifetime of desire in there, all that had passed and that was yet to come, every time we felt that sweet agony inside, saying yes to desire and desire clutching the yes from our bodies, from our heads, from time, and I couldn’t wait any longer, and neither could he, we just couldn’t, and that was why I came, Cícero, you feel that way too, but you kept going on about having a future, having a wife, a child, you got scared, it scared me too, I had a horrible feeling here inside me, being away from you, I couldn’t take it anymore, I couldn’t have just let your fears decide our future, your words that last time we were out by the cashew tree, and then you left, I came after you and then what, what’ll happen now? your family will find out, my family will find out, if this is already confusing to us, imagine to our fathers, the heartbreak, the anger they’ll feel, you know what they think of people like that, like the two of us, don’t you? they think the worst, that it’s worse even than disease, where are my pants? I’ll have to talk to my father, and say what? and to my mother? there are no words, I got to find the few I got and tell them, they’ll find out anyway, what else is there to hide? what if we can’t be together anymore? it’s going to be a fight, and not just with our own heads, but with other people’s too, you know? we’ll fight if we have to because nothing can keep us apart anymore, they’ll have to literally cut us off, our flesh, to tear us off piece by piece.

*

Raimundo finished getting dressed. The sun was starting to drop from the middle of the day. Before leaving the riverbank, he looked at the cross that marked the river and that would mark his life. He headed on home.

A letter has beckoned to Raimundo since he received it over fifty years ago from his youthful passion, handsome Cicero. But having grown up in an impoverished area of Brazil where the demands of manual labor thwarted his becoming literate, Raimundo has long been unable to read. As young men, he and Cicero fell in love, only to have Raimundo’s father brutally beat his son when he discovered their affair. Even after Raimundo succeeds in making a life for himself in the big city, he continues to be haunted by this secret missive full of longing from the distant past. Now at age seventy-one, he at last acquires a true education and the ability to access the letter. Exploring Brazil’s little-known hinterland as well its urban haunts, this is a sweeping novel of repression, violence, and shame, along with their flip sides: survival, endurance, and the ultimate triumph of an unforgettable figure on society’s margins. The Words That Remain explores the universal power of the written word and language, and how they affect all our relationships.