Leucate Univers

Abstract

more engaged with the Russian spirit than with the country’s quotidian concerns. The novel almost floats; we are engaged from beginning to end, and one couldn’t find a better companion than Rostov. Rita D. Jacobs New York City Emili Teixidor. Black Bread. Trans. Peter Bush. Windsor, Ontario. Biblioasis. 2016. 393 pages. There is nothing more profound than the realization of what war does well beyond its official end. Peter Bush has given us a poetic translation of Emili Teixidor’s novel Black Bread, in which each line seems to be given complete attention and where Teixidor has loaded line after line with both wonderful and terrible beauty. From the opening scene to the finale, the narrative of war and chaos and coming-of-age is underpinned with what seems an eternal forest—a natural world that holds secrets and desires and will ultimately outlive all the pettiness that is humanity. Though the narrative of Black Bread is based in Catalonia just after the Spanish Civil War, it is a timeless setting for contemporary humanity. This is a novel that will stick with us because of the continued relevance of divisive social orders in addition to the complexities of religion and politics. Telling a story of war, class divisions , sexuality, religious doctrine, executions , and fascist rule from the point of view of a young boy is, perhaps, one of the best ways to deliver a litany of existential questions without a hint of preachiness . It unfolds flawlessly, through honest characters, scenes, and descriptions of rural Spain. From the start, we are folded into a familiar world—the close relationships that children have as they grow up together; the hard-working family; the grandmother with infinite wisdom. Ultimately, Emili Teixidor’s novel allows us to see aspects of ourselves by situating us in moments of sympathy for the speaker . Teixidor’s linguistic brushstrokes paint everything we need in order to see ourselves just as the speaker finally does himself: that we are, in the end, always somehow at war within ourselves. That we are all doomed to someday grapple with moments so uncomfortable and arresting that we might find ourselves completely changed into something we no longer recognize. Sarah Warren University of North Texas Sachin Kundalkar. Cobalt Blue. Trans. Jerry Pinto. New York. The New Press. 2016. 240 pages. The entrance of an unknown stranger who radically impacts the lives of other characters is a commonly used fictional device. Consider Pasolini’s Teorema, where the entrance of an opaque character called “The Visitor” radically changes the day-to-day existence of five characters. Sachin Kundalkar’s Marathi novel, Cobalt Blue, brilliantly translated by Jerry Pinto, deploys a similar device. The everyday and erotic lives of two characters, a gay man named Tanay and his sister Anuja, are completely altered after a young artist , whose backstory remains shrouded in mystery, rents an upstairs room in their parental home. The novel, divided into two parts (“Tanay” and “Anuja”), depicts the profound impact this stranger has on the two characters after he disappears without explanation. Tanay’s narrative is an imaginary, emotionally intense dialogue between an “I” and a “you.” Anuja’s narrative consists of diary entries where she tries to reconstruct her life after her lover leaves her. What unites these two narratives, which often show us the same events from different perspectives, is the polyvalent use of blue. Blue functions as a marker for the alluring difference of the other, for example when Tanay says: “You had a way of looking at things which seemed sharp, perceptive , cobalt blue.” The color signifies an incorporation of the other within the self when Tanay ruminates on relationships: “If nothing else,” he says, “you adopt some of the other person’s habits.” Almost as an afterthought, he reveals how his beloved is World Literature in Review 80 WLT JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 woven into his perception of self: “Yesterday , when a cobalt blue smudge of the wall ended up on my hand, I wiped it on my trousers without thinking.” Blue operates as a cipher of loss like the blue paint drying on the floor in Tanay’s “museum of broken things” or the “stream...