Inês Pedrosa In Your Hands Trans. Andrea Rosenburg Amazon Crossing Portuguese playwright, journalist, and author Inês Pedrosa follows the lives of three generations of women in her introduction to English-language readers. Immensely rewarding and lyrically philosophical, In Your Hands won Portugal’s top literary prize upon its 1997 release; more than two decades later, the transcendent prose and timeless themes of love and tolerance are as resonant as ever. Pascale Pujol Little Culinary Triumphs Trans. Alison Anderson Europa Editions Pascale Pujol’s debut novel, Little Culinary Triumphs, is an entertaining read that follows Sandrine as she tries to realize her dream of opening a restaurant in Paris’s eclectic Montmartre neighborhood. Sandrine enlists the help of some of the neighborhood’s most colorful characters in an attempt to realize her dream while dealing with the discovery of a shady newspaper operation next door. Through her rhythmic prose and witty, biting humor, Pujol takes readers on an exhilarating narrative ride. Nota Bene North and East Frisian, where no substantial literature arose. Each editor follows a different approach. The first chapter focuses on the existing canon, whereas the second highlights the two-sided status of Frisian as a farmer’s vernacular that even so had the aura of being old and respectable in the eyes of foreign learned language lovers. As the chapter on the twentieth century demonstrates , the editors stress they have refrained from presenting a canon of modern Frisian poetry and prose. Instead, they show examples from literature that illustrate the modernization of Frisian society since 1900. This approach circumvents the inevitable dispute about which texts belong to the canon. Examples include the breaking of sexual taboos in the 1960s, the ecological crisis, and the appearance of racist sentiments due to immigration. However, there is no mention of feminism, LGBT emancipation , or even the internet, which surely have put their imprint on Frisian society and literature, too. These flaws, nevertheless , are only small specks on the grand panorama of Frisian written language offered to us in Swallows and Floating Horses, with due credits also to the team of five translators and their three Frisian counterparts. Teake Oppewal Ljouwert/Leeuwarden Meenal Shrivastava Amma’s Daughters: A Memoir Edmonton, Alberta. AU Press. 2018. 312 pages It is significant that Meenal Shrivastava’s memoir of Amma, her maternal grandmother , is titled Amma’s Daughters. I emphasize the plural “daughters” because this memoir is a great example of relational storytelling. While the figure of the story we are following and which, if any, of the characters deserve our sympathy . Eventually, they all remain opaque, vessels for Burstein’s unflagging inventiveness and baroque language, which seamlessly shifts between contemporary colloquial idioms and biblical citations, a richness of idiom that is preserved in Gabriel Levin’s translation. Soon the reader realizes that the muck of the title also refers to the novel’s dense language, like a great, muddy deluge, swallowing up and sweeping under anything that happens on its path: garden furniture, fishbowls, talking dogs, broken jugs, pagan deities, or sadistic literary critics. And yet it is among these random, amassed objects that the most touching and empathetic moments of the book emerge. The fishbowl, for example, contained two fish that were released by the five-year-old Jeremiah and his father one early dawn in the pond at the university’s botanical gardens. They then gave the bowl to the Ammonite security guard, who filled it with earth to make an ant farm for his son, and he in turn nurtured generations of ants inside it, even after his father’s death, even when he, too, grew old. Such are Burstein’s prophesies of hope, to hold on to as we tumult toward ruin. Shir Alon University of Oklahoma WORLDLIT.ORG 101 anticolonial Indian activist, Amma, takes center stage in the narrative, the telling of the tale is refracted through the perspective of Shrivastava’s mother, Surekha Sinha, herself a writer of “eight books” and “more than a thousand pieces of verse.” Yet Amma’s Daughters is also the book Surekha Sinha never wrote. The responsibility for writing that book fell to Surekha Sinha’s daughter, the academic Meenal Shrivastava. Drawing...
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May 24, 2019
Andreas Burkert 
Open Access