#beejay silcox

[dk-thrive]

no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved – only the inescapable rhythms of loss

Serpell is a terrific destabiliser, even at the level of the sentence. A room echoes with the “curbed bedlam” of sitcom laughter; commuters ignore each other in the “slotted indifference” of a train carriage. There are no tidy moral lessons at the end of her dissonant and time-contorting fable – no bones to bury, no truth to pin, no mysteries solved – only the inescapable rhythms of loss. “It’s like swimming,” she writes. “You stroke and kick to get to the outermost edge of the wave. You feel the momentum: go on go on go on. But always, something tugs you back into the scooped water, the furrows, those relentless grooves.”

— Beejay Silcox, from “The Furrows by Namwali Serpell review – bravura investigation of grief” (The Guardian, August 17, 2022)

[womenintranslation]

The First Arabic Novel to Win the International Booker Prize

Jokha Alharthi’s inventive multigenerational tale, “Celestial Bodies,” is also the first novel by an Omani woman to be translated into English.

“Booth’s translation honors the elliptical rhythms of Arabic and the language’s rich literary heritage. She imbues the book’s numerous poetic extracts with lyricism and devotedly preserves the rhymes and cadences of its proverbs. (“The feet walk fast for the loving heart’s sake, but when you feel no longing, your feet drag and ache.”) Yet there is no doubt that this is a contemporary novel, insistent and alive.”