Quick thoughts on two very strange, very compelling books in translation. 

The Twenty Days of Turin by Giorgio De Maria; translated by Ramon Glazov

The Twenty Days of Turin messed with my head the first time I read it. Guess what happened the second time around? 

The history of this utterly terrifying novel is fascinating. It was first published in Italy in 1977. Forty years later, Liveright published Ramon Glazov’s English translation; now, almost a decade later, they’ve released a paperback edition with a Jeff VanderMeer forward and a pair of short stories added into the mix. I had plenty to say about this book back in 2017; since then, more of De Maria’s bibliography has been translated into English. I wrote about that a bit, too. 

I don’t honestly know how best to classify The Twenty Days of Turin. I’ve seen it described as one of the best books written about Italy’s Years of Lead. In his introduction, VanderMeer provides a few points of comparison, one of which — Michel Bernanos’s The Other Side of the Mountain — I’m reading now. This novel is subtitled “A Report From the End of the Century” and follows a journalist as he attempts to better understand a series of deaths that took place in Turin years before.

De Maria’s book has the skeleton of a procedural, then…at least up until the point that it doesn’t. And what this book does better than almost anything else I’ve read is describing the sense that the world its protagonist believed himself to be a part of no longer exists. The final sequence of this book taps into something truly primal. It is truly one of the most unnerving books I’ve ever experienced. 

The Monroe Girls by Antoine Volodine; translated by Alyson Waters

Speaking of writers I first wrote about in 2017! The last few years have seen an uptick in the number of books made available in translation by the writer best known as Antoine Volodine; besides this one, the University of Minnesota Press has several more either recently published or in the works. That’s a good thing. It’s never a bad time to read Volodine’s hallucinatory stories of storytelling and altered perceptions in authoritarian states, but right about now is a better time than most.

In broad strokes, The Monroe Girls is about an attempt to counteract a revolution that has turned into something sterile and authoritarian. This novel abounds with double agents and shifting loyalties, and in those respects it will be familiar to readers with a penchant for the dystopian. The Monroe Girls is a lot stranger than that, however: the titular characters are a kind of paramilitary force that emerge from an afterlife to wreak havoc in the world of the living.

Even that, though, doesn’t quite get at the way that this book handles the line between the living and the dead. Dying doesn’t seem to take characters off the board here; it adds to the dreamlike qualities of the narrative. There’s also the matter of Breton, a man whose alienation is so profound that appears to have developed a second, detached personality. This is a book in which reality itself seems broken, like a metaphysical remake of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. And as strange as all of that may sound, it’s also worth stating that this is probably one of Volodine’s more accessible books — so if you’re looking for a window into their bibliography, this makes a good starting point.