October Newsletter
Out this month is our sixth book of the year, Suneeta Peres da Costa's Saudade, which was just named a finalist for the Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards.
Saudade follows a Goan immigrant family caught between their complicity in Portuguese rule and their own outsider status in pre-independence Angola. Looking back on her childhood, the narrator, Maria, captures with intense lyricism her difficult relationship with her mother and the ways in which their intimate world is shaken by domestic violence, the legacies of slavery, and the end of empire.
To get Saudade along with our next five titles, sign up for the Transit Book Club.
An Interview with Suneeta Peres da Costa
Jessica Faleiro: Tell us about the title of the book—where does it come from and what does it refer to, specifically within the book?
Suneeta Peres da Costa: Saudade is an untranslatable word, and an ineffably Portuguese concept; perhaps the closest English meaning is ‘longing for lost things.’ It is a literary and artistic term with some aesthetic kinship to fado music (in Portuguese fado means fate). The concept of saudade is thought to have had its origins in the so-called ‘Age of the Discoveries’ when Portuguese sailors were away from and missed their homes and families. Memory, place and unmooring from those one loves are at its heart.
In writing this novella, I wanted to reclaim this evocative word and write a riposte to that great 16th century epic of Camões, The Lusiads, which is thought to have been composed in a prison in South Goa—my father’s birthplace. At one point when she is asked her name after arriving as an exile in India, Maria even calls herself Saudade. My Saudade is perhaps an anti-epic, a disaporic exile’s song, a fado re-attuned to the violence of Empire, the ghosts of colonialism, and the haunting dispossessions of the Iberian slave trade.
You can read the conversation in full at the Joao-Roque Literary Review.
Axiomatic in The Believer
Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is reviewed by Katharine Coldiron for The Believer:
"It’s the work of a virtuoso, someone who has relentlessly honed her ability to make ideas progress rapidly through sentences, using an order and style that she has innovated, such that the path to a reader’s enlightenment is steep and narrow but clearly marked. Like Maggie Nelson’s, Tumarkin’s is the kind of writing that makes much creative nonfiction seem clumsy and rudimentary, as if everyone else is writing way too many words about smaller, pettier ideas."
Publishers Weekly also named it a Best Nonfiction Book of 2019!
Karl Ove Knausgaard on Jon Fosse
In time for Nobel season, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote an essay on an author whom he thought deserving of the prize, Norwegian playwright and writer Jon Fosse. We're thrilled to be publishing his 1,250-page magnum opus, Septology, in three volumes, beginning with The Other Name in April 2020, in Damion Searls' translation.
"Although his work often approaches death and explores a kind of existential ground zero," says Knausgaard, "it is never disillusioned and certainly not misanthropic, but full of hope. Fosse’s darkness is always luminous."
Read a rare interview with Fosse in Music & Literature.
News, Reviews, and More
1. Publishers Weekly calls María Sonia Cristoff's forthcoming Include Me Out (tr. Katherine Silver), out February 4, "a striking, clever novel" about "the meaninglessness of words and the meanings of silence." 2. Electric Literature on Suneeta Peres da Costa's Saudade, which "explores what it means for colonial subjects to be complicit in oppression and racism." 3. The Christian Science Monitor features Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's Kintu: "African Women Re-writing the Historical Epic." 4. John Freeman highlights Jon Fosse in his (brief) history of Norwegian literature for Lit Hub.