Rara’s Three Books: Genre Challenges, The Genesis of Violence, and Philosophical Journeys | Culture

TINE HØEG’s Tour de chambre, translated from Danish by Ieva Toleikytė

I read Tour de chambre by thirty-year-old Danish author Tine Høeg in one sitting. It is easy to identify with the heroes of the book, because here is the golden youth boiling in a student dormitory, which we all have experienced during our studies. Parties, passions, friendships, interwoven into one indivisible vortex of youth, in which we all desperately want to spin as long as possible, until something tragic and irreversible happens. Tine covers many themes – identity, creative search, friendships, betrayal, art, longing and death.

Regarding this book, it is very important to emphasize the author’s writing style, the genre challenges she poses to her readers. She writes in short sentences, broken lines, punctuation marks are (not) used very thoughtfully. Often, her minimalist, poetic style is more reminiscent of virtual correspondence, messages than a regular novel. As the author herself says: “I invented my own form that best conveys my material. Then it’s very gratifying to be able to challenge people’s imagination of what a ‘real’ novel looks like.”

She reminds me of Sally Rooney in terms of her youthful themes and the way she writes, but in terms of writing style, Tine is much livelier, more interesting. “Tour de chambre” was like a fresh, intoxicating spring rain in every sense, because it is a great talent to fit so many emotions and feelings into so few words.

I can safely say that Tine Høeg is one of my most pleasant discoveries this year, and I will be looking forward to her other books.

Paradise by FERNANDA MELCHOR, translated from Spanish by Eglė Naujokaittė

The writer of Mexican origin Fernanda Melchor literally blew the roofs off with her first book translated into Lithuanian, “Hurricane Season”.
Paradais is Fernando Melchor’s second novel to be included in the long 2022 series. Booker the list. As in the previous novel, the action takes place in Mexico, and the themes here are just as complex: murder, torture, rape, incest and many other forms of exploitation. In the book, the author emphasizes that the violence and misogyny of both young characters have no clear source. It doesn’t stem from the financial deprivation Polo is experiencing, and it’s not something that can be fixed through Franco’s dad’s bank account. Rather, it is a culture of systemic oppression that has been perpetuated for generations and manifests senselessly on young people. Melchor has a wonderful quality of showing rather than judging, even in dire situations, it is important for her to show the humanity of her characters, the root causes of the evil that manifests through them.

When writing, Melchor tries to identify with her characters as much as possible. She writes in their tone, lexicon, creating long and aggressive sentences that go on for pages, the dictionary is overflowing with offensive, misogynistic and homophobic swear words (they were, by the way, perfectly translated by Eglė Naujokaitytė), which, I will not hide, emotionally exhaust the reader, which is why the “Paradise” book reading is emotionally difficult. However, I understand that this is the author’s goal, that precisely by causing disgust and anger in her readers, she seeks a shock effect. It is this use of language that allows Melchor to show the verbal violence that our society often ignores.

You ask – why do you need to read about these horrors? In my opinion, Melchor’s work is necessary to read in order to delve into Latin American literary traditions and analyze what remains and what changes in them. When asked about magical realism, a literary style developed in Latin America by writers including Gabriel García Márquez, Melchor notes his frustration with the term, which nowadays makes people want to focus more on the fictional, fictional aspects of literature and less on reality. Melchor concentrates magical realism on the depiction of the dark side of “Paradise”, and uses spoken, violent language and dialogues to highlight the reality of Mexico.

“Mr. Palomar” by ITALO CALVINO, translated from Italian by Toma Gudelytė

The works of Italo Calvino always surprise me, they are written with great attention to details, philosophical ideas, the meaning of which can only be understood by connecting all threads into one.

Palomar is the so-called astronomical observatory, which for a long time could boast of the largest telescope in the world. It’s also the name of the book’s main character, Mr. Palomar, who constantly finds a place to fix his gaze.

Mr. Palomar is Calvin’s last and perhaps most philosophical work, a collection of semi-comic meditations on the universe as Mr. Palomar observes and explores it. His eyes and mind explore ocean waves, constellations, a woman lying on a beach, nipples, mating turtles, a thrush whistling, the afternoon moon, different sizes of slippers, types of cheese when choosing a favorite cheese, a giraffe, and much more, ending the book with a chapter on How to Learn to Be Dead “. At the end of the book, the author himself indicates the thematic indexes, which indicate the three thematic areas of his book – visual experiences, anthropological and, in a broad sense, cultural elements, and the third – speculative experiences related to the universe, time, infinity, the relationship between “I” and the world, planes of consciousness . This scheme acts as a springboard for the imagination, one can suspect that numerological matters evolved from the coincidences of the composition, and not the other way around.

Calvin is a master of subtle descriptions, his sentences are thick, the hero’s thoughts are anxious, doubtful, confused, as if solving an eternal dilemma – how to find one’s place in a cracking and creaking world, where all wisdom, intelligence, all discoveries sometimes dissolve in the anguished gaze of an albino gorilla or falling in the glow of meteorites, he never found his beloved constellation that night…