My admiration for Fitzcarraldo Editions remains undiminished. I have just finished Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic, a work I read somewhat against the grain of my usual inclinations. I should do this more often. Lately I have struggled to complete anything I begin, troubled by a vague distaste for literature with no clear cause. Yet I tore through Tumarkin’s complex and riveting essays, drawn in (as often happens with nonfiction) by the voice. She is a sharply attentive writer, vibrantly present, not inward but melancholy in a manner that clarifies rather than distorts.
In this more expansive mood, I turned to another recent Fitzcarraldo title, The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne. There is not much in terms of plot: instead, a shared dislocation spreads across a family, an atmosphere of withheld expression and unclear loyalties. It is a rendering of ordinary experience that resists explanation. Social commentary is implied, not declared.
The prose is precise, and the spareness demands careful reading. Each voice must be inferred from what is unsaid. I kept thinking of Haneke, whose films I have been rewatching. The tension and compression in Álvarez’s writing would lend itself easily to film, not in content but in form.
They’re one of a handful of publishers whose books I would always be prepared to read; I love the fact that their books are like no others I come across!
Yes, bold choices, a discerning eye.