Solarpunk

Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. The novel ends in an elegant twist awash in schadenfreude. Eventide is ink well spent. Lanie Tankard Austin, Texas Dolores Redondo All This I Will Give to You Trans. Michael Meigs. Seattle. Amazon Crossing. 2018. 478 pages. One expects a thick novel to be expansive in theme or epically cover a great deal of time and territory, but lately several mysteries, especially in translation, have been showing up with all the heft of One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Brothers Karamazov. At 478 pages, All This I Will Give to You is by Spanish novelist Dolores Redondo, whose Baztán Trilogy (set in the Basque country) has sold a million and a half copies in Spanish and been translated into thirty-five languages. Her books have been nominated for several major awards, including the Crime Writers Association International Dagger for novels translated into English. All This gets its title from Satan’s offer to Jesus in the wilderness and begins with the main character, Manuel, a novelist, being notified that his husband, Álvaro, has been killed in a car accident on a lonely road in Galicia. He was supposed to have been conducting business in Barcelona on the opposite side of the country. Almost immediately , mysterious details begin to accumulate . Álvaro has been keeping the secret that he is from a titled family, and Manuel learns he has inherited all of Álvaro’s possessions. No one in the family is very happy with the gay husband of their estranged scion becoming lord of the manor, even though Manuel, offended by Álvaro’s keeping this immense secret from him, has no interest in claiming any of the estate. A chain-smoking retired cop, however, convinces Manuel to stick around for a while and investigate what he suspects was no accident. Gradually, family secrets are exposed, Manuel develops colorful allies and enemies, such as an amiable priest and an Ethel Barrymore–type evil matriarch, and adopts a sad stray dog, and murder will out as in a proper, old-fashioned mystery. Even with the contemporary references to gay marriage and a few pages devoted to a long-ago sexual assault in a seminary, it’s all a bit familiar, as you may surmise. The question is whether such a light story justifies the thickness of the book it fills. Reading it is, in general, pleasant, and the novel is entertaining. The prose is not overtly verbose or pretentious. Yet you have the suspicion that Agatha Christie would have cooked the same stew in a pot half the size. J. Madison Davis Palmyra, Virginia Solarpunk: Ecological and Fantastical Stories in a Sustainable World Ed. Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro. Trans. Fábio Fernandes. Albuquerque, New Mexico. World Weaver Press. 2018. 286 pages. Solarpunk is the third installment in a triptych including Vaporpunk and Dieselpunk , all edited by Brazilian science-fiction author Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro. It anthologizes nine Brazilian and Portuguese short fiction stories that challenge utopian themes characterizing solarpunk written in English . Solarpunk asks its readers to “imagine a sustainable world, run on clean and renewable energies that are less aggressive to the environment.” However, this anthology does so on the premise that a sustainable future does not necessarily ensure equality, freedom, and justice. Notable selections include the detective fiction “Soylent Green Is People!” by Carlos World Literature in Review 70 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 Orsi, which imagines a process capable of harvesting energy from the breakdown of organic matter—with some dark consequences . Another is “Escape,” by Gabriel Cantareira, which posits a sustainable future dominated by large neoliberal corporations . Finally, the gothic story “Gary Johnson” grapples with the implications of a scientific process capable of releasing energy from the human soul. Translation is Solarpunk’s biggest problem . The translator, Fábio Fernandes, acknowledges he typically works on English to Portuguese-language texts and that Solarpunk is his first Portuguese to Englishlanguage translation. Possibly for this reason , many of the short stories are marked by word choice and grammatical errors. However, its biggest translational shortcoming is the dearth of contextual material. The stories in this anthology are strongly rooted in Brazilian and Portuguese

Art · Art history · Country · Expansive · Literature · Sociology · Solitude · Trilogy · Wilderness · Global Energy and Sustainability Research · History

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