CAT Book Club: March

Now that March is officially here, it’s time to start talking about our books for the month:

The Endless Summer(opens in a new tab) by Madame Nielsen, translated from Danish by Gaye Kynoch (Open Letter Books)

Empty Set(opens in a new tab) by Verónica Gerber Bicecci, translated from Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Coffee House Press)

THE ENDLESS SUMMER

About the Book

Emotional and visceral, the novel drifts through time and space, relating the lives, loves, and dissolutions of everyone who surrounds this unexpected couple, including the woman’s ex-husband who holds the family at gunpoint, her daughter, and her lovers, who include a boy who finds himself and his true sexual identity in America. There is also the young boy who “is perhaps a girl, but does not yet know it,” who narrates it all.

Read an excerpt.(opens in a new tab)

What People Are Saying

“The reader is swept away by the flow of the narrative, the warmth and wit of a storyteller who presents modern tales of destiny with a fearless presentation of the bittersweet melancholy of existence.”
— Sjón (who chose The Endless Summer as one of the top ten Nordic books you should read(opens in a new tab))

“The narration has the pace and inevitability of a scherzo, even its ominous moments told with a playful fluidity and irony. Like a diaphanous Thomas Bernhard novel, this strangely shaped book meanders along, now exploring the life of an obscure minor character, suddenly stopping to obsess over a bowl of rice and curry, only haltingly moving toward the family’s tragic destiny.”
— Scott Esposito for the New York Times Book Review (read the full review(opens in a new tab))

Meet the Author

Meet Madame Nielsen in this video she made(opens in a new tab).

Madame Nielsen is touring the United States! Catch her in San Francisco on March 8. She’ll be in conversation with Two Lines Press’ Scott Esposito.

Empty Set

About the Book

A Venn diagram for love, Empty Set traces and reconstructs relationships using geometry, ice cores, and tree rings. It tells a story of holes appearing inside other holes. It is the chronicle of a breakup that results in a journey toward family origins. The narrator, the daughter of Argentine exiles who settled in Mexico City, must move back into the apartment from which her mother suddenly disappeared. When words fail, fall short, or stop working altogether, they yield to drawings and abstractions. Empty Set traces a language of its own, composed of letters, diagrams, and hollowed spaces.

Perhaps you already read an excerpt in Two Lines 27? We’ll be talking about the book later this month.

What People Are Saying

“Empty Set may be an antidote to the current climate of despair.”
— Lisa Fetchko for the Los Angeles Review of Books (read the full review(opens in a new tab))

Kevin Thomas responds to the novel with this illustrated review(opens in a new tab).

Meet the Author and Translator

Verónica Gerber Bicecci is an artist who writes. Check out her portfolio of artwork here(opens in a new tab).

Christina MacSweeney is also the translator of Valeria Luiselli, Daniel Saldaña París, Julián Herbert, and Elvira Navarro. Learn more about Christina’s work through these interviews from 2016(opens in a new tab), 2017, and 2018(opens in a new tab).

Both author and translator will be in San Francisco on March 29 to discuss Empty Set. We can’t wait!