João Reis - One of the funniest novels you are likely to read,. It is a perfect example of the negative capability described by Keats that would absolutely kill the police procedural from which it spins its web: it accepts the existence of “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

 

João Reis, Bedraggling Grandma with Russian

Snow, Trans. by João Reis. Corona Samizdat,

2021 

One of the funniest novels you are likely to read, which you will particularly appreciate if you have the perverse nature of a Beckett lover, or have come across David Vardeman’s books, Bedraggling Grandma is a book of precision taken to torturous limits of hilarity. Sure a woman has been murdered and the eye witness is a talking, thinking, reading stuffed donkey, but it is not entirely absurd, for it suggests a number of human truths like a short electric cut through Wittgenstein, who plays a role in the novel that begins with the sheer absurd and ends with a more elevated absurd, you odd and Cartesian human reader.

A book that can be read in one sitting, it is also a book that you will read at least three times if you do race through it in a sitting. Perhaps you should read it standing. Standing and leaning? Well, that would allow some leg flexing, yes. But isn’t your concentration sharper if you are sitting? And though your legs stretch less, is the trade-off between less stretching worth it for the rest they have in not supporting your body? And which is better for your head? Sitting, as you can rest your face in your hands? Or standing, which allows better back to head stretching? What if someone enters the room? Why did they? Did they intend to interrupt your reading of Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow? If not, why did they interrupt your reading of Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow? For they did, indeed, interrupt your reading of Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow. Would they have felt less free to do so if you were standing? Does sitting invite interruption?

These are questions you will not think to ask until after you realized that you have been slyly taught how to think by this Portuguese master of humor, philosophy, and imagination, Joao Reis.

There is a diacritical mark above the a in Joao much like the Spanish one we use for manana, which is the soonest I will add it to this description. 

Bedraggling Grandma is a book of precision taken to torturous limits of hilarity. Sure a woman has been murdered and the eye witness is a talking, thinking, reading stuffed donkey, but it is not entirely absurd, for it suggests a number of human truths like a short electric cut though Wittgenstein, who plays a role in the novel that begins with the sheer absurd and ends with a more elevated absurd, you odd and Cartesian human reader.

A book that can be read in one sitting, it is also a book that you will read at least three times if you do race through it in a sitting. Perhaps you should read it standing. Standing and leaning? Well, that would allow some leg flexing, yes. But isn’t your concentration more sharp if you are sitting? And though your legs stretch less, is the trade-off between less stretching worth it for the rest they have in not supporting your body?

https://dublinliteraryaward.ie/books/bedraggling-grandma-with-russian-snow/

The absurd must be presented matter-of-factly; that is how it is embedded in our day-to-day lives, where it predominates almost to the point of disappearing from our view, resisting detection and exposure. Bedraggling Grandma with Russian Snow is a novel that is in part about that very thing, the failure to apply rational thinking and observation to a dire situation in preference for invented observation that serves to expose an artificial “perfect plot.” Two detectives, each with his own peripheral ambitions, interrogate witnesses to and randomly selected suspects of the barely described murder of a young woman. With supposedly meticulous care, they fail utterly even to approach the truth. In hilarious scene after scene, facts elude detection because a monomaniacal interrogator works from the assumption that, according to Wittgenstein’s philosophy, anyone, just anyone sufficiently fulfills the role of perpetrator.

Reis’s flawlessly flatly wry novel uses that most popular and artificial genre, the police procedural, as a point of departure without heaping contempt on it, strangely enough, considering the degree to which his characters torture their faculties in grasping at uncertain certainties. For instance, the extended interrogation of Didier H. is a remarkable delight and alone worth the price of admission, though the whole does not fall below that level. I frankly covet this writer and his virtuosity and told a writer friend so as I was making my way through the novel. There is something remarkably gentle and gentlemanly about Reis’s use of the absurd. How he manages this, I can’t quite say. Perhaps the writer who can render a plush mechanical donkey (Bruce) of such innate charm and politeness as to put the crude and cruel human beings around him to shame can’t help but ennoble whatever he touches. As masterfully as Reis employs the absurd, he is capable of sudden but not jarring turns toward tenderness, as with the curiously heartbreaking image of an old Russian grandma, pelted by Canadian snow, being asked by her grandson, who considers this all just fun, to compare that snow beating her to the Russian snow of her former life.

This novel is a perfect example of the negative capability described by Keats that would absolutely kill the police procedural from which it spins its web: it accepts the existence of “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” - David Vardeman

https://www.joaoreisautor.com/

Joâo Reis, Devastation of Silence. Trans. by

Adrian Minckley. Open Letter, 2023

Like Louis-Ferdinand Céline meets Larry David.

The nights were terrible, during the day we were occupied, but at night we got to thinking, picturing food, our houses, food again, painful memories from our childhoods—that abominable era—would mix with images of food and our torture would grow and grow, I recalled my impotence before the plate I was ordered to clean, the impossibility of choice in a world into which I had been thrust unwillingly, war was indeed an extension of the torture of being born . . .

Set during the difficult era of the Great War, The Silence Devastation is the story of a captain in the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps who, with no documents showing his rank, finds himself in a German prison camp forced to share the circumstances of his poorer countrymen. He is hungry, constantly plagued by the sound of incessant detonations—and trying to finish his oral account of a strange story about a German scientist and voice recordings. In all this, he must seek meaning in his observations, his dreams, and, above all, silence.

"The Translator's Bride is a neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty."—Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books

"João Reis . . . is a great connoisseur of literary comedy, in a subtle way in which everything is so natural, but simultaneously rude, with the cruel ways in which various characters are depicted, thus creating a blackly comic web that weaves together the world of the book."—Nelson Zagalo, Virtual Illusion

"João Reis’ great success in The Translator’s Bride is to convince his audience that they are reading a work written at modernism’s mid-twentieth-century zenith . . . pulling us out of our own times and holding us in the era of Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway."—West Camel, European Literature Network

João Reis, The Translator's Bride. Trans. by

Sónia Oliveira. Open Letter, 2019

At the start of The Translator's Bride, the Translator's bride has left him. But if he can only find a way to buy a small house, maybe he can win her back . . . These are the obsessive thoughts that pervade the Translator's mind as he walks around an unnamed city in 1920, trying to figure out how to put his life back together. His employers aren’t paying him, he’s trying to survive a woman’s unwanted advances, and he’s trying to make the best of his desperate living conditions. All while he struggles with his own mind and angry and psychotic ideas, filled with longing and melancholy. Darkly funny, filled with acidic observations and told with a frenetic pace, The Translator’s Bride is an incredible ride—whether you’re a translator or not!

"The circuitous absorption of The Translator’s Bride is sustained by its novella-like structure and dark, gleaming humor. . . . [Its] language is beautiful, mordant, and tragic."—Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews

"The Translator's Bride is a neurotic little gem: fast, fun, frenzied, and feisty."—Jeremy Garber, Powell's Books

"The Translator's Bride is a great little book that brings a breath of fresh air to today's moment in Portuguese literature, asserting itself as an excellent novel not to be forgotten."—Jorge Navarro, O Tempo Entre Os Meus Livros

"João Reis . . . is a great connoisseur of literary comedy, in a subtle way in which everything is so natural, but simultaneously rude, with the cruel ways in which various characters are depicted, thus creating a blackly comic web that weaves together the world of the book."—Nelson Zagalo, Virtual Illusion

"João Reis’ great success in The Translator’s Bride is to convince his audience that they are reading a work written at modernism’s mid-twentieth-century zenith . . . pulling us out of our own times and holding us in the era of Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway."—West Camel, European Literature Network

"Reis’s novel is both surprising and hilarious."—Publishers Weekly