{"id":8690,"date":"2020-11-30T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8690"},"modified":"2020-11-29T17:01:34","modified_gmt":"2020-11-29T22:01:34","slug":"foreign-objectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8690","title":{"rendered":"Foreign Object(ive)s"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"origami,<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Three short novels from international authors, all under 175 pages, showing you can do a lot to tell a great story, evoke reader emotion, and, by the way, garner significant critical praise in about half the length of the average American novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ramifications<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>by Daniel Salda\u00f1a Paris, translated by Christina MacSweeney<\/strong> – A young boy in Mexico City is obsessed with folding and refolding origami frogs. This is one of the rituals he developed to fill his mind and his time after his mother walked out on him, his older sister, and their rigid father. She couldn\u2019t take their stifling middle-class life and vowed to join the revolutionaries in Chiapas. But did she? After a time of youthful doldrums, he takes dramatic action to find her and doesn\u2019t. Then word comes she died in an auto accident. But did she? Now an adult, her son appears irredeemably \u201clost in the woods of machismo and social revolts \u201d says reviewer Alejandro Zambra.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Convenience Store Woman<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori<\/strong> \u2013 Thirty-six-year-old Keiko Furukura found work at a convenience store when she was in her late teens and, despite her likely abilities, has never left that job. The daily rituals and predictable rhythms of the convenience store soothe her, and she has a talent for the needs of the job\u2014customer support, upselling, store display. Her family wants her to aspire to more, to return to the university, to find a husband, but life at the Smile Mart is what satisfies this \u201cdefiantly oddball\u201d woman. Named a \u201cbest book\u201d by numerous publications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Hundred Million Years and a Day<\/a><\/em><\/strong> by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, translated by Sam Taylor<\/strong> \u2013 You can brace yourself for winter by reading this highly praised adventure involving the hunt for an intact dinosaur skeleton high in a remote Alpine wilderness. It\u2019s the late summer of 1954, and three palaeontologists and their taciturn mountain guide have only a limited time to search before winter closes in, and close in it does. The guide insists they leave, but Stan, the organizer of the group, won\u2019t go. Eventually, they leave him and he braves the elements so as to get an early start on the search the next spring. All alone, in the cold and dark, the boundaries between waking and dreaming, the now and the past blur. \u201cSpare, elegant and poetic, this slender novel is quietly devastating\u201d said the Daily Mail.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo of frog origami by Hanne Hasu for Pixabay.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three short novels from international authors, all under 175 pages, showing you can do a lot to tell a great story, evoke reader emotion, and, by the way, garner significant critical praise in about half the length of the average … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Foreign Object(ive)s - three highly regarded foreign novels. How do they pack so much in? Half the length of the typical US novel!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,61,1288,40,1749,126],"tags":[1781,1782],"class_list":["post-8690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-character","category-culture","category-fiction","category-international","category-reading-2","tag-daniel-saldana-paris","tag-jean-baptiste-andrea"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2ga","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8691,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8690\/revisions\/8691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}