#the novel has an English translation

[buchdrache]

Review: Identitti by Mithu Sanyal

"Identity does not determine the things we do, but it does determine the things other people do to us." (S. 410)

They still exist, the novels that turn one's worldview completely upside down. "Identitti" by Mithu Sanyal is one such novel. Immediately after I finished reading the novel, I rushed to my PC to type these lines, so as not to lose the feeling that the novel had created in me. It has been working in me for days. The story has opened up a field of themes for me that is completely contrary to what I assumed up to now.

Scandal! The famous professor Saraswati is in fact white and has only lied to everyone about her Indian identity. Is it even a lie? Her student Nivedita, at any rate, is shocked by the revelation, she feels cheated and deceived. She immediately goes to her professor to get answers. Answers to the question of why Saraswati did what she did, but also to find herself and her tangled identity.

Nivedita is the protagonist of the novel and at the same time her story cannot be told without Saraswati. Nivedita's mother comes from Poland, her father from India, and she herself grew up in Germany. Is she now Polish, Indian, German? All her life, Nivedita has been looking for confirmation from outside, putting on other people's identities like others put on clothes. First this happened in the form of her cousin Priti, who grew up in England in a strong Indian community, then later with her professor Saraswati, who teaches postcolonial studies at the University of Düsseldorf.

The novel tackles a highly sensitive and heatedly debated subject area: Identity and Identity Politics, and at the same time it wraps up the subject in a witty and brisk read. I was gripped by the style from the start and soon by the subject matter. The narrative focuses strongly on intellectual discourse, but without overloading it with scientific jargon.

What moves me most personally, however, are the questions that are opened up here: If categories like race and gender are just social constructs, what constitutes our identity? Where do the lines run between identity, cultural appropriation and blackfacing? What makes us us?

The novel does not provide clear answers, because there are no clear answers to these questions. But it provides plenty of material to think about.

It is also interesting how the novel is arranged. It is a collage of different media: classic narrative text, transcripts of radio broadcasts, newspaper columns, tweets, Instagram posts and so on. Almost like real life is a collage of different aspects. For many of these posts, the author asked actual people to contribute. She described the context of her novel to them and asked them to write a tweet as spontaneously as they would if they read about a case like the Saraswatis. And indeed there was. In 2015, Rachel Dolezal was outed by the press as white, who until then had been living as a Black woman (unlike Saraswati, whose identity is POC). The case inspired Sanyal to write her novel.

"Identitti" is, despite everything, fictional, although real people appear and all the places mentioned also actually exist. But this does not diminish the questions the novel raises, as they have an all too real impact on all our lives.

If race, like gender, is only constructed, then why should it be okay to hormonally and surgically adapt one's own body to one's identity in the case of gender, but not in the case of race? Where is the difference? This question has bothered me from the beginning. I don't have a clear answer yet, but I am fascinated by this question. Perhaps there is no need for a clear answer. In any case, I have learned that there is a term, transracial, that describes what Saraswati lives.

In my search for answers in the novel, I noticed with interest how the characters engage in discourse around it. Saraswati's opponents are outraged. They accuse her of cultural appropriation, racism and blackfacing. Saraswati counters them with numerous arguments. But while her opponents are just spouting phrases, Saraswati is able to give them calm and level-headed (if occasionally a bit populist and flashy) whole lectures to justify why she did what she did, making well-substantiated arguments and numerous cross-references to academic literature. One particular passage caught my attention:

""Are you going to claim to be Aboriginal next, then, when everything can be interchanged?" sneered Oluchi's friend." (S. 244)

When I first heard about the fact that apparently you can actually change physical characteristics to make passing as transracial (cisracial?) possible, I was confused. Race for me until then was something inherent, something you are born with and that is not changeable. I can't suddenly be Black, I am, after all, white.

But the same is true of gender. I have the gender I have, I was just assigned a different one at birth. What Oluchi's friend says here is one-to-one TERF rhetoric, only applied to race instead of gender. Race as a category was artificially created. Race is not linked to physical characteristics, race has no biological basis, but oppressors use physical characteristics to support their theories. The same happened with the category of gender.

Maybe that was the moment that made me change my mind. In the epilogue to the novel, Sanyal mentions the text "trans. Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities" by Roger Burbaker. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but this text also seems to relate the categories of race and gender. So it sounds like a worthwhile further read.

I do have one criticism, however. Precisely because the novel relates race and gender as categories, I would have expected gender to be dealt with as sensitively as race. But that is not always the case. The novel is gendered throughout, so there is an awareness of the subject. A genderqueer cis woman does indeed appear. Nivedita is initially confused as to whether Toni is a man or a woman when she appears, but then nonetheless genders her based on physical characteristics before asking Toni for her pronouns. I think a gender-sensitive reading could have tweaked this a bit.

I don't know if this society is ready for the discussions the novel opens up, but it would be nice if it was. The novel is definitely a good and important loud voice on this.

"To say only gender can be truly trans is the same as trying to distinguish real science from ... other forms of knowledge-making, high art from low art, art from craft." (S. 243)

Possible triggers - experiences of racism - Racist attacks - terrorist attack in Hanau is addressed - toxic relationship

Advertising according to §6 TMG Series information Author: Mithu Sanyal Title: Identitti Language: German Cover illustration: Raja Ravi Varma: Kali, before 1906 Series: No Pages: 424 Original price: 22€ Publisher: Carl Hanser Verlag Genre: Fiction ISBN: 978-3-446-26921-7

Originally posted on 15/01/2023

#book review #bookblr #identitti #mithu sanyal #fiction #race #gender #racism #the novel has an English translation

[onlyzhuyilong]

#guardian #镇魂 guardian #沈巍 #even in English translation Priest’s descriptive writing is wonderfully #even in English translation Priest’s descriptive writing is wonderful #zhu yilong #朱一龙 #朱一龍 #주일룡 #my gifs #I got the English translation of the novel & man I love it #please stand by for the queue #if you’ve ever get the chance to see zhu yilong irl (like at an event or film festival) he matches this description too #he has a subtle beauty that cameras don’t do justice to #if anyone asks the drama ends with them sitting on a bench laughing the end nobody died

[non-un-topo]

Forever fucked up over the fact that sometimes you have to write the thing you desperately want to read/watch because it doesn't exist yet

#this isn't about fanfiction btw dfghfds #i love writing but at what cost !!! also in this economy ??? #and all of my ideas are so niche and silly but at least i have a feeling my dad would love them !!! we have a similar brain #inherited the brain while i also inherited his entire face #anyway one of these days i'm going to write a long rant about how almost EVERY novel that takes place in the middle ages - #- takes place in fucking england and has something to do with monarchs or the construction of a church. #or it's all fantasy OR the story of king arthur a hundred thousand times. #don't be a coward. tell stories about non-english commoners. and stop making the crusades sound like a noble thing. #were it not for The State of The World and the Economy i would quit everything and write movies and books #because all of my writing is very visual. like i think a lot of my ideas would translate better on film. #ohhh you know what it is? a lot of these books i'm thinking of are written by historians and i think historians of the english type - #- get really hard over royals and famous battles and such. #and that's all well and good but it's not very accessible to readers just starting out in the genre. i've complained about this before lol

[suv-draws-stuff]

The indomitable gascon spirit and strange rat man (gender neutral), now limbified

#art #digital art #my art #original character #oc #limbus company #limbus oc #yes theyre also in the same bus as my other limbus ocs #I ONLY JUST RECENTLY REMEMBERED I HAD A MUSKETEER HYPERFIXATION WHEN I WAS YOUNGER so i decided “why not???” #also have you ever discovered a japanese novel so obscure #that the source you rely on are the movie adaptation and the unfinished english translation #because the novel has no professional english translation #and you do all that because you love surreal media #my head hurts in a good way #character reference

[kafkaguy]

if you're bilingual/multilingual i really suggest doing translation as a hobby. nothing serious, just getting your favourite songs or poems or book passages in one language and trying to translate them into another one. it can be really relaxing, it has the same effect as doing a sudoku or crossword puzzle. it's just the right amount of challenging and soothing and also stretches your understanding of each language and may even reveal things about the meaning of the text you're translating! so if you wanna do something creative but feel kind of unmotivated, some light translating is a good way to go 👍

#i do this a lot these days its a nice way to wind down #its especially fun trying to find ways to get english songs to work in greek #cos phonetically theyre such different languages. wildly different use of syllables. #greek has some specific ass words for specific ass things and english has one word for multiple things #but then it also applies vice versa?? so theres no safe harbour #its really fun thogh. i did it a lot when i was younger reading greek translations of english books #and then getting pissed when i read the english version cos 80% of the time the greek translation sucked 😭😭 #so i did it a lot out of spite. not entire books. but a good chunk of them #i did once translate an entire greek graphic novel into english 👍 #so yeah #🍪

[lupizora]

For the past year or so, I've been listening to a local person reading his entire collection of Sherlock Holmes (although it took me until recently to figure out he's been going about it by publication order lol).

It's been fun, considering audiobooks couldn't really keep my attention for long in the past. Maybe it's easier since this time it's in my native language idk.

Funny thing is that the reason I give most people about choosing to listen to Sherlock Holmes, now of all times, is that "Well, I haven't read it before and it's a staple of classical literature in general".

However, this is only part of the answer.

Sure, I do like a good mystery novel and I didn't want to appear unknowledgeable(?) to other booklovers, of an older generation I guess haha 😅

But no. The true reason, deep down, that I jumped at the opportunity to read Sherlock Holmes when it arrived was that I thought it'd help me understand Kudou Shinichi better. Is this the case of one fandom obsession bleeding to another similar interest? Like you can figure out a lot about other people from their die-hard interests irl. Why not fictional characters too? lmao 🤣

The Sherlock Holmes books are certainly a product of their time, but they are quite interesting nonetheless. I'm already considering which editions I wanna buy 😁

#wolfsyapping #dcmk #sherlock holmes #kudou shinichi #The person who is reading them has a pleasant and clear voice tbh #Though I don't know which editions he's reading from #the first couple of stories used words that are a bit old fashioned in the translation #which could simply be the translators trying to emulate the generation of English used in the original text #but I didn't notice anything similar in the later stories or novels 🤔

[kissmefriendly]

Guys. I don’t do book recs, or at least I rarely do, but Frankenstein In Baghdad by Ahmed Sadaawi really is an incredible book. I got my copy at a charity shop but you can get it online — it’s £8 on Amazon though definitely check other sites too.

Without spoiling it, the setting is a post-American invasion of Iraq and the local junk dealer collects body parts from explosions in the area, stitching them together in order to give them a proper burial and he calls it the Whatsitsname. The completed body of the Whatsitsname is then possessed by a hotel security guard who died in the latest explosion and is looking for his body. Unexplainable murders then begin happening in Baghdad.

It does carry over a lot of the plots and characters from the original novel (the blind man is a half-blind old Catholic woman waiting for her long-dead son to return home, Frankenstein isn’t a med student but a renowned liar, the Creature is a murderer/vigilante, etc). But the setting and time period also add to the story — we more or less stay in the same area throughout the novel. The horror is tangible, the characters are so human it hurts, the prose is like silk it’s so beautifully written. It’s themes of justice, humanity, religion, status, power and destiny are so well done.

(At first I thought the sheer amount of characters would get difficult to remember but the author does such a good job of setting them up and giving them distinct characterisation that it never became a problem for me.)

#with the rise in popularity of Dracula I thought I’d throw out another gothic novel retelling #obviously there’s some pretty heavy stuff in there given the time and setting #but it was so good #I wanna see what else Sadaawi has done - even though I read the English translation the narration was beautiful #ik it’s been translated into quite a few languages too #book recommendations #Frankenstein in Baghdad #also having it set in Bataween was quite funny/well choiced. it literally means ‘bit’ from the extensive quick google search I did on it #coz. coz he’s made of bits. get it.

[kleiner-detektiv]

Just learned that there will be a german translation of the novels of 7th time loop in summer next year.

While I'm waiting for volume 5 to be delivered.

#I mean... Nice! #But the german summary already makes it sound weird. #Next question is if I'll buy the german translation as well 🫠 #Volume 1 is supposed to cost 29€ at the moment. That's... Some number. #I got the English one for 13€ #Ughhhhh... #7th time loop #I loved the English translations a lot. So I don't know if I'm happy with the german one as soon as I have to compare. #Even if I still find it cute that you can see which were the current most loved words of the translator :D #It was 'Eventually' in novel 1 and 2 and 'husky' in 4. 🤭 #les me has spoken

[spatio-rift]

the way every akatsuki fan seems to be convinced that hidan and deidara are slutty freaks annoys me so fucking much. THEYRE NOT

#its so aggravating to see deidara posts in the wild. no one actually gets him #im still annoyed about that post calling him dumb for hating orochimaru for leaving akatsuki #bc he doesnt wanna be here either #OROCHIMARU LEAVING IS WHAT LED TO HIM BEING RECRUITED!!!! OF COURSE HE HAS A GRUDGE AGAINST HIM FOR IT #and everyone was talking about some kind of loyalty to sasori in the tags😭😭 be fucking for real please #its doubly annoying to me bc he explicitly says it in his chapter of the akatsuki novel which i literally translated into english

[ratnurse]

IT'S HERE!!!

#this is remnants of filth or yuwu by a chinese danmei author called meatbun and its my favourite novel of the past two years #the english translation of vol 1 has just been published #and one of my close friends was the translator!!! #the picture is my favourite character he is very bitchy and pretty and i adore him #i never talk about it here because certain people made me feel ashamed and dirty due to my love of this genre but whatever #i am cringe and i am free

[kingdumkum]

something i’ve discovered in the course of editing is that “dove” and “dived” are both grammatically correct past tense conjugations of “to dive” BUT the difference is that “dove” is more common in American English/literature and “dived” is more prevalent in British English/literature so i’m curious:

what kind of books (american v. british) do you read most and has it impacted your diction?

#pls reblog im genuinely curious if this is a Me concept or if the way other people speak/write is this influenced by what the origins of lit #it’s only funny because i live in deep deep south and have a bit of drawl #so the furthest possible speech pattern but alas #i’m not surprised #my favorite novel of all time is the picture of dorian gray #but frankenstein is up there too #and the hobbit what a classic #even my modern stuff recently has been translated into English in which the translation comes from a British agency so #one eyed king

[hexcitrine]

randomly looked at this account to update my age and holy shit it's been a while since i posted here..........i have a small pile of art i have yet to post but hbhbshdbshbd too lazy

#part of it is that i haven't posted any of my recent art but in addition #i haven't made new art in a WHILE (abt 3 months) which is highly unusual for me but the reason for that is #3 months ago i suddenly remembered that i tried learning mandarin for three (3) days before forgetting about it for 9 months #(amusingly the reason why is not because of danmei......i did not even know danmei existed when i first decided to learn it) #anyways i have been insanely fixated on learning it for the past 3 months #however since art is primarily a way for me to process my interests and that only really be done when i'm fixated on media........well #let's just say i have not been making art at all #that might change soon tho #rn i'm reading 撒野 (saye) in chinese bc it's at a level i can read and i fucking love it so far #idk why i picked a book longer than svsss (which took me a week to read in english)...u would think there's no chance of me finishing it #or even reading it #especially when the only novel i've read before this is a chinese translation of the fucking magic finger by roald dahl LMFAO #but it's been a week and i'm a fifth of the way into it which i was not expecting at all #it was initially an exercise of “i will get as far as i can and try my best to read a chapter a day” but i've been zipping through chapters #last night i was up until 3 AM reading it and i was so tempted to read more but had to stop myself #of course this is all aided by pleco which lets me quickly look up words that i don't know yet. pleco ily #that being said...this all does mean i know words like 收銀台 before i even know the word for “orange” (the color) which is pretty funny #but idk considering that the sum of my time spent learning chinese is just 3 months..........i think i am doing pretty damn good #i thought it would be a LOT longer before i could finally start enjoying some interesting things #god but it really has been a while since i last read a high school romance...but i am quite fond of the leads and their respective baggage #sorry for the whole tag ramble.........i haven't really had anyone to talk abt this stuff with #oh also it's my birthday #that is why i am even here to update my age in the first place #happy lan wangji birthday #actually the only reason i realized it was gonna be my birthday soon is because i saw chinese artists posting lan wangji birthday fanart #and then remembered that we share the same birthday #also re: the art i haven't posted yet.........a good chunk of it is misvil fanart...song qingshi my beloved #and there's also a luo binghe drawn on an art app i PROGRAMMED MYSELF (!!!!!!!!!) in there #actually that piece is the main reason i haven't posted the art i HAVE made. how the fuck do i explain that i drew it on an app that i made #sorry this is genuinely the most off the rails tag ramble i've ever done. okay i'm done

[moonsinkfoxgirl]

mom picked up my Heart of the Woods physical edition, and presumably thinking it’s a movie asked me whether one can watch it in German...

#I wasn't even sure where I was supposed to start explaining #'that's a visual novel it is read on a computer' #'yes I think it has a German translation' #'the audio is only in English though' #'you do realize that that's anime lesbians on the cover right?' #'if you read that i might have to explain to you what a youtuber is' #'among a dozen other things' #so yeah in the end I just clammed up #told her I wasn't sure #and then the conversation immediately fizzled out as it usually does #not sure whether I should be relieved or disappointed #rambles from the moonsink

[leatherbookmark]

in all aspects but physical i am plastering my self to the windows of people who have just watched cql and hissing READ THE NOVEL incessantly

#depending on your finances it's either easier of more difficult now (not everyone had aspare One Hundred US Dollars lying around and #that's not including the shipping) BUT this book is so good it explains a bunch of stuff that wasn't clear in the show it adds CONTEXT #it adds MORE fun shades of gray!!! it has post-guanyin temple scenes that WILL KILL YOU #i'm saying this as an ex-Person Who Said They Wouldn't Read The Novel Ever Because It Sounded Annoying. READ the novel #i feel like as opposed to many novel fans i'm not really 'no but' @ the show but rather 'yes and' #and that going from the show to the novel is like... the relation of mdzs's title to the novel's contents #you think you know everything? well Grab A Snack And Let's Go #i think there's one book left for the english translation to be complete? the main novel at least. and then vol 5 is the extras #i'm very horizontal about it but Eh #shrimp thoughts

[pebblesmustard]

I don't think I can ever describe it decently enough but finding a kindred spirit (of sorts) between two authors' voices (especially when they are so distinct from one another and unique to themselves) is so magical.

#this is about me thinking i found a mirror of elizabeth strout’s pen around lucy barton and tezer özlü’s ‘cold nights of childhood’ #even though they are so so different from one another #if i didn’t know that cold nights of childhood was only translated to english for the first time last year #i would swear that strout had read it #which makes it even more insane! #art!!! #it materializes in such similar but distinct ways from such different individuals with such different lives and experiences! #i wish i was smarter so i could talk about it in a way that made sense #aaarrghhh it’s makes me want to chew on drywall! #i've only ever read this one novel by özlü and it has kind of fucked me up while comforting me at the same time #and strout also fucked me up while comforting me in a completely different manner! #idk it might just be because i read them back to back that my brain is trying real hard to want to find a thread that connects them lol #i do think i have to read “cold nights of childhood” a couple times more to truly grasp and digest it #that book is about 65 pages and it punches you in the stomach in almost every page #and i don't know my thoughts around this could change after a reread but for the time being this unhinged opinion shall stay here

[glowingsavepoint]

welp it seems the website that had the mtl of tsctir has been shut down. life is a nightmare

#there goes literally the only source for over 400 chapters of this fucking novel. this shits never getting a full english translation #like it was a shit mtl ngl but at least you could context clue together what was happening well enough #i wouldve made a back up if had known that site was gonna disappear ;-; #can someone please translate this story to the end im losing my mind over here #like i know some people that are doing it but its so painstakingly slow its driving me crazy #i just need to know what happens from 746 onwards and now that the mtl is gone the furthest one out there now has only just reached the 300 #im so sad #tsctir #mine