Check out the LA Times review of The Arid Sky and read an exclusive excerpt of Emiliano Monge's "striking desert noir"

Get your hands on The Arid Sky, the novel the Los Angeles Times describes as a "stellar English-language debut" for author Emiliano Monge. Praising the novel's "bleak, lyrical prose" that "thrives on a persistent feeling of universality," reviewer Mark Athitakis writes "[The Arid Sky] evokes a sense of terrible acts constantly repeating in one place, history grimly folding back on itself. It’s a traditional western cut up and turned into an M.C. Escher print."

Read the full review here and grab your copy of The Arid Sky here.

Can’t wait for your copy to arrive? Get your first look at The Arid Sky with the following excerpt.

DISAPPEARANCE, ESCAPE

May 27, 1911, and another knot in our account of this life—a knot in which, at the hour when the sun beats down on the backs of men across the Mesa Madre Buena and the earth succumbs to the drowsiness and slowness that succeed spring, Germán Alcántara Carnero hears a sudden whistle and stops swinging his mattock. Puzzled, ourman, still a boy at this point in our story, turns and gazes over his shoulder, and when the whistle cuts through the air again, the three mangy dogs that were sleeping on the ground nearby rouse themselves, sniffing the air for a smell that is yet to reach the boy—the smell of a smudge coming down over the scrubland, where the heat from the earth meets the heat dropping from the incandescence that is the sky at this time of year.

He looks at the horizon, which is very clear, and sees the smudge as it continues to advance over the scrub. It’s been so long since we’ve had any kind of wind, thinks Germán Alcántara Carnero. Two, maybe three weeks and not the tiniest gust, he thinks, casting his mind back as the smudge continues its approach, gradually growing into a silhouette. The whistling man whistles again, calling to attention the men, women, and children hereabouts, who all leave off their work and, like Alcántara Carnero, stand and wait. The local landowner—the lord and master, that is, of these lands and of all the people in them—approaches on his mare, a thousand swirling starlings following in his wake. A solitary cloud crosses the sun—brief respite for Germán Alcántara Carnero as he wonders what orders they’re about to be given.

The cloud’s fleeting shadow, as fleeting as the words I am writing here, moves across the plowed field, across the plots in which seeds have already been sown, and then over the path along which the horse—whose glinting owner we will refer to as lordandmaster—is trotting. Eye drawn by the glints coming off of lordandmaster’s clothes, ourman—whom we will be better off calling ouryoungman, though in truth he isn’t even quite a young man yet—does not notice his dogs rousing themselves until they set to barking. “Quiet, you three!” he says as the lordandmaster whistles again. But the dogs continue to bark and whine, and, leaning down, he kicks one of the beasts in the neck and the other on the snout: “I said quiet!”

A little way off, ouryoungman hears someone asking: “What’s he want?” It is the man who always speaks up when anything happens in these parts: “What is it this time?” Another peon, a few meters from us, answers with a laugh: “He’s come to hand out some presents.” All those in earshot laugh. “He’s here to give us his horse.” And the first man, plunging his machete into the soil and wiping his brow, says: “I bet he’s going to tell us to all go home. I know him, and I know he don’t like being out in the hot sun like this…Bet he’s going to tell us, ‘Whoever doesn’t stay home will pay…’ Look at him, so sure of himself—cock of the walk!”

Lordandmaster whistles once more—not because any of his workers haven’t heard him already, but simply because he can, and because he knows it annoys these men.

“He’s frightened it’ll start here, too!” says the man who has begun exhorting his companions. “Frightened we’ll rise up as well. Bet you he’s going to come and complain about those ten men, and warn us off joining them.” “I wish he was afraid!” says one of the older men—the one who’s been working for longest on these lands, lands where the punishing heat even seeps through the ground, quickly fermenting any recently buried bodies. The man who spoke first, undeterred, indifferent to the old man’s reply, takes three steps forward and says: “He’s come to say, ‘woe to those thinking of welcoming them into their homes.’” But again, ouryoungman doesn’t hear this. He has just noticed a strange insect crawling from the ear of his dog and trying to pick it off. Seeing its blue-green wings, Germán Alcántara Carnero thinks: It’s a Jerusalem Cricket. I’ll give it to María, she’ll like it. He reaches out a hand, but then feels a sharp pain, a heavy blow that, though it doesn’t touch him, cuts the insect in two and therefore hurts him nonetheless. “That bug don’t bite, but he does!” says one of the peons as he comes by, pointing to lordandmaster at the far end of the field. “Better get over there now.”

Germán Alcántara Carnero watches in anger as the man, the machete in his hand, walks grudgingly over, but then falls in behind him. When he reaches the group surrounding lordandmaster, he catches the tail end of a phrase: “…I will go and seek them out, personally, and I will find them, and I will mete out such punishment on each and every one.” With his outsize hands, Germán Alcántara Carnero forces open a space between the men, who now turn their heads to the north, where the man who killed his insect has begun speaking: “So go back to our houses, is that it? And once we get there stay put? I have a better idea—why don’t you and your family go to fuck?” The men, though already silent, fall quieter still, and ouryoungman braces himself: lordandmaster immediately crosses the circle, his hand reaching for his gun, which he levels at the man’s head and, still advancing, pulls the trigger. And the man who killed the insect is blown onto his back.

The mouth of the fallen man issues the final gurgling sounds that his body will ever emit, as though his heart and lungs, before giving in, had to unleash a final insult to the workers looking on in silence, heads bowed, waiting for their next order. “Home,” roars lordandmaster, “all of you get home, and don’t let me catch any of you going out.” They all stare back at him, all except for Germán Alcántara Carnero, who is watching the hole through which the dead man’s brains are dribbling out. “Don’t none of you come back out again till I say so.” And with that, lordandmaster mounts his mare once more and, pulling hard on the reins, shouts: “Don’t let me hear that any of you have been talking with the Rio Verde men, nor showing them any kind of hospitality.” Pleased with their silence and with the obedient turning and walking away of his workers—men who, even with their backs to him, don’t dare to defy him in words or thought— lordandmaster spins begins moving off, but then ouryoungman’s dogs begin barking again and he turns back. What’s Félix’s boy doing now? he wonders, with confusion that will soon produce a smile on his face. What’s he doing peering at the dead man? Is he really going to…? Nodding his head, captivated, lordandmaster lets out a laugh as he sees the person who will one day be ourman reach out and thrust his outsize fingers into the bloody wound. Lordandmaster, up on his mare, applauds, saying to himself: This you’ll never forget, not this, Félix’s little boy, before tugging on the reins again and setting off. The surprise on the face of ouryoungman—the only worker remaining—lingers: he has seen dead men before but never gone so far as to touch one, and never imagined the blood would be this warm. Crouching, looking in the dead man’s eyes, he whispers: “That’s what you get, fucker, for hurting my beetle. It was meant to be a gift.”

He looks up, the only things around him now his three dogs and the vultures that have just landed a little way off—beyond them across the fields he can see the diminishing silhouettes of the workers picking their way through the scrub, and beyond that the rocky outcrop, sandstone winking in the sun, and beyond the rocky outcrop the vast swath of thicket land where his family lives and where a dam will one day be erected.

Picking his way across the fresh furrows to his mattock, he gathers it up along with the two halves of the beetle that crawled out of his dog’s ear, and thinks of his sister, who turns fourteen today and who has never uttered a word in her life: she was born with a tongue the wrong size for her mouth. “I’ll find her something else. By the time I get back to the house, I swear I’ll have another present.” Scanning the horizon once more, ouryoungman enjoins his dogs—who are casting resigned looks at the fly-covered corpse also being contemplated by the jumpy vultures: “Come on, you three. Let’s go!” Leaving the field behind and passing up and down a number of small knolls, he cuts into the part of the land where at certain times of the year beanstalks and at others alfalfa and sorghum and grass and corn grow, in haphazard manner: a manner replicated by almost everything on this plain and thus by this story as well. Here a hundred shoots, there a group of stalks and the heads of some maize, and over there, corncobs in an unlikely line. Here the earth begins to change: the weeds begin to break up into discrete clumps, drifting farther apart and soon coming to resemble islands and then finally small islets charting a course in an ocean of earth—on the surface of which the stone just thrown by Germán Alcántara Carnero lands.

Without breaking stride, ouryoungman leans down and plucks another stone from the path, cleaning the soil from it as he did the previous stone—spitting on it and rubbing it with both hands before carefully checking it over and then hurling it angrily toward the horizon. He has no choice but to find a new gift for María del Sagrado Alcántara Carnero. On this part of the path we are on, where the soil turns sharp and rough underfoot and even the islets of clumped grass desist, the boy who will one day be ourman is more likely to find the surprise he’s looking for: a stone with a fossil inside, one that shows how this area was submerged beneath water in epochs past. He bends down, picks up another stone, checks it, discards it. At the point the path exits the stretch of seemingly ravaged lands and enters the area that precedes the rocky outcrop we are very soon to arrive in—a place where the ground resembles leprous skin—Germán Alcántara Carnero leans down again and, picking up a fourth stone, smiles and gives a small excited skip. Finally, a good gift.

Read an Excerpt from "Beyond the Rice Fields," by Malagasy Author Naivo

Beyond the Rice Fields, by Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa (better known as Naivo), is not only a remarkably sweeping and captivating debut novel of love, loss, and societal upheaval in 19th-century Madagascar, but it's also the first novel from that country ever to be translated into English.  The epic story centers on the friendship between Tsito, a slave, and Fara, the daughter of Tsito's master.  Their bond is strengthened and tested as the political landscape of their heretofore isolated homeland shifts under the weight of colonization by the British and French and the introduction of Catholicism. Beautifully translated by Allison M. Charette, Beyond the Rice Fields calls to mind the greatest abolitionist literature of the 19th century while exposing the reader to an understudied history that echoes our own time. Read on for the first two chapters of the novel BBC Culture calls "a fascinating window into Malagasy history." 

An Excerpt from Beyond the Rice Fields, by Naivo

Tsito

Chapter 1

Every time I watch the fampitaha, my heart aches, and I can again see Sahasoa, where I spent the first years of my life with the People Under the Sky. I can again see Fara, who was crowned queen of the competition. Back then, we still rolled the gatestones across the entrances to our villages, every night, before dusk fell. The rice fields were bounded only by the swampland, teeming with life, and by the limits of human labor. That was the age of childhood fancies and the first schools, of bullfighting, nighttime stories, and chameleon battles. What remains of that now? That world is slowly fading from my memory, its edges frayed by the passing years, washed away by the tide of time like the old sun-bleached bamboo stalks from our fishing rafts. It erodes under the here and now, like our red walls under the monsoon rains.

No, nothing stirs my soul as much as a procession of girls coming around a clay wall, richly dressed for the fampitaha dance competition. Their eyes sparkle with a child’s desire to please; at least that has survived the test of time. Their ribbons and flowers are a feast for the eyes and spirit. When they dance in our dust-covered streets, curving their wrists and bending gracefully at the waist, the finest fruits of the great wide past burst forth, reborn. The old tree is granted new life in its tiny seeds.

Despite the passage of years, I remember my arrival in Sahasoa in great detail. I still remember that sun-drenched morning during the Alakarabo moon when Rado brought me to the village. As we walked through it, children flocked to us, raising a cloud of dust. Even the dogs came up to sniff me. I felt very fragile. Lost, filled with fear.

“Haody, Nenibe!” said Rado, walking into the hut. “Is anyone here?”

Fara and Bao were at the market. Bebe was alone, burning incense in the northeast corner. I’d followed Rado but stopped at the door, dazed.

Everything was new to me. I was assaulted by smells, sounds, and lights from every corner of the house. The placement of objects was unpredictable, threatening. The bed looked fit for a funeral. The sinibe was a weird color. The sahafa looked like the wrong size.

“Mandrosoa tompoko! Tonga soa! What have you brought us?”

Even the central-midlands drawl—which I’ve now adopted—made me instinctively afraid. It reminded me of the slave market, of the soldiers. The welcoming words opened my wounds again.

In my far-off childhood, my father had often spoken of this tribe, the long-eared Merinas, whom  he called “amboalambos”—pig-dogs. The elders described them as underhanded beings, merciless and cruel. The forest people, my people, had always valiantly resisted their attempts to invade, hiding at the slightest warning in the impenetrable, age-old forest. But one day, my village was taken by surprise and destroyed. Soldiers descended on my community in the early dawn, like a cloud of evil red crickets, sowing death and desolation. Amboalambos were the enemy.

That first day, seeing Bebe with her drooping ears in the shadowed hut, I recoiled, horrified.

Yet the elder woman’s home became mine over the years. Mine, like the foreign shore where the waves spit you out after a shipwreck. Like those makeshift underground shelters to run to before a whirlwind, where you unexpectedly find new faces. And a new destiny.

Chapter 2

How to Become a Devoted Slave

I’ve kept a habit from my early years among the amboalambos, of massaging my wrists and ankles. I do it for hours on end, whether sitting, squatting, or lying down, whenever I can, to circulate my blood. I never could shed the compulsion. Sometimes in the morning when I wake, I look at the Creator’s rising sun and contemplate my own hands and feet in amazement. I still wonder if I’m truly free.

Rado bought me at a slave market. When he brought me to Sahasoa, Fara was seven. I was two years older than her, but I looked a year younger, and I still spoke with a lilting forest accent. My home village had been razed to the ground when Radama’s troops attacked. All the men were killed, and the soldiers looted all our possessions. Having captured the women and children, the king’s troops kept a handful as trophies and sold the rest at the slave market. They killed my father and my grandfather, my two older brothers, my two paternal uncles, and my maternal uncle. My childhood memories are haunted by bodies littering the ground.

At the time, children were going for thirty to sixty piasters on the slave market. Young girls were popular for their domestic use. Older girls were more expensive, and beautiful captives could bring in eighty piasters. Little boys were sold for an average of thirty piasters, but any with a particular skill were worth more.

I was sold for forty piasters. It was a good price.

Sometimes I laugh, because I’ve realized that even the memory of the dealer—a foul man with formal speech, so typical of that time—has become a weirdly precious treasure. My owner was a smooth-talking hawker. A career man, he was good at his job, not like those soldiers who captured and sold indiscriminately around the countryside. His is a permanent mark in my memory; time will not alter it.

This occurred during the last crescent of the Alakarabo moon, in the fifteenth year of the Sovereign King’s reign.

This is essentially how the dealer sounded: “What would you say to a little slave to distract you, my good sir? This one right here will enchant your evenings with the melodious sound of his valiha; the ancestors will bestow their favor upon you! His music is fresh as the dawning dew-covered day, more poignant than the setting sun on the hillside! This slave is as small as a louse and as black as the inside of a cooking pot, but his fingers have been blessed with inspiration by the most benevolent of our forest spirits!”

I never knew the dealer’s name. I must have had occasion to hear it, but I never retained it. Perhaps because I didn’t want to.

Rado didn’t intend on buying a slave. But he came over anyway. I was squatting among stacks of baskets and sacks of grain. My ankles were chained together, and I looked aggressively, silently, at this strange man walking toward me. What did he want? Nothing good. Probably to hit me, hurt me, like so many others had done since my capture. Seeing Rado’s interest, the dealer whose name I’ve forgotten held a stringed valiha zither out and ordered me to play. The customer was waiting. I acquiesced with a grimacing smile; showing too much malevolence would have led to punishments later.

Rado seemed interested.

“How much?” he asked.

“You won’t regret this choice, good sir! You have a rare opportunity. The ancestors have surely brought you here. It was just this very morning that a noble lord offered me a pair of sheep for him, but I refused; I wanted to keep him for myself, you understand. My wives just love the valiha. The second in particular, the youngest, she goes into raptures whenever she hears its wistful chords.”

As he spoke, the merchant gestured invitingly with a knowing smile, which Rado returned coldly.

“So why are you selling him now? Is he sick?”

“Oh no, not at all! He’s in perfect health! He also never begs to be allowed to play, which is a welcome quality. You know the proverb, ‘A slave skilled at the valiha: when you ask him to play, he refuses, but as soon as you speak of work, he goes mad for music!’ You won’t worry about that with this one—”

“You still haven’t told me why you want to sell him.”
Without answering, the dealer turned to me and barked, “Get over here, you!” I shuffled forward, the chains fettering my feet.

The dealer clamped his hand onto the top of my head and turned me around, showing off my limbs and thin torso.

“He’s called Tsito. He’s a little skinny, but he comes from good stock. He’ll work hard and won’t bother you. I broke him in very well.”

Rado examined me carefully for marks of abuse. I lowered my eyes. It wasn’t allowed, looking at a master. I’ve also kept that habit, lowering my eyes when I talk to people. It’s very hard for me to hold someone else’s gaze.

Slave traffickers procure their merchandise in several ways. The simplest is to buy them from soldiers when they return from the countryside, as happened with me. They can also do the village circuit, traveling around to the many families enslaved because of debts or poverty. Sometimes, dealers will send their henchmen to capture ordinary people who get lost on the roads or venture out alone a little too far from home. The most common technique to break them in is the trial of water, which consists of binding the captive’s hands and feet and plunging their head into a tub of water until they start to suffocate. The procedure is repeated over several hours and only stops once the victim declares, convincingly, “I confess that I am your slave and that my ancestors are your ancestors’ slaves.”

I’d been broken in well, as the dealer said. Very well.

Slaves who don’t show marks of violence aren’t necessarily better treated. But Rado couldn’t know that. The only visible marks on me were dark furrows that the ropes had left on my wrists and ankles. In some ways, these marks recorded the least violent aspect of enslavement: being bound. In a twist of irony, the body does not preserve any outward sign of the most brutal part: suffocation, temples threatening to burst, slipping unutterably toward death.

Well, actually, mine did. I was two years older than Fara, but I looked one younger; until well beyond my captivity, my body refused to grow, which was the only way my bones and muscles revolted. As an adolescent, I sometimes wondered if my ancestors were punishing me for enslaving them to the ancestors of the amboalambos. And of the nameless dealer.

The slave trafficker shoved me toward Rado and heaved a deep sigh.

“I’ve decided to part with him, good sir, because I have a large family to provide for. You must understand, I am a poor man. I don’t have the means to feed one more mouth—”

Rado interrupted his little speech: “You still haven’t told me the price. And where is this child’s mother?”

“She died, my good sir! Along with the rest of his family. That is, alas, the harsh law of war. You’ll be taking in a little orphan here. You know what our ancestors said: ‘A crying orphan, only pitied by the back of his own hand.’ Through your purchase, you will save him!”

My owner pulled a mournful face, ever the true professional.

In that moment, I was wracked with despair, and tears sprang to my eyes. The dealer was lying again. All of my other family members had been sold. Those who trade in men find it wiser to get rid of the adults first, for if parents see their offspring leave before them, they become uncontrollable. Some even attempt suicide. In any case, the merchandise is spoiled and is harder to sell.

This seller was definitely a career man. Night made me a confidante, tied to the foot of his bed: he sighed and reminisced sadly about the time when the business of lost men still flourished. Ever since the Sovereign King ceded to British pressure and prohibited the export of slaves, the trade had languished.

I never saw any of my family members again.

But I found Fara.

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About the Author

Naivoharisoa Patrick Ramamonjisoa, who goes by the pen name Naivo, has worked as a journalist in his home country of Madagascar and as a teacher in Paris. His first novel, Beyond the Rice Fields, was published in its French original version in March 2012 by Éditions Sépia in Paris. Naivo is also the author of several short stories, including “Dahalo,” which received the RFI/ACCT prize in 1996, and “Iarivomandroso,” which was adapted for a theatrical production in Antananarivo, Madagascar.  He recently released a short story collection entitled “Madagascar entre poivre et vanille,” which explores various topics pertaining to contemporary Madagascar including the socialist era, the recurrent political coups, the corruption of the judiciary system, and the monarchic and colonial resurgences.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Allison M. Charette translates literature from French into English. She received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Beyond the Rice Fields, the first novel from Madagascar to be translated into English. She founded the Emerging Literary Translators’ Network in America (ELTNA.org), a networking and support group for early-career translators. Allison has published two other book-length translations, in addition to short translated fiction that has appeared in Words Without Borders, The Other Stories, Tupelo Quarterly, InTranslation, the SAND Journal, and others. Find her online at charettetranslations.com.

Celebrate International Translation Day with a Venta / Sölu / מְכִירָה / Продажа!

This International Translation Day, we'd like to toast the intrepid translators who navigate between languages to bring us the richness of the world's cultures. These extraordinary linguistic artists have brought us compelling, eye-opening stories from Cuba, Hungary, Iceland, Brazil, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Madagascar, Russia, Albania, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere.  

Without Alfred MacAdam, we wouldn't have the sensorial firehose of the novels of the polymathic Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky; without Alison Entrekin, we wouldn't enjoy the deliciously brutal feminist takedown of macho culture that is Fernanda Torres's The End. We not only #ReadBannedBooks, but we translate them too, with the help of champions of free expression such as Will Evans—a publisher of books in translation himself—who brought us the book Oleg Kashin got beaten by Putin's thugs for writing; and Carol Ermakova, who brought us exiled Uzbek author Hamid Ismailov's dive into the literal underbelly of Moscow in The Underground.  We celebrate classic translations too, such as John Ormsby's foundational rendering of Cervantes's masterpiece Don Quixote—a book we got so excited about publishing that we translated the first chapter into languages from Hebrew to Zapotec. 

To celebrate our community of translators, we're giving our readers a 25% discount off any of our translated books through the weekend when you buy directly from the Restless website and use the discount code TRANSLATIONDAY at checkout. Scroll through the gallery below to see what's on offer!