Hi friends,
Since I’m in the US and so are many (but not all!) of you, I feel obligated to say something about the crushing results of our election, which will have terrible ramifications here and around the world. I’m gutted, but I’m also at my saturation point for both “here’s how I feel” and “ways to take action” pieces. I am not an expert on fighting fascism, so I will not be writing one of those. This is a newsletter about words and books and it will continue to be a newsletter about words and books; those things are, of course, politicized, as is everything else. I will continue to celebrate romance of all kinds.
The most important thing I have read about books, specifically, in the wake of the US election is Bethany Karsten’s article The Trans Literature Preservation Project, and I would encourage you to read it and take what actions you can. It’s a long read, but the most important action items are at the top.
More generally, use your local library if you have one. Check out books, use their resources, or attend their programming. Let the librarians know you appreciate them—positive comments help counteract all the nasty fascist whining they have to endure. If you have a US mailing address, get a Queer Liberation Library card and check out their wonderful digital collection.
Any time you’re buying a book, consider if you can buy it from an independent bookstore or directly from the author. These are good things to do for many reasons. They’re especially necessary now because if we are going to resist potential new obscenity laws and sweeping book bans, we need to build a robust, decentralized system. The more places/ways there are to get books, the better.
CALQUE, n., LOANWORD, n. These two delightful linguistic terms might already be familiar to some of you, but let’s lay it out anyway.
A calque is a special kind of translation where you translate each element of a word or phrase. The word “calque” comes from a verb meaning “to trace,” so keep in mind the idea of making a copy. For instance, the English word “skyscraper” often shows up in other languages with the words for “sky” and “scrape/scratch”—in French it’s “gratte-ciel” (scratch-sky). Meanwhile, English has calqued many things from French, like “marriage of convenience” (mariage de convenance), “free verse” (vers libre), and “crime of passion” (crime passionnel). I’m drawing these from Wikipedia’s very charming list of calques, which offers examples from many other languages.
A loanword, meanwhile, is a direct borrowing from a foreign language. (“Loan” and “borrowing” both suggest we’re going to… return these words? That’s not how language works, but it’s the imperfect metaphor we’re using.) These are everywhere, and many of them are so common that we don’t think about their origins. Café. Taco. Anime. Kindergarten. Lieutenant. Espresso. Wonton. Schadenfreude. Soprano. Chow. Algebra. Ukulele. Banjo. Goober. Raccoon. Jungle. Loot. Bungalow. Thug. Pajamas. And of course I live in Massachusetts (this one has undergone a lot of sound change, which is common for loanwords). You’ll note that cuisine, the arts, and the sciences produce a lot of loanwords, but so do conquest and colonialism.
And at last we arrive at linguists’ favorite fun fact about calques and loanwords, which is that “calque” is itself a loanword (borrowed directly from French) and “loanword” is a calque (a tracing/translation of German Lehnwort). Confusing, but delicious.
I’ve been thinking about calques and loanwords partly because my horrible country is full of people buying into vicious, selfish, shortsighted, evil white nationalism, and every day they use words from all over the world and don’t even think about how we are all connected and interdependent and all have to live together on the only life-sustaining planet we know about, but also because—
(apologies for this radical change of subject)
—I have a book coming out on Tuesday, and my book is written in English but set in (very, very fictionalized) France and populated with French-speaking characters. Imagining the text as a kind of fake translation gave me a lot of space to play. Any time a character uses an expression, if that expression is similar or recognizable in French and English, I stuck a little closer to the French. So instead of saying “a bull in a china shop,” a character says “an elephant in a porcelain shop.” A calque! I did this throughout the series, and writing this newsletter, I really wish I’d kept a list. I did no such thing, so you’ll just have to trust me that there are a handful of other examples.
Why? Mainly to amuse myself, which is the reason for everything I write. But if these loan translations—loan pseudotranslations—unsettle the text a little, make it feel not at home in English, I like that, too.
The series is largely epistolary, told in letters and diary entries, though it’s constantly trying to escape/disobey/reshape that set of genre conventions, mixing in third-person prose sections, poetry, and scripts. Not all epistolary fiction contains such mixtures, but I think by its nature epistolary fiction prods at its own artifice, nudges the reader and winks. That’s one of the things I love best about it. Anyway, I thought it would be silly to bow respectfully to genre conventions in a series about magic nonbinary characters. Genre and gender come from the same root, you know?
Because epistolary fiction is, as a form, obsessed with textual production—who wrote this letter, when, how, why, how was it transmitted or stored, who is reading it, when, how, why—and so am I, I took a few opportunities to extend that question to the language itself. Who says “an elephant in a porcelain shop”? Not English speakers. Maybe the reader passes right by this without noticing; maybe they don’t. Winks are like that.
Life is like that. Ambiguous, fleeting, uncertain. It’s very strange to be publishing this novel—my tenth—and wondering if it’s my last. But of course I could have wondered this after any of the previous nine books; I might get hit by a truck tomorrow. The novel is actually sort of about that, if it’s about anything beyond a cranky old woman who can’t die and a flirtatious thief who is way into cranky old women. I’m not sure it is.
It’s got at least one calque in it, though.
Need some small-r romance novels to help you remember that people can do right by each other and good things are possible? Here you go:
Curvy Girl Summer (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Danielle Allen. It’s fascinating to me that so few contemporary romances have dating apps in them. I don’t know if it’s because app dating is exhausting in real life so nobody wants to read about it, or because authors are uninterested in its story potential, or some combination, or something else entirely. Anyway, the heroine of this Black romance, Aaliyah, feels pressure from herself and her family to find a boyfriend in time for the big thirtieth birthday party she’s throwing herself. Partly this pressure comes from Aaliyah having lost her beloved elder sister—married, pregnant, beautiful, had her whole life together—from a sudden, unexpected heart problem when said sister was 30, so everyone is having a lot of big grief-related feelings about Aaliyah turning 30, and honestly some of her family members are pretty awful to her about her lack of a partner and her weight. But she stands up for herself. She decides she does want a boyfriend, so she gets on a dating app and starts looking. Aaliyah has a string of catastrophic first dates, all while a sexy bartender is looking on—and sometimes intervening on her behalf. It turns out she has way more chemistry with the bartender than with anyone else—the banter, damn—but he’s got his own grief and trauma to deal with. Luckily, it’s a romance novel, so they work it out.
The Solstice Cabin (m/m, both cis and gay, fantasy, historical) by Arden Powell. This is set in 1920s Nunavut, which is such a wonderful and unusual setting even aside from the magic, which I also love. David has been been chasing his friend Amaruq, who fled Toronto following the conviction (and subsequent death by suicide) of their mutual friend Paul for “gross indecency.” Both David and Amaruq are heartbroken about Paul and also about their separation, which left much unspoken between them. That makes this novella sound melancholy, which it is, but it’s about the sweetness of reconnecting with someone you thought you’d lost. The stark beauty of winter plays a huge role, since once David finally finds Amaruq, the snow forces them to stay in Amaruq’s cabin together until the spring thaw.
A Lot Like Adiós (m/f, both cis and bi, contemporary) by Alexis Daria. This is an absolutely gorgeous exploration of repairing friendships, romances, and family relationships. Michelle and Gabe grew up together in the Bronx and were always best friends. They even wrote fanfiction together for their favorite canceled sci-fi show—one that won their particular devotion because “we finally get Latinos in space”—a detail that I absolutely love. Their teenage chat logs about writing the fic are interspersed between chapters, as are parts of the fic itself. Their friendship almost became a romance, but then Gabe revealed to Michelle that he was moving across the country for college. After a big fight with his father, Gabe decided never to come back, and he stopped speaking with both his family and Michelle. Nine years later, Gabe owns a gym and his business partner wants to hire Michelle as a marketing consultant, but Michelle says she’ll only do the work if Gabe stays with her. They pick up exactly where they left off, and it’s very sexy. I love the way Daria writes complicated family dynamics. Gabe’s dad, feeling the pressures of being an immigrant with a young family to support, was too hard on him, and eventually both Gabe and his dad come to understand that. It’s really moving. This is beautifully written. I’m not a habitual audiobook listener, but the Boston Public Library only had this in audio and I thought the narration was great.
The Friend Zone Experiment (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Zen Cho. Renee Goh is the outcast daughter of an ultra-wealthy Malaysian family. She has set up her perfectly curated life as a fashion designer in London, far, far away from them, but when her father calls to announce his retirement, and that he wants all of his children to compete to take over his company, Renee can’t resist the chance to prove herself to her family. Her life is complicated by just having re-encountered Ket Siong, a best-friend-almost-boyfriend from ten years ago, whose quiet, intense company she still finds irresistible. For his part, Ket Siong is in London with his family because they fled Malaysia when a close family friend was kidnapped after protesting deforestation. His mother and brother don’t want him to investigate the friend’s disappearance, but Ket Siong can’t let it go. He also can’t seem to stay away from Renee, even though her family may be entangled in the corruption that led to his friend’s kidnapping. This is beautifully written and gripping, and it has such a marvelous sense of setting and memorable details—all the places the characters go in London, from the National Gallery to the old man pub, plus Ket Siong’s oatmeal-colored scarf, Renee’s can of grass jelly, her fancy hair dryer, everything she wears. And they look at art together, which always endears characters to me. This whole thing absolutely aches with yearning. I thought it was perfect. It is also closed door, in case that is a thing you seek out in romance.
That’s all for this time. I’ll be back in your inbox on December (!) first.