Today is the official release day for Kree by Manuela Draeger, the second post-exotic novel (after Solo Viola) that I’ve had the pleasure and challenge of translating for University of Minnesota Press. I’d say it’s a long, strange trip of a book, but that would imply moving along in a chronological manner from one definite location to another, and this novel offers nothing so comforting and reliable as linear progression.

Bizarre is the word Yann Étienne of Diacritik uses to start off his review of Kree. He places this novel “in a borderland between reality and fiction, between reality and dream, with no way to say what belongs to one or the other” (“dans une zone-lisière entre le réel et la fiction, entre la réalité et le songe, sans pouvoir dire ce qui appartient à l’un ou à l’autre”). It’s a world dominated by estrangement, Étienne writes: “This is our world, but so violently deformed that we almost can’t recognize it anymore, because it is the world of after. After the catastrophe, but also after death” (“C’est notre monde, mais déformé si violemment qu’on ne le reconnait presque plus, car c’est le monde d’après. D’après la catastrophe, mais aussi d’après la mort”). This strangeness arises throughout the novel, in its organization, its imagery, in its very language, and at times that means Kree isn’t an easy read; sometimes, as Étienne says, “perhaps one must accommodate this strangified reaction that comes from this reading” (“il faudrait peut-être accueillir cette réaction estrangifiée née de cette lecture”).

The characters’ dialogue gives an especially striking example of this. When I corresponded with the author, I learned that these characters are speaking “the language of the dead”; an eroded, impoverished language with a distorted grammar and vocabulary, nothing corresponding to any specific existing slang. I tried to convey this, in part, by translating the dialogue fairly directly, without rearranging or otherwise smoothing out the words to create phrases that would sound more “natural” in English. So if you find yourself reading the dialogue and thinking, What the what? … well, those little stumbling blocks are intentional. As Erik Leborgne writes, “Corrupted dialogue reflects the speakers’ state of deterioration […] The characters speak, with difficulty, of what is destroying them from the inside.” (“Le dialogue corrompu reflète l’état de délabrement des locuteurs […] Les personnages parlent, avec difficulté, de ce qui les détruit de l’intérieur”). As readers, we search for meaning, and in some books we can expect answers: Chekhov’s gun will be fired, the meaning will be revealed, the metaphors will fall neatly in line. But in books as in life, sometimes we struggle for meaning, and don’t get it.

This might all sound a little heavy—but Kree is also, at times, funny, smart, heart-rending and stomach-churning. It’s a book I loved on first read, and I’m excited to share it with everyone. I hope you’ll enjoy it, too.