| CARVIEW |
Padma Viswanathan
The Charterhouse of Padma
Two women, living in America’s heartland, unearth shocking secrets about the men they love and question the lives they chose.
P is on deadline. She should be translating. Instead, she’s writing obsessively about her favorite color: chartreuse. A literary translator in Arkansas (of all places), she’s married to Mac, a professional feminist too slick for his own good. As the COVID lockdown commences, P discovers a secret about her husband, one that upends her understanding of her life’s trajectory.
Every time I thought I knew where Padma Viswanathan’s The Charterhouse of Padma might be going, she surprised me in the best way. This smart, scintillating journey of a text shows what thinking as writing might look like.
Recent Books
Recent News and Thoughts from Padma
On Earth As It Is Beneath is one of this month’s New York Times “Best New Horror Books”
I’m both excited that The New York Times ran a lovely review of my translation of Ana Paula Maia’s chilling novel On Earth As It Is Beneath and puzzled that the fact of it being translated wasn’t mentioned in the ……
read more
My favorite novels featuring doubles
Confession: it was really hard to pick just five, but when a new platform, Shepherd.com, asked if I would try, I couldn’t resist. I’m excited to be teaching a course on doubles in literature this fall, and making this list ……
read more
Double, Double: On the Unsettling Power of Doppelganger Stories
A personal essay in LitHub Publishing The Charterhouse of Padma, a novel with a mirrored narrative, has got me thinking–and writing–about why I’m so obsessed with doubles in life and literature. This essay exploring two doubled architectures, one imagined, one ……
read more
Photo: Alex Tran
Padma Viswanathan is the author of three novels and a memoir, as well as numerous short works of fiction and nonfiction. She also translates from Brazilian Portuguese. This is her official web site.
Short reads online
Rough, by Ana Paula Maia
A taste of this wonderful Brazilian author, two of whose novels I’m currently translating.
Transitory Cities
This short story was published years ago, but this praise from George Saunders, who chose it as The Boston Review Annual Fiction Contest winner, still makes my day: I found this piece imaginative and original; the author has taken an odd and beautiful concept and expanded upon it in a daring and beautiful way. The story has a nice dramatic arc, and the final image was oddly moving, satisfying. The story has real heart, and the author seems willing to go into strange territories. The story reminds me of the work of Steven Millhauser, Aimee Bender, or Ben Marcus: using fantastic elements to get at very real emotional material. Promising and exciting work.
Better Protect America
A short story based on the absurdities of the US Border Patrol Agency. “The new security was going to be unpredictable, by design.”
How to Break in to Publishing If You’re a Smalltown Brazilian Mayor in the 1930s
Graciliano Ramos famously came to national attention in Brazil when the annual reports he submitted to the state government, in his capacity as mayor of his hometown, mysteriously made their way into the press. Here’s the first, in my translation.
Why Didn’t “Brazil’s William Faulkner” Achieve the Same International Fame?
In which I ask a few questions about comparing authors and cultural dominance.
Graciliano Ramos and The Plague
About a viral narrative lurking within a story I thought I knew.