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This Lydia Millet blurb is sending me: “a clear triumph for VanderMeer, who after numerous works of genre fiction has suddenly transcended genre with a compelling, elegant and existential story of far broader appeal.” She doesn't think much of translated literature either!

Damion Searls somewhere is rolling his eyes at me and going, "LET IT GO, ANTON" but I have a point to make! Genre and translation are both deserving of derision to people like Lydia Millet (which was where I took this discourse), which is an interesting touchpoint between these two literatures.

What she specifically said in my presence was that something "smells of the translator" and the usage of an olfactory metaphor is quite a choice—it's usually a tool of class paranoia. It's par for the course she'd consider genre to be something "lowly" to transcend. People really think like this!

...but .. why? I see similar genre boundaries in music and man, in both music and literature I really struggle to know what any genres is or what it is of stuff I read. Why does it matter lol. I barely know the genre of any of the books I read. What do people gain from this haha