There is no crumbling and no crushing of the loaf and the result is such that the housewife can well experience a thrill of pleasure when she first sees a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows . . . One realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome.

Sliced bread made its commercial debut in Chillicothe, Missouri on July 7, 1928, when the Chillicothe Baking Company’s first loaf thrills went on sale in local stores. As the front-page story in the town newspaper predicted, sliced bread swept the nation; and when SPAM hit the shelves on July 5, 1937, the nation doubled down on the culinary convenience: “Here’s a lunch that’s good and quick,” proclaimed a typical ad, “hot cheese SPAMwich does the trick.” Produced by the Minnesota-based Hormel Foods Corporation, the tinned “miracle meat” became a staple for Allied troops during WWII (albeit often the only option), and according to the SPAM poet, helped keep peace on the domestic front for decades afterward:

Husband (lying in bed): What’s that sizzling sound I hear?

Wife (from kitchen): Get up! It’s SPAM and eggs, my dear!

Weighing the time saved against the taste lost, the generic sliced loaf had a surprisingly easy victory in the marketplace. In White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, Aaron Bobrow-Strain explores the triumph as an interplay of economic and cultural factors, one that eventually transformed the profile of the housewife from that of cook and baker to shopper and home manager. One powerful factor, Bobrow-Strain notes, was “a powerful emotional resonance between the spectacle of industrial bread and a larger set of aesthetics and aspirations” ascendant at the time:

During the 1920s and 1930s, an obsession with machines and progress changed the look of America’s material life. Streamlined design channeled a love of industrial efficiency into the nooks and crannies of Victorian frill and Craftsman style. It began with vehicles — smoothing, tapering and lengthening their lines to help them slip efficiently through air. It was a seductive look, all speed and glamour, and it spread quickly to objects with no need to foil drag. Irons, pencil sharpeners, and kitchen mixers got lean and smooth. The country’s first pop-up toaster, the 1928 Toastmaster, looked like an Airstream camper.

Bobrow-Strain offers White Bread as one chapter in the larger story of “the post-war triumph of processed foods.” According to the latest numbers, one-third of the world is now overweight, and America leads the way, with 13 percent of children and young adults in the U.S. now obese. Among recent books exploring this alarming and costly trend is Michael Moss’s award-winning Salt Sugar Fat, which describes the ever-evolving strategies used by the giants of the food industry to achieve the “bliss factor” in products that are “knowingly designed — engineered is a better word — to maximize their allure.” In The American Way of Eating, Tracie McMillan describes her year working undercover in the food industry — on a large-scale Californian farm, stocking produce at a Walmart, working in the kitchen of an Applebee’s restaurant — in an attempt to explain and solve “the paradox of plenty” that plagues America and, increasingly, many other parts of the world:

Put simply, our agriculture is abundant but healthy diets are not. The American way of eating is defined not by plenty, but by the simultaneous, contradictory, relentless presence of scarce nutrition in its midst. This intransigent paradox has spread by many means, first and foremost by our industrial agriculture . . . And it has spread even further via processed foods — pioneered in American factories, kitchens, and boardrooms — that rely on the cheap grain produced by our agriculture and are tailor-made for supermarkets and restaurants that demand shelf-stable food-stuffs. There are mounting pressures that may change all of this, intensifying climate change and declining soil health not least among them, but the pattern is unmistakably set: The American way of eating is on track to become that of the world, too.

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Maile Meloy doesn’t waste a second before subverting the title of her gripping new novel, Do Not Become Alarmed. Catastrophe is the subject of a pair of foreboding epigrams, and that’s before you’ve even reached the first page. Then there’s the setting for the story, a luxurious Christmas cruise. Think about it — what’s the last bit of good news you heard coming from the public exploits of a cruise line?

Exactly.

So here we are, boarding the ship with two young families. Liv and Nora are cousins in their thirties, and they’re also close friends. To help Nora get through the first holiday season after her mother’s death, Liv has suggested that the two families take a joint vacation. Together with their husbands and four young children, the women trade the bubble of their well-heeled lives in Los Angeles for the even more sheltered cocoon of the ship.

They’re headed south from L.A., down the western coast of the Americas for two weeks. A U-turn at the mechanical marvels of the Panama Canal is a sweetener for Liv’s husband, an engineer. The truth is, a cruise isn’t the first choice of vacation for any of the adults, who feel themselves too self-aware to be able to enjoy the artifice of shipboard life. But soon enough they’re seduced.

Take the endless buffet that instantly erases the burden of daily meal planning:

Watching them eat, Liv felt her mind relax, easing its calculation. Feeding children, even when you had all available resources, took so much planning and forethought. The low-grade anxiety about the next meal started when you were cleaning up the last. But for two weeks there would never be any question about what was for dinner, or lunch, or snack. That roving hunter-gatherer part of her brain, which sucked a lot of power and made the other lights dim, she could just turn it off.

The spell of seaborne luxury is cast, and the sailing is, well, smooth. The Kids Club, an oasis of perpetual amusements overseen by a jolly and competent staff, sets the adults free to laze and lounge and nap. And a friendship with a sophisticated Argentinian couple and their two glamorous teenagers gives the excursion a gloss of worldliness. Maybe self-aware skepticism is overrated?

But as Meloy reels you into the story with her cool and fluid prose, she clearly signals that yes, you should absolutely — and perhaps even perpetually — be more than a little alarmed.

The first hint is when two of the six children briefly go missing aboard ship. Add in Liv’s first-world tendency to see peril in almost anything — sharks and riptides on a proposed surfing lesson, the risk of a bus crash on a trip to a hummingbird sanctuary, the kids getting hooked on caffeine on a tour of a coffee plantation — and you can feel the karmic comeuppance on the horizon.

When it arrives, it’s a doozy. While at port in an unnamed country that sounds a lot like Costa Rica, the three dads go golfing. The moms, all six kids in tow, decide on a zip-line tour of the rain forest. “This is a good country for us to go ashore in,” Liv says. “They call it the Switzerland of Latin America.”

But things don’t go as planned, and the isolated beach they wind up on proves a gateway to crisis: In an instant, all six children go missing. Aged six to fourteen, they’re defined by their vulnerabilities. Diabetes, Asperger’s, pre-teen brattiness, teenage beauty — each faces a particular kind of danger.

With the kids gone, it’s not only the now-frantic parents who have to strap in. We readers do as well. In a headlong rush — a zip-line turns out to be the perfect metaphor for Meloy’s narrative technique — cause is followed by outsized effect, and bad timing begets even worse luck.

“I’m afraid I’ve taught my children to be too good,” Nora says at one point, sure the advice that eased her biracial children through their American lives would now prove their undoing. “I wanted to keep them safe. I taught them that they can’t play with plastic guns, ever. And they can’t lose their tempers. I wanted them to not draw attention to themselves. I wanted them to be small targets.”

You want Nora to be reassured. But when it comes to the genuine perils of an indifferent world, Meloy pulls no punches. As the story roars to a close, we’re forced to face just how random life actually is, and how close to a precipice each of us stands.

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Nuclear powers lobbing test missiles into the ocean. A miles-long crack gashing the Antarctic icecap. Mass shootings across the country. The headlines scream dystopia, inspiring our leading novelists to depict dire, near-future scenarios: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne, among them. Spaniard Jesús Carrasco’s vivid, disquieting debut, Out in the Open, plumbs a similar tale, but one more rooted in reality than invention, illuminating both the art and science of literary translation.

Out in the Open tracks the flight of an unnamed boy across a vast, sunbaked plain studded with withered foliage and only trickles of water to quench his thirst. He’s on the run from his family and an unspeakable evil that Carrasco only gradually reveals, a sinister bailiff in (literally) hot pursuit. Carrasco captures the furnace of rural Spain with its severe climate, dead-end poverty, eccentric customs, and slavery to the Catholic Church. Early on the boy meets an elderly, feeble goatherd, and they cast their lots together, forging a friendship and aiming to escape to the cool sanctuary of the mountains, a herd of goats in tow. Margaret Jull Costa’s pitch-perfect translation evokes the textures and urgency of Carrasco’s prose, as in this scene, when the pair approach what they hope is an oasis: “A few yards away from a reed bed, on the edge of what must once have been a pond, stood two exhausted alder trees, their leaves all shriveled . . . on the other side, lines like isobars were etched on the dry, cracked bed of the pond, witnesses to its final death throes . . . The hot midday breeze made the reeds rustle, filling the air with a sound like delicate wooden bells. Coarse heads of hair waving like Tibetan prayer flags.”

Arguably the most prominent translator of Iberian literature into English, Jull Costa has worked with such luminaries as Javier Marías and José Saramago, but she found Out in the Open posed fresh challenges: “First, there was the Spanish title: Intemperie. The Latin etymology of intemeperie, which is intemperies, means both intemperate weather and violent or savage behavior. So that one-word title in Spanish sums up the entire novel, with its small hero exposed to the elements and to the most awful abuse. I tried alternatives: The Lost Boy, In the Wilderness, The Wilderness Boy . . . None really worked, and although Out in the Open loses any hint of savagery, it does, at least, combine the idea of being out in the elements and of secrets being exposed to public view.”

Despite Carrasco’s simple plot — a boy’s quest to survive despite brutal odds — the novel’s layers compelled the seasoned Jull Costa to seek assistance from Internet sources and the author himself, who now lives in Scotland. Language follows the brain’s wiring, which send complex signals along neurons that branch out in all directions and can jump-start contradictory impulses in a nanosecond. Hence the potential futility of Jull Costa’s craft. “The vocabulary! The book is full of detailed descriptions of everything from milking a goat to saddling a donkey. I don’t think I have ever felt more ignorant. I felt sometimes as if every word contained a trap, some meaning I didn’t know . . . for example, an encendedor de mecha turned out to be something called a rope lighter, used by soldiers in the trenches in the First World War and still apparently used by people heading off into the wild.”

As if every word contained a trap. Jull Costa’s trope unveils the high stakes: a translator must dance her way through a minefield of meaning. The legendary Edith Grossman, translator of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa as well as the acclaimed English-language version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, believes a confident eye and ear are the best tools for vibrant work: “I attempt to transfer the meaning, tone, and level of diction of the original into English. If the syntax, word order, tenses and so forth have to change to accomplish that, then I change them. As I’ve often said, you can’t make a translation with tracing paper.” A literal translation, Grossman asserts, “creates a counterfeit language that really isn’t at home anywhere.” Both translators acknowledge the trickiness of slang, so prevalent in American English, “because it dates quickly,” as Jull Costa observes. “With a writer like Passoa, I have to respect his oddities of expression by finding an equally odd construction in English.” Grossman echoes this view: “If there’s slang in the original, I look for equivalent slang in English.”

Over the past decade translations have spiked in popularity (and in sales) among American readers, with surprise bestsellers such as Herman Koch’s The Dinner and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s hymn to himself, the six-volume My Struggle. Spanish-language translations have thrived, too, which Grossman attributes to the “Bolaño effect,” as well as the enduring influence of García Márquez. There’s also another medium fueling the surge of translation: social media, which are bridging national boundaries and allowing virtual communities to form almost overnight, from the political arena — the Arab Spring and Women’s Marches are recent examples — to the literary realm, with the rise of websites such as Literary Hub and, yes, the Barnes & Noble Review. Facebook, Instagram, and Google all provide links to translations, which may sound amusingly stilted in English but aren’t any less clumsy or ungrammatical than our blue state/red state Twitterwars.

Jull Costa and Grossman both point toward the essential role played by the receptor language, implicitly arguing that translations are judged by how gracefully they scan in English. (Grossman probes this idea further in her short yet magisterial Why Translation Matters.) Out in the Open unfolds like a stark, minimalist ballet, stripped of niceties, even as Jull Costa choreographs each moment elegantly, despite the violence, real and remembered, that come at the boy and old man. Festering wounds, slaughtered goats, the rasp of breath, body stench: all bring us fully into Carrasco’s fictional world. There’s a David Lynchian quality to the characters as well, among them the legless owner of a village commissary and the chain-smoking bailiff, whose lusts and crimes drive him to his own doom. Perhaps Jull Costa’s brightest accomplishment here is her skill in conjuring Carrasco’s mood and pacing, the taut suspense of withholding information that eventually trails back to the doors of the very institution that glues the culture together: “The dense atmosphere of an old sacristy, where the ceremonial robes had been woven at the very beginning of time and where the walls had for centuries absorbed the cries of altar boys, orphans and foundlings . . . Putrefaction now worming its way through unspeakable sins.”

In Jull Costa’s view, the “sheer physicality” of Carrasco’s writing sets the novel apart from anything in contemporary Spanish literature, notably in its climactic scenes, a blood-drenched, depraved confrontation between the boy and goatherd and their adversaries. American authors feel the need for a note of redemption, the faint music of uplift, even in a book as bleak as The Road. But Carrasco suffers no illusions: we’re headed into a future as starved and desolate as the plain the boy crosses, no authority to shield us, enemies hell-bent on our destruction. Only our compassion and the burning desire to live — plus a heaping helping of good luck — will ferry us to safety.

 

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