This last selection of 2018 was made partly in response to a comment on the A Year of Reading the World Facebook page. Reacting to my review of Sofi Oksanen’s harrowing novel Purge, Susan wrote: ‘All your book choices have a “ dark” sad quality to them. I even predicted this one! You need to find someone in the whole wide world that writes with some humor or happiness!’

While my voyage through international literature has taken in some sunny vistas, from the irrepressibly curious and joyful memoir An African in Greenland by Togolese explorer Tété-Michel Kpomassie to the hilarious and thought-provoking Lake Como by Serbian author Srđan Valjarević, it’s fair to say that most of my recent picks have tended towards the darker end of the spectrum. As a result, I decided to take up Susan’s challenge and find something funny with which to see the year out.

It wasn’t as easy as you might think. For a start, humorous translations are relatively thin on the ground. This may be something to do with the fact that, genre fiction aside, a large proportion of the texts that make it into English from other languages tend towards the literary end of the spectrum. In the anglophone world, ‘literary’ tends to equate to ‘serious’.

There’s also the issue that jokes can be difficult to carry from one language to another. Sometimes this is down to the fact that a lot of humour is rooted in word play, but it can also be owing to cultural differences that mean that a sequence likely to have one set of people roaring with laughter may leave another group cold.

As a result, the funny literature in translation tends to fall into three categories – the satirical, the surreal and what I’ll call circumstantial or fish-out-of-water stories, in which we watch an unlikely protagonist thrown into a challenging scenario with, hopefully, hilarious results. I’ve tried several books in all three categories in the last few weeks.

In the satire camp, I was intrigued by Vladimir Lorchenkov’s The Good Life Elsewhere, translated by Ross Ufberg, a biting account of increasingly desperate attempts by a group of villagers in one of Europe’s poorest countries to get to Italy and the better life they imagine they’ll lead there. As so little Moldovan literature comes into English, it was great to see another voice from the country represented in the world’s most published language. However, the bleakness of the humour (featuring suicides, people trafficking and all manner of extreme experiences) was such that I wasn’t convinced the book satisfied my brief.

Among my fish-out-of-water reads, I romped through Nichola Smalley’s translation of Emmy Abrahamson’s How to Fall in Love with a Man who Lives in a Bush, a quirky account of a Swedish woman’s love affair with a homeless man in Austria. There were some particularly amusing scenes set in an English-language school, which played deftly on the malapropisms inevitable when learning a new tongue, and I was interested to discover that the novel was inspired by the author’s relationship with her now-husband. Still, enjoyable though it was, the book felt a little too light for my tastes. I wanted something that would make me think as well as smile.

That left the surreal. Here, I gravitated towards Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, attracted partly by the name of celebrated translator Susan Bernofsky, who directs the Literary Translation programme at Columbia University in the States. As she translated the work from Tawada’s German manuscript, I’m counting this as a German read, although a separate, earlier version exists in Japanese.

Concepts don’t come much more unusual than the one behind this book. It consists of three interlinked short stories examining the interaction between captive polar bears and the people who work with them, taking in a sweep of twentieth-century history along the way.

Swooping in and out of the heads of the ursine and human figures in its pages, the narrative delights and surprises. Humour comes from crashing the two worlds together – presenting bears holding down administrative jobs, battling writer’s block and crossing picket lines – and the opportunity this gives Tawada to make our world strange to us. Through the eyes of polar bears, the rituals of organisations such as the Young Pioneers and ideas such as make-up are exposed as arbitrary and potentially foolish.

In addition to raising a smile, this oddness enables the author to explore big questions. By bending language and stepping outside the anthropocentric framework most stories take for granted, she and Bernofsky invite a reconsideration of concepts including nature, nationality, art, politics and rights. The human perspective is revealed to be one of many, reminding us that, as Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has put it, ‘we are living on a tiny island of consciousness within a perhaps limitless ocean of alien mental states’.

Is this the sort of uplifting book Susan had in mind? Perhaps not quite, although it is inspiring in its way. Is it laugh-out-loud funny? No – to be honest, I’m still looking for another one of those. (Please do put any suggestions below.) Is it worth reading? Absolutely.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear (Etüden im Schnee) by Yoko Tawada, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (Portobello Books, 2016)

Wishing everyone a very happy 2019. Thanks so much for your support and interest in my reading adventures. Check back soon for some exciting news!