Category Archives: Book of the month

Book of the month: Ag Apolloni

June 28, 2024 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This book was one of two sent to me by Colin. He was going on a trip to Kosovo and volunteered to go to some bookshops on my behalf to see what Kosovan booksellers would choose for me as standout books from their nation.

Kosovo wasn’t included in my original year of reading the world. Although it’s recognised by more than 110 countries, it isn’t officially UN-recognised. As such, it’s one of the many nations that fell under the ‘Rest of the World‘ banner, which ended up being represented by Kurdistan that year.

I was intrigued to see what Colin what find. He sent me an email from Pristina, where he had had a great conversation with a bookseller at Libraria Dukagjini. She recommended three titles that had been translated into English: the international hit My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci, who writes in Finnish, translated by David Hackston; Night Trails by Mustafe Ismaili, translated by the author; and Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame by Ag Apolloni, translated by Robert Wilton and published by Elbow Books. She also mentioned an untranslated novel, Genjeshtars te vegjel by Fatos Kongoli (which translates Google translates as ‘Little Liars’).

I have MCY, but the other two translations intrigued me. Colin posted these to me, persevering when the British customs returned the books first time round. The Ag Apollini in particular caught my eye. ‘A masterpiece,’ proclaimed Mieke Bal on the cover and it had been named as Kosovo’s 2020 novel of the year. I decided I’d better see what all the fuss was about.

Apolloni calls this book a ‘documentary novel’ and I can see what he means. Built around a real-life research trip he made with academic Dritan Dragusha and film director Gazmend Bajri, the narrative records his responses to the stories of two women whose families disappeared during the Kosovo War. One, Ferdonija, spends her life waiting, still setting the table twenty years later in the hope her four sons will return; the other, Pashka, burnt herself to death when the remains of two of her children were returned.

Yet, in many ways, this book is more essay than documentary: it brings in Apolloni’s thinking on Greek tragedy and weaves together literary and cultural references from throughout human history to cast the hideous events of the recent past in a timeless, mythic light. Reflecting on the fact that of the more than 100 plays Aeschylus is known to have written only a handful survive, it explores what loss on every level means and how it shapes the human condition.

At the centre of the book is an intellectual challenge: how do you tell a story about someone who has no future, whose life is in the past? Apolloni puts it like this: ‘how can you write something about someone who just sits and laments their own fate?’ Stories are surely action and agency, after all? Protagonists do things.

Aeschylus provides the answer: the lost play, Niobe, surely did just that, recording the suffering of the bereaved mother at the heart of it, taking the audience into the centre of her pain. Apolloni sets out to achieve something similar.

And he succeeds. This is no cold, academic exercise. Feeling is everywhere in this book, both in the raw and extraordinary portrayal of Pashka and Ferdonija, but also in the other stories that touch theirs, many of which are realised in no more than a sentence or two.

A particularly moving section involves a visit from a high-profile Holocaust survivor, who comes to meet the war’s victims. ‘What I know is that I must be here at least,’ he tells a woman. ‘I must be. I cannot suffer in your place, but I have to be present at your suffering. That’s all I can do.’

Yet, in being present in such a way, he is himself a sort of timeless figure – ‘like the high priest of Shiloh, determined in his compassion to shelter all of the children and raise them in the tabernacle’. By being intensely part of specific, extreme experience, he assumes a sort universality.

This is a key theme of the book: timelessness is made out of intense nowness, out of raw, compacted pain. ‘Tragic myths are created by great shocks. In the direst cases, we are myths recycled.’

So it is that the contemporary details of Ferdonija’s static existence speak beyond their moment. The descriptions of the photographers posing her and staging her home so as to present her grief as they see fit reveal themselves to be part of the changeless human condition. The feelings this evokes resonate with Niobe, with Electra, with Antigone – with all those mythic female figures who lamented and felt the weight of others’ eyes upon them.

The universality of these feelings stretches not only back through time but outwards across political boundaries. In the face of such a story, all people, regardless of their heritage and allegiances, cannot help but respond. So it is that when Gazmend Bajri screens his film, people on all sides of the conflict respond to the suffering: ‘Pain is human, not national. This has nothing whatever to do with nationalism, and so the audience suffered along with the actor.’

Of course, reading this book now, in another time of great suffering, adds another layer. When many in other parts of the world – in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine, to name but a few – are experiencing similar horrors on a comparable scale, this story feels particularly telling. For many, the thought of reading it might seem too much – the last thing you want when we are already bombarded with so much misery.

Yet this is precisely what makes Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame uplifting. In the face of so much suffering it is easy to feel helpless and overwhelmed. Storytelling – when it is as honest, humane and insightful as this – gives us a way to get alongside these experiences, to be present. By giving shape to sorrow, stories allow us to commune with it: ‘Gazi films Ferdonija so that we too may feel her tragedy; he knows that this is how you kindle cartharsis in the spectator, participating in the suffering of the main character, so that passio becomes compassio.’

There may not be anything we can do in the face of these horrors, Apolloni shows us, but there is a way we can be.

Glimmer of Hope, Glimmer of Flame: a documentary novel by Ag Apolloni, translated from the Albanian by Robert Wilton (Elbow Books, 2023)

Book of the month: Fatou Diome

May 30, 2024 By in Africa, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Don’t judge a book by its cover, the saying goes. Frankly, though, if I were assessing Fatou Diome’s The Belly of the Atlantic, translated by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz, on its appearance, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. The pictures of the figure in the boat and the foot on the ball feel wearily familiar, if not a little clichéd.

Besides, although I’ve read and enjoyed football novels in the past – and know that a great writer can make any topic absorbing – I usually do so in spite rather than because of such subject matter. Not being a sports fan, I rarely find knowing a book is built around a particular game tempting.

But I did pick up this novel, which came out in French in the early 2000s and in English in 2006, for two reasons: partly because Senegal was one of the nations that had relatively few novels available in translation when I did my original Year of Reading the World, but also because I’m a particular admirer of the work of one of its translators: Ros Schwartz. Seeing her name on the title page suggested to me that this would be worth a try.

In fact, this book subverts the apparently familiar tropes of its cover in powerful ways. Narrated by Salie, who lives in France, the novel crystallises around a series of phone calls from her younger brother, Madické. A football fan with a difference, Madické is obsessed not with the French team beloved of his peers but with the exploits of the Italian player Maldini and needs to hear how every match he plays turns out. The one television on their home island of Niodior is temperamental to say the least, hence his SOS calls to his sister to fill him in. These conversations prove the catalyst for a series of reflections on and memories of Salie’s life, the immigrant experience, and the gulf that travelling from one world to another opens up between those who leave and those who stay behind.

The female perspective is part of what makes the book so striking. The opening descriptions of football mania and boys revelling in the beautiful game invite us to assume a male narrator. It is only gradually, with the repeated presence of strong, female characters, and strikingly direct observations about discrimination and the hypocrisy of patriarchal society, that the narrator’s position becomes clear. Indeed, it is only some pages into the narrative that Salie reveals herself as ‘a moderate feminist’ who ‘wouldn’t want testicles for the world’, and who looks with some disdain on the standards her brother is expected to conform to in order to satisfy her home society’s conception of ‘man’.

This covert disruption of what might be thought of as the default narrative voice for a book like this makes much about it fresh and startling, even twenty years after its publication. Familiar ideas are presented from new angles. And the tales of those who remain on Niodior, trapped in cycles of poverty and prejudice, gleam with troubling brilliance. The story of Sankèle, who pays a terrible price in an effort to escape an arranged marriage, is particularly memorable.

For a reader in the UK, the novel may seem uncannily prescient. In its exploration of the desire that many young people have to leave Niodior and try their luck in Europe, and its presentation of the grim reality and crushing obligations that await those who make the leap, the book seems to anticipate the stories that flooded Western media years later of African migrants braving horrific risks in search of a better life. For example, here’s Salie reflecting on the gap between Madické’s idea of her daily life and the reality:

‘It was no use telling Madické that as a cleaning woman my survival depended on the number of floor cloths I got through. He persisted in imagining I wanted for nothing, living like royalty at the court of Louis XIV. Accustomed to going without in his underdeveloped country, he wasn’t going to feel sorry for a sister living in one of the world’s great powers after all! He couldn’t help his illusions. The third world can’t see Europe’s wounds, it is blinded by its own; it can’t hear Europe’s cry, it is deafened by its own. Having someone to blame lessens your suffering, and if the third world started to see the west’s misery, it would lose the target of its anger.’

Of course, the fact that these words written in the early 2000s read as prescient to someone like me also shows up the selectiveness of the anglophone world’s storytelling: the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ is not a new phenomenon, Diome’s novel reminds us, regardless of what prevailing accounts of it may lead us to assume.

Structured as it is, the book can feel a little static. Salie is relatively passive – partly because she is trapped by her situation and partly because she is trapped by the past. As such, she is perhaps more in the position of one of the oral storytellers of her homeland, recounting rather than participating in events. The writing, however, brims with energy. Like its perspective, the novel’s imagery is fresh and striking, melding Senegalese traditions, nature and computer technology to paint the world in bold colours. If, occasionally, the narrative tips over into polemic, well, who are we to argue?

Reading The Belly of the Atlantic made me reflect on many things. It reminded me of the valuable way stories from elsewhere can disrupt, problematise and reshape the narratives that surround us. It also helped me remember how important older books are in anchoring us and counteracting the kneejerk impressions of the now. If we only ever read new titles – no matter how brilliant they may be – we can easily become detached from the threads of history, and lose sight of the lines and grapnels cast back down the decades that bind us to the world and to one another.

The Belly of the Atlantic by Fatou Diome, translated from the French by Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz (Serpent’s Tail, 2006)

Book of the month: Saud Alsanousi

April 30, 2024 By in Book of the month, Middle East, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Back in 2012, when I tried to source and read a book from every country in the world, Kuwait was one of the trickier entries on my list. There were very few traditionally published titles available in English translation. I ended up reading a self-published novel by the hit blogger Danderma, which proved an education in Arabish (Arabic words written informally in the Latin alphabet, usually on computers or mobile phones that do not support Arabic script) and the craze for frozen yoghurt sweeping the country at the time. Indeed, Danderma was very helpful to me and shared some fascinating insights into the challenges facing writers in Kuwait, some of which I related in my first book, Reading the World.

Knowing that there had to be many other interesting Kuwaiti writers whose work hadn’t yet made it into the world’s most published language, I resolved to revisit the country’s stories. Twelve years later, I’m back, thanks to a tip-off from translator Sawad Hussain, who responded to my call for books published pre-2020 that deserved a second look, as part of my year of reading nothing new.

Hussain’s translation of Saud Alsanousi’s Mama Hissa’s Mice follows the (mis)fortunes of Katkout, Fahd and Sadiq, three friends growing up in Surra, central Kuwait, during the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century. Coming from different sects and ethnic backgrounds, the young men share little but their fury and frustration at the divisions that compound the destruction wrought in the wake of the Iraqi invasion. In an attempt to overcome this, they form a group, Fuada’s Kids, which aims to bind Kuwaitis together by appealing to their nostalgia, but in so doing risks costing them everything.

Disorientation is at the heart of this novel. The narrative, like the central characters’ world, is fractured and splintered, reflecting the feeling that ‘it’s as if an enormous fist has plowed into Kuwait, leaving it in ruins’. The present-day, adult reality is intercut with flashbacks and with chapters from an autobiographical novel, some of the of which have been removed to placate the government censors.

Indeed, censorship is another key theme. Growing up, the boys learn that questions can be dangerous. Seemingly innocuous issues such as how someone pronounces a word or the spelling of certain names can crack open rifts and even invite physical violence. Small wonder, then, that self-censorship and sanitization flow through many of the conversations, because, as Fahd’s grandmother Mama Hissa is fond of observing, ‘all cowards stay safe.’

For English-language readers, there is an extra level of challenge. The unease and self-questioning that the story prompts with its challenging structure and courting of the unsayable is compounded with cultural disorientation. It is often unclear how certain statements should be read. We can’t know the significance of certain jokes – or whether some phrases are meant as jokes at all. The childhood memory of the boys pretending to be Palestinians throwing stones at Jews, for example. Is this said ironically, or bitterly? Would this be shocking in this society or unquestioned? And how ought we to respond?

There are also a large number of unfamiliar cultural terms in the text. Hussain does an elegant job of elucidating key elements but refuses to patronise or pamper readers by over-explaining. The terms are left Roman rather than italicised – a reminder that it is we, rather than the world of the story, who are foreign. (For more on the politics of italicisation, check out Daniel José Older’s YouTube video ‘Why We Don’t Italicize Spanish’ below.)

But there are also moments of powerful connection. From Alsanousi’s skilful marshalling of the child’s-eye view to reveal the strangeness of behaviours adults take for granted, to his intense, visceral presentation of moments of fear and suffering, and from the way he builds nostalgia to his layering of action so that we grow to remember events as the central characters’ do, this novel reaches out and grasps us.

It also showed me my own world through new eyes. A Londoner born and bred, I had long been in the habit of looking askance at the overseas investors who own empty properties in many of the capital’s most desirable postcodes. Reading Mama Hissa’s Mice made me consider the question from another angle: when you live with the threat of invasion and societal collapse, ‘foreign houses are assets for when something happens’. Wouldn’t many of us make similar choices if we had experienced such things?

This was a difficult read. But as a result it was also surprising one. An enriching one. A challenging one. It required me to sit with not-knowing in the same way that Shalash the Iraqi did – accepting my limitations and recognising that this is not a story that can or should centre my knowledge or perspective as so many of the books produced by the anglophone publishing industry do. I’m very glad to have had the chance to experience it.

Mama Hissa’s Mice by Saud Alsanousi, translated from the Arabic by Sawad Hussain (Amazon Crossing, 2019)

Picture: NASA Astronauts, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Book of the month: Hubert Mingarelli

March 30, 2024 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

It’s nearly ten years since I started my Book of the month slot on this blog, after having been blown away by an Italian writer who has since taken the English-speaking world by storm. In another six years, I will have featured more Books of the month than the 197 titles that comprised my original year of the world.

Making book reviewing on this platform a long-term commitment has had a profound impact on how I read. Finding a title worthy of featuring each month has been a good way of holding myself accountable to stay connected to what is happening in international publishing, and it has enabled me to channel and share some of the many recommendations I am still fortunate to receive from readers all over the planet. Because I only feature one book a month, I rarely take recommendations from book PRs, and because I am keen to support the industry and to keep this blog free of commercial influence, I buy nearly every title I feature, rather than accepting free copies. I try to maintain the spirit of my original quest: a personal, independent and entirely unscientific record of diverse reading experiences that I aim to approach with openness, respect and curiosity.

Some months, the choice of what to feature is easy. Other months, particularly when I am in the thick of research for my own writing projects, it is a struggle to find something that fits (I don’t always have to love the books I feature unreservedly, but I have to feel that they are interesting and deserving of wider notice). Most of the time, however, I am torn between several titles and forced to neglect books that I would really like to tell you about. As I always try to review something in the month I read it, this means many brilliant reads get left behind.

This year of reading nothing new, however, I am relaxing my month rule slightly and taking the opportunity to return to a few of the stories that have stayed in my mind over the years. The first of these is A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli, translated from the French by Sam Taylor.

This title was recommended to me a few years back by my friend, author Caroline Brothers. I was looking for something that would absorb me and this short novel was Caroline’s answer.

Set during the second world war, the narrative follows three German soldiers sent out into the winter-bound Polish countryside to find a Jew to bring back for execution. Having caught one hiding in the woods, they hole up at an abandoned cottage to share a meal before returning with their captive. Over the hours that follow, the implications of their actions force themselves to the surface and the toll their murderous work takes on all present becomes clear.

Knowing that a novel is set during the second world war is often a turn-off for me. There are so many brilliant (and not so brilliant) stories set during this period that it seems to me that a book has to work doubly hard to make something powerful out of subject matter that has been handled by so many writers.

A Meal in Winter delivers. A masterclass in subtlety, it unravels the psychology of the aggressor, revealing how violence rebounds on its perpetrators, shattering and unmaking those who enact it every bit as much as its victims. Even at the sentence level, through the lens of Taylor’s translation, we see how thinking glitches and recoils in the face of inhumanity. The interior monologue of the narrating soldier abounds with jagged rhythms and defensive repetitions, rearing and bucking in the face of horrors he cannot own.

There is one section in particular that echoes in my mind, years after I read it, when the narrator reveals why seeing little individual touches on his victims’ clothing irks him so profoundly:

Because if you want to know what it is that tormented me, and that torments me to this day, it’s seeing that kind of thing on the clothes of the Jews we’re going to kill: a piece of embroidery, coloured buttons, a ribbon in the hair. I was always pierced by those thoughtful maternal displays of tenderness. Afterwards I forgot about them, but in that moment they pierced me and I suffered for the mothers who had, once, gone to so much effort. And then, because of this suffering they caused me, I hated them too. And the more I suffered for them, the more I hated them.

And if you want to know more, my hatred knew no bounds when they were not there to hug their darlings tightly to their breasts while I killed them. Once, they had embroidered a snowflake on their hat or tied a ribbon in their hair, but where were they when I was killing them?

The brilliance of this – the way the traumatised mind contorts its owner’s atrocities so as to apportion blame to his victims – is staggering. This is how we work, Mingarelli shows us. This is what we do. Even when we have committed monstrous acts, we share human feelings and we still need to find a story that makes our actions acceptable, that allows us to live with ourselves.

It is relatively easy to write about victims, at least in my experience. It is hard to write about perpetrators. And it is fiendishly difficult to do so in a way that makes readers feel for their plight and recognise the victim in them, even as we abhor their deeds.

That Mingarelli achieves this is the source of A Meal in Winter’s power and hope. The story is bleak. But the fact that the author presents it with such humanity and insight is deeply moving and inspiring. Even as we destroy one another, human beings possess an extraordinary capacity for empathy and compassion. We truly are marvellous wretches. In fewer than 150 pages, Mingarelli shows us the full range of his and our capabilities. Unforgettable.

A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli, translated from the French by Sam Taylor (Granta, 2013)

Picture: German military map showing planned assault on Poland in 1939 https://static.dw.com/image/50105792_303.jpg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Book of the month: Jia Pingwa

February 29, 2024 By in Asia, Book of the month, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Book publicists are a curious breed. Although I rarely accept proofs and buy almost all the books I feature on this blog, I frequently receive emails from people promoting titles that will clearly be of no interest to me. Mainstream books by British and American writers. Business books. Academic books on subjects outside my area of expertise. As I delete these emails, I wonder if the people who send them see their job primarily as a numbers game: if they simply scattergun enough emails out into the universe, someone is sure to take the bait.

But every so often I encounter a book publicist who thinks carefully about my interests and sends me a suggestion that hits the nail on the head. These people can be gamechangers.

The fact that I do a Book of the month post on this blog is down to such a publicist. Back in 2014, Daniela Petracco at Europa Editions contacted me about an as-then little-known Italian author. I explained I was no longer doing book reviews here, but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She didn’t care. She had to send me this novel, regardless. She loved it and she was sure I would too.

Reluctantly, I accepted a copy, was blown away by what I read and started my Book of the month slot in order to be able to tell people about it. And the novel? My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein.

This month, I had a similar experience. In response to my call for books published no later than 2020 that I might feature in my year of reading nothing new, I had an email from Daniel Li, working on behalf of Sinoist Books. He sent me three suggestions that he thought might fit the bill (which immediately made me warm to him, as this was a number of books I could reasonably check out, rather than an endless list of possibilities that would require several hours to unpick). Of these, Jia Pingwa’s Broken Wings, translated by Nicky Harman, caught my eye.

Described as a thriller, the novel tells the story of Butterfly, a young woman kidnapped from the city and taken to a rural village to be sold as a wife to one of the many men left single because of the gender imbalance resulting from China’s one-child policy and rapid urban migration. It opens with her scratching her 178th mark to record the days of her imprisonment on the wall of the cave in which she is held, and centres around the question of whether she will ever escape and find her way back to the life for which she pines.

But there the similarities to a thriller end. In fact they end even before the opening page, because in his foreword, Jia pretty much gives away the plot: he reveals that the novel grew out of a story he heard from an old man from his village about his daughter who was kidnapped and rescued, and who then, in the face of unbearable media attention, eventually returned to live with her kidnappers.*

Instead of delivering a gripping story (or instead of primarily doing that), this novel offers something even more engrossing: entering into and inhabiting the unimaginable, and making it feel personal, real. Jia puts it like this:

‘When I was young, death was just a word, a concept, a philosophical question, about which we had enthusiastic discussions that we didn’t take too seriously, but after I turned fifty, friends and family began to die off one after another, until finally my mother and father died. After that I began to develop a fear of death, albeit an unspoken one. In the same way, when a short while ago cases of trafficking of women and children began to appear in the media, it felt as remote from my own life as if I was reading a foreign novel about the slave trade. But after I had heard what happened to the daughter of my village neighbour, it all became more personal.’

In order to communicate this shift, Jia enters into Butterfly’s experience to an astonishing degree. He starts with the hardships of life on the unforgiving loess plateau, where people scratch a living trying to dig for rare nonesuch flowers and growing blood onions. The specificity of the detail is extraordinary. ‘What is there to see?’ the neighbour exclaimed when Jia asked if he had been to see his daughter. Jia shows us: the millstone with its runner stone worn to half the thickness of the bed stone over years of use; the rim of the well, scored with grooves; the gourds withering on a frame near the cave entrance.

Although spare to start with – reflecting, perhaps, Butterfly’s numbness – the language flowers over the course of the novel, as she adapts to life in the village. We start to see the beauty in rituals that at first seemed crude and beneath notice. As the prose takes trouble over recording the details of how to make a good corn pudding, we see Butterfly learning to value the world around her differently, adjusting to her new reality. At times the writing is strikingly lyrical and almost painful in its poignancy:

‘At noon, I gazed at the hills and gullies and knolls far away. Distance seemed to soften them so they looked like watery billows. I longed to escape from this ocean and climb back on dry land again. But when the sun set and it turned chilly and the light left the strip, the sea suddenly died, and I was left like a stranded fish.’

But it is Jia’s presentation of female experience, rendered through Harman’s arresting choices, that is most impressive. The description of her eventual violation by her so-called husband, Bright, and the physical trials of pregnancy are exceptionally well handled. And the portrayal of labour and birth are quite astonishing – up there with Eva Baltasar’s descriptions in Boulder, translated by Julia Sanches.

There are challenges for the anglophone reader. Oddly though, these do not concern the cultural differences you might expect – although the world Jia depicts operates according to strikingly different values, the humanity in his writing makes it relatable. Instead, it is technical choices concerning pacing and what descriptive information to include that occasionally prove taxing. Several times I found myself wrongfooted by not knowing whether a character was present or had moved to a place or performed an action, when a writer working in another tradition would have told me.

This was interesting, though, rather than off-putting – an insight into the things I take for granted and the supports I am used to expecting when I read. And a reminder that the technical and stylistic mores that we tend to regard as markers of good or bad writing in the anglophone tradition are more malleable and subjective than we might think.

Because the writing in Broken Wings is not simply good. It is marvellous. Playful, expansive, precise, moving and surprising, it sweeps us into another world, transforming this sad story into something almost sacred. Jia and Harman put it best, again in the foreword:

‘A novel takes on a life of its own, it is both under my control and escapes my control. I originally planned it purely a lament by Butterfly, but as I wrote, other elements appeared: her baby grows in her belly day by day, the days pass and her baby becomes Rabbit, Butterfly’s sufferings increase, and she becomes as pitiable a figure as Auntie Spotty-Face and Rice. The birth of a novel is like the clay figure shaped in the image of a divinity by a sculptor in a temple; once it is finished, the sculptor kneels to worship it because the clay figure has become divine.’

Broken Wings by Jia Pingwa, translated from the Chinese by Nicky Harman (Sinoist Books, 2020)

* The publisher informs me that this foreword is an afterword in most editions, including the original Chinese, but it appears as a foreword in some ebook editions. Because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, they encourage readers to read it first (although my usual advice would be to leave all extraneous text until after you have read the primary text).

Picture: I, Till Niermann, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons

Book of the month: Leïla Slimani

December 20, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of books about books. Specifically, books about reading, writing and translating. This is partly because I find these kinds of books fascinating but also because my next book is going to be about rethinking the way we read. More details to follow soon…

So it was a joy to hear from academic, translator and champion of women in translation Helen Vassallo (if you haven’t yet come across her Translating Women site, it is a treasure trove of insightful commentary and exciting titles) about a new collection of work by French-Moroccan literary superstar Leïla Slimani that she had just brought into English. And an even greater joy when she kindly sent me a copy.

Unlike the novels that made Slimani’s name (chief among them Lullaby or The Perfect Nanny, as it was variously translated into English, which won the Prix Goncourt and became France’s most-read book of 2016) The Devil Is in the Detail brings together three slender works released separately in French. It is the first in a series published by Liverpool University Press with Florida State University’s Winthrop-King Institute that aims to showcase ‘cutting-edge contemporary French-language fiction, travel writing, essays and other prose works’ that ‘reflect the diversity, dynamism, originality, and relevance of new and recent writing in French’.

Certainly, the collection features a diverse range of prose. Short stories rub shoulders with essays. There’s the transcript of a staged conversation Slimani had with newspaper director and writer Éric Fottorino. And the volume ends with an urgent piece in praise of politician and women’s rights champion Simone Veil, followed by a selection of quotations from her. It is the sort of amalgam that marketing bods at mainstream anglophone publishing houses would veto in a heartbeat.

Thank goodness, then, for indies and university presses. Because the curation of these superficially dissimilar pieces reveals striking threads running through Slimani’s thinking and creative practice.

Take her views on reading’s relationship to feminism. For women, as she explains in On Writing, her interview with Fottorino, time with books is essential because ‘a woman who reads is a woman who is emancipating herself’. With this in mind, she echoes Virginia Woolf’s call for a room of one’s own, claiming that this is important to allow space for reading as much as for writing.

This idea of the part reading plays in shaping women’s agency is demonstrated in the short story ‘Elsewhere’. Protagonist Rim finds books hold the key to her freedom. Her father ‘gorged her with stories’, giving her the world in printed form so that in the end she is confident enough to go out and meet it on her own terms.

Slimani’s reflections on her writing are particularly fascinating. Unabashed about discussing her own struggles – from an abandoned project to inhabit the minds of the Charlie Hebdo attackers to an unpublished first novel – she is disarmingly honest about the effort it requires: ‘There probably are such people, born writers destined for greatness, but I think there are a lot of people who just need to work hard, to meet the right person at the right time or need inspiration to strike at the right moment.’

Such frankness feels unfamiliar coming from such a lauded writer. In the English-speaking world, the fiction of the overnight success still has a powerful hold over the way we talk about books. (‘Ssh, don’t tell people that,’ a PR person muttered to a novelist friend of mine when they mentioned they had six failed manuscripts in their bottom drawer.)

But then, Slimani has always been a writer to challenge convention. Whether she’s penning gripping thrillers that win the highest literary honours (admittedly not such a departure in the Francophone world, where crime fiction more often receives critical acclaim), or exposing the hypocrisy underpinning the treatment of Moroccan women, she is unapologetic in her views, even when this risks controversy. Refusing to allow ‘a pseudo-respect for other cultures’ to muzzle her, she calls out injustice where she sees it.

Yet this forthrightness rests on a belief in the importance of togetherness and the joy of sharing space with those who think differently. The short piece ‘Our Gods and Our Homelands’ ends with an appeal for the France of 2016 to mirror the big Christmas meals Slimani remembers enjoying in Morocco as a child:

‘where everyone was welcome, where no one judged either the drunkenness of some or the outspokenness of others. Where the older generation did not dismiss the things the younger ones cared about, where everyone present chuckled at the blasphemers. Where at the end of the day the only thing that mattered was the awareness of how lucky we were to be together in a world where everything is hell-bent on dividing us.’

As we move into 2024, may our world take on more of the spirit of Slimani’s childhood Christmases. And may our reading, like this collection, be wide-ranging, ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging, engrossing and inspiring.

Thanks to everyone who continues to follow this blog, and whose comments, messages and suggestions keep fuelling and expanding my reading and writing adventures. Wishing you all a very happy Christmas and a joyful New Year.

The Devil Is in the Detail and other writings by Leïla Slimani, translated from the French by Helen Vassallo (Liverpool University Press, 2023)

Book of the month: Perumal Murugan

October 31, 2023 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

For the past three years, I’ve had the privilege of holding the role of Literary Explorer in Residence at the Cheltenham Literature Festival. This sees me co-curating and participating in a range of events about international storytelling at the UK’s oldest book festival.

Highlights this year included getting to interview my hero Tété-Michel Kpomassie – the writer I’ve most wanted to meet since I encountered his amazing memoir An African in Greenland (tr. James Kirkup) back in 2012. Building on our Zoom conversation last year, the discussion was as lively, joy-filled and life-affirming as his writing.

I also got to run a ticketed version of my Incomprehension Workshop for curious readers. It sold out and the responses were wonderful, further fuelling ideas for my next non-fiction book, of which, I hope, more soon.

Another lovely thing about the role is that I also get to hear about books from elsewhere and meet experts in storytelling from around the world. This year, these included international delegates from book festivals in Argentina, Botswana, Türkiye, India and Nigeria. From these passionate experts, I gleaned a number of book recommendations, including my latest Book of the month, which was one of several titles recommended to me by Dr T. Vijay Kumar, director of the Hyderabad Literary Festival.

Translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman was a smash hit when it was published in India in the mid-2010s, drawing lakhs of readers, prompting the writing of two sequels and changing the course of its authors life, as Murugan explains in his afterword. It tells the story of Kali and Ponna, a married couple who find themselves coming under extreme pressure as the years go by without them having children. Despite the strength of their bond, the rituals, penances and indignities to which they feel obliged to submit in the quest for a child take their toll. At last, the pressure to participate in a controversial rite on the 18th day of a local festival pushes them to breaking point, bursting open the assumptions and prejudices that have made them who they are.

For anglophone readers from the global north, this novel is an intoxicating mixture of the familiar and the strange. Anyone who has experienced or witnessed loved ones battling infertility will find much to recognise in its pages. ‘Please save me from being the talk of the town,’ laments Kali, expressing perfectly the pain of having such private matters made public, while Ponna enters into a masochistic loop, goading herself through ever more punishing and demanding ordeals in the hope of having her prayers answered. ‘Seeking a life, we have pawned our lives,’ she says, while joining her husband to sneer at those with too many children.

Yet instead of medical procedures and gruelling rounds of drugs, Ponna and Kali must do penance, make donations to temples, drink bitter concoctions and ensure they win the gods’ and goddesses’ favour. And at the heart of the novel is the ancient rite that at once lures and terrifies them: the night on which men become gods and all rules are relaxed in the dark streets of a nearby town.

Translator Vasudevan has done a fabulous job bringing the narrative into Indian English. The rhythms and structures of the prose complement the subject matter and setting perfectly, while the repeated use of the modal auxiliary ‘would’ gives the story a mythic quality, blurring the edges and making us half-believe we are reading a fable set long ago. Even linguistic challenges, such as the nuances of the Tamil term for son-in-law, are conveyed in an easy, conversational style.

Yet, despite the relaxed, sometimes mythic quality of the prose, there is nothing imprecise or vague about Ponna and Kali’s relationship. Murugan captures it perfectly, portraying the dynamism that keeps strong marriages alive and presenting a portrait of love that is truly touching – and makes the threat of its unravelling all the more poignant.

There is sharp-eyed comment on contemporary issues too. The legacy of colonialism threads through the pages, knotted around a family story of a humiliating and degrading competition run by a British officer, in which Kali’s grandfather participated.

But the natural world is never far from the story. The tone for this is set in the opening lines, with the planting of the Portia tree that rises and spreads its branches over Kali and Ponna’s travails throughout the course of the book. Alongside this, a number of other natural symbols dot the narrative, drawing and concentrating the reader’s gaze, and complicating questions just as they seem to become clear. ‘He never explained anything. He only drew your attention to things,’ writes Murugan of Kali. He could be describing his own writing style too.

In his afterword, Murugan explains that the novel was prompted by hearing a single word (which he does not reveal) and that writing the story taught him what can happen ‘if the world of values packed within a word bursts open’. ‘I am very eager to know the kinds of experiences it [One Part Woman] might now bring to literary readers across the world,’ he explains. Well, Perumal Murugan, your book centres around one word for me too: wonderful.

One Part Woman by Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan (Pushkin Press, 2019)

Picture: ‘Parshvapippala (Sanskrit: पार्श्वपिप्पल)’ by Dinesh Valke on flickr.com

Book of the month: Jörg Mühle

September 29, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

September is #WorldKidLitMonth, so, with the help of my resident six-year-old, I decided to write about one of the translated children’s books on our shelves (many of which we’ve heard about through the brilliant World Kid Lit project).

As its title suggests, When Dad’s Hair Took Off, Melody Shaw’s translation of Jörg Mühle’s Als Papas Haare Ferien machten, tells the story of what happens when Dad’s hair flies away and goes on an adventure with its owner in hot pursuit.  Illustrated by the author, it takes readers on a wild goose chase that sees Dad causing all sorts of chaos around town and keeps you guessing right to the end.

Humour is the book’s great strength. My daughter and I both love the moment where Dad pounces on a lawn, believing the blades of grass to be his hair. There’s also a brilliant sequence where the hair sends postcards from its travels, featuring a sparkling set of puns ‘from hair, there and everywhere’ that really get under dad’s skin.

The illustrations make the book memorable. Mühle studied at the Offenbach School of Design and the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and his talent shines on every page (although my daughter feels the cover could be more interesting, perhaps featuring a speech bubble giving more a sense of dad’s horror and outrage at his hair’s exodus).

Although the story goes through a number of surprising twists and turns, it has a relatively mundane beginning. My daughter thinks this is a bit of a missed opportunity. It’s a shame that the hair takes off in the bathroom, she says, because that is a very obvious place for something like that to happen. She would also like there to be a door to Ancient Egypt somewhere – although she accepts this would make it a rather different story.

For the most part, though, she thinks it’s a great book with a wonderful and unexpected ending that keeps the laughs coming right to the final page.

I agree. As children’s authors often observe, the challenge for writers in this genre is that they have to satisfy two audiences: the child at which the story is nominally aimed and the adult who will buy or borrow the book, and may read it aloud repeatedly. The upshot is that some contemporary children’s books have a slightly arch, two-faced feel, spinning a story to please the little one while winking at the parent over their head. Sometimes, the plot will be a little too obviously engineered to push a message calculated to encourage good behaviour or positive attitudes. In such a version of this book, for example, Dad might learn to make peace with his hairless state and discover that he is enough on his own.

The joy of When Dad’s Hair Took Off is that it has no truck with such well-intentioned double dealing. It is simply funny, anarchic and beautifully presented. As such, it unites rather than divides its audience, making the reading experience a truly shared and rewarding endeavour.

When Dad’s Hair Took Off by Jörg Mühle, translated from the German by Melody Shaw (Gecko Press, 2023)

Book of the month: Sheyla Smanioto

August 31, 2023 By in Book of the month, South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

This WITMonth, it’s my pleasure to feature a multi-award-winning feminist tornado of a novel recently arrived in English.

Out of Earth by Brazilian novelist Sheyla Smanioto came onto my radar when Sophie Lewis, who translated the book with Laura Garmeson, contacted me about it. I rarely accept review copies these days – I would be inundated if I did and I like to buy most of the books I feature on this blog in order to support fellow writers. (I also rarely feature books when they are newly published as I think the very small window of time titles get to succeed is one of the many problems with the publishing industry today so I try to do what I can to keep good books visible for longer by reviewing older titles.)

In this case, however, I decided to make an exception. Having admired Lewis’s work for many years and knowing how passionate she is about championing bold and daring translations (she was one of the original driving forces behind groundbreaking indie publisher And Other Stories), I was pretty sure this book would be something special. And I wasn’t wrong.

At this point in a review I would normally give a brief overview of the plot. In the case of Out of Earth, that’s tricky because this is not a book that plays by the rules. The linear and-then-and-then-and-then of storytelling has no place here. Rather, the narrative expounds the realities of inherited trauma and domestic violence, using the experience of four generations of women in the arid Brazilian sertão as a lens through which to reveal painful truths.

Language itself is at war with accepted modes of expression in this novel. Evasive, skewed and sometimes choric, the narrative voice courts ambiguity, teetering repeatedly on the verge of nonsense and shrugging off the rules of grammar to invite and dismiss multiple interpretations of even simple claims. Take the second paragraph:

He whistles, Tonho does. Calls the dog over right up close. The dog hesitates, tail lowered. The dog hesitates, then comes. It wants to know why the calling. Then he strikes the animal on the flank, yelping softly. The dog, not Tonho. The dog lies dying, slowly slowly. Not Tonho, he likes listening to the faltering barks of the dog on the ground guts blood bone breath. Tonho’s, not the dog’s. But right before the dog dies, in that very moment, you wouldn’t be able to tell which was the dog and which was Antônio.

Comprehension and interpretation, the text signals, are partial and contingent, forever shifting. We can never be confident we have fully got the measure of what is happening or who it is happening to, as the following clause or sentence may rewrite what has gone before or require us to revise our impressions.

This linguistic signposting provides a key to much of what follows. Over the ensuing pages victims morph into witnesses and the traumatised reenact their traumas even as they try to protect their younger relatives. ‘Have you noticed how babies newly born are just a heap of people thrown together?’ asks the narrative. In this book grown people are heaps of other people thrown together too, such that we can rarely be sure where one ends and another begins. With this interbleeding of selfhood and experience comes a strange strain of dramatic irony, granting use eerie foreknowledge of how certain moments will play out because we have read something like them before.

Yet, for all its ambiguity – for all that the lens through which we look is smeared and flyblown – the narrative has moments of searing clarity. At points, the language focuses daylight on dark areas so intensely that it almost scorches us. Here’s how Smanioto et al present Tonho as he visits the full force of his fury on Fátima:

He’s beating again: for suffering in others. He’s beating everything under the sun he’s beating. He beats he sees no body, he beats, beats, beats he sees no body, he beats beats beats not a single dog he beats. He doesn’t see any body at all he doesn’t see anything until he stumbles across Fátima he doesn’t see any Fátima in the midst of so much Tonho until he comes across Fátima at death’s door.

Uncomfortably, in this work centring female experience, it is the psychology of the male abusers that gives rise to some of the most powerful and memorable writing. Smanioto provides several brilliant instances of the mechanisms of self-justification as men perpetrate horrors on female bodies. These moments of ruthless, undeniable action feel shocking and sharp; but in the context of the swirling ambiguity of much of the rest of the text, they are oddly welcome too.

For this is perhaps the most profound and troubling thing this book shows us: storytelling as we are used to experiencing it is in itself a problematic and potentially exploitative thing. In their requirement for doer and done to, for causality and conclusions, for the casting of characters into recognisable, defined roles, traditional narratives force through choices and demand the supremacy of certain readings, leaving little space for multiple, conflicting or blurred perspectives.

‘Reading: devouring the hunger of others,’ reads a section heading towards the end. With her exploded poem of a book Smanioto obliges us to confront the role our appetites play in the perpetuation of such hunger.

Out of Earth by Shela Smanioto, translated from the Portuguese by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis (Boiler House Press, 2023)

Picture: ‘sertao casa flamboyant’ by Maria Hsu on flickr.com

Book of the month: Kate Roberts

July 25, 2023 By in Book of the month, Europe, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Another unfamiliar translated classic this month, but this time it’s from my home country. Retranslated into English by Katie Gramich in 2012, Kate Roberts’s 1936 novel Feet in Chains is acknowledged to be a masterpiece, albeit one likely to be unfamiliar to many speakers of the UK’s majority language.

Set in rural north Wales, the novel follows the fortunes of the Gruffydd family of Fridd Felen, a farm in the hills of Snowdonia, in the decades after Jane marries Ifan up until midway through the first world war. Drawing on Roberts’s observations and research during her time living in the region, it reveals the economic and social injustices that entrench and deepen inequality, leading many of the local quarrymen and their families to be crushed (literally and figuratively) by forces beyond their control.

Yet, although the subject matter is grim, this is not a relentlessly depressing novel. There is humour in the interactions between the characters and their jockeying for position in the local hierarchy. The opening, where newly married Jane attends chapel in her new community and nearly faints during the preacher’s longwinded sermon, sets up a series of rivalries and tensions that plays out beautifully in small domestic details, snide comments and telling looks over the following chapters.

Language is a central theme. Jane and Ifan do not speak English, although several of their sons go on to learn it when they win scholarships, and this provides the source for much discussion about identity and belonging over the course of the novel. Here’s an example from when Jane attends the prizegiving at her son Owen’s school:

‘I wish I could have understood what that man who was giving out the prizes was saying,’ said Jane Gruffydd, ‘didn’t he look like a nice man? Did he give a good speech, Owen?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t it a shame we don’t understand a bit of English, Ann Ifans?’

‘I don’t know, indeed; you understand quite enough in this old world as it is. Who knows how much pain you manage to avoid by not knowing English?’

Owen and Jane Gruffydd laughed heartily.

Yet not knowing the language turns out to be a source of suffering in many situations. It is the ability to speak English that awakens the younger generation to some of the injustices built into their society. Through reading books in English, they learn about the political ideas of the left and are inspired to start unionising and agitating for better working conditions.

And it is Jane’s inability to speak the language of the national administration that leads to the cruellest scene in the book, when she receives a letter about her son, Twm, who is away fighting in the trenches in France.

These papers were in English. She saw Twm’s name on them and his army number, and there was another thick sheet of white paper with just a small bit of English on it.

She ran to the shop with the letter.

‘Richard Huws, here’s an old letter in English come. Can you tell me what it is? It’s something to do with Twm at any rate.’

The shopkeeper read it, and held it in his hand for a moment, saying nothing.

‘Sit down, Jane Gruffydd,’ he said, tenderly.

‘What is it?’ she said. ‘Nothing’s happened, has it?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid it has,’ he said.

‘Is he still alive?’

‘No he isn’t, I’m afraid. Ann!’ he called from the shop into the kitchen, ‘bring a glass of water here now!’

At such moments, the reticence and understatement in the writing is extraordinarily powerful. Roberts brings us so close to her characters’ experiences that language of any kind is almost redundant (although the effect also relies on distance – the assumption that the reader, with the benefit of historical hindsight, will have a more accurate estimation than Jane of the realities of life in the trenches and understand the contents of the letter before she does). The dignity and spareness in the prose packs a punch that no amount of description could achieve.

That Roberts has made a deliberate choice to hold back at these points becomes clear when you set them against her meditations on the political and economic context of the characters’ lives. Perhaps more didactic than we are used to seeing in English-language British novels, these passages expand on the causes of the personal dramas we watch play out, making no secret of the author’s views on where the blame lies.

To those used to reading UK literature in English, this perspective and approach may feel unsettling and strange. The choice of what to explain and what to leave implicit may jar or surprise.

To me, however, as the grandchild of a bilingual Welsh speaker, there is something compellingly familiar about this narrative. In the rhythms and cadences Katie Gramich has achieved in her translation, I hear my grandfather’s voice. His startling directness, his mischievous humour. The story feels true and close in a way I don’t quite have the language to explain. For the first time, it has made me think about the realities of the lives of my great-great-uncles, who were at work down the mines in the same period as Ifan works in the quarry. They died long before I was born and spoke a different language to me, but through this story I was able to enter into something of their experience. Much as I found when I encountered my first book in translation from Welsh at the end of my 2012 year of reading the world, reading this novel felt like coming home.

Feet in Chains (Traed mewn Cyffion) by Kate Roberts, translated from the Welsh by Katie Gramich (Parthian Books, 2012)

Picture: ‘View‘ by Hefin Owen on flickr.com