Category Archives: Post-world

Book of the month: GauZ’

January 23, 2023 By in Africa, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A few months ago, I had the privilege of sharing a stage with award-winning translator and International Booker Prize judges chair, Frank Wynne. Before the event started, he mentioned that he had checked out this blog some years ago, aware that a number of the country choices were likely to be translated by him, given that there was very little available in English from much of francophone Africa.

Certainly this chimed with my experience during my 2012 quest, when some 11 UN-recognised nations – many of them French- and Portuguese-speaking African countries – had no literature in commercially available English translation that I could find. I can’t claim to have performed an exhaustive survey of Ivorian literature in English in the years since, but it is true that both my original Ivorian read and this latest Book of the month were translated by Wynne. I have read all the literature I have so far encountered from this West African country through the same person’s eyes.

On the face of it, however, the two books couldn’t be more different; whereas Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah is not Obliged follows the fortunes of a foul-mouthed child soldier, Standing Heavy by GauZ’ presents Paris (and by extension, the world) from the perspective of the often undocumented African security personnel, or heavies, hired to guard its shops. Yet below the surface lie many of the same tensions that drive Kourouma’s novel. The legacy of colonialism and slavery inform the power dynamics playing out in the high-class emporia of the Champs-Élysées every bit as much as on the killing fields of West Africa; under the watchful eyes of Ferdinand, Ossiri and their peers, the wealthy and the desperate come to worship the gods of global commerce, moving in the grip of forces perhaps most clearly discernible to those paid to observe.

The way Gauz’ plays with structure is one of the novel’s greatest triumphs. Reflecting the fact that this is a book about people who stay still for hours on end, he dispenses with the sort of chronology often seen in Anglo-European novels and instead presents a narrative stitched together largely from pensées and observations. These are as wide-ranging as they are witty and rich, taking in everything from the correlation between someone’s salary and the distance their coccyx typically spends from a seat, to the sales-shopping habits of babies and the historical inequities encoded into white-linen trousers. They also offer opportunities for virtuosic flourishes from the translator, my favourite being ‘the bland leading the bland’.

Another striking example proposes a genetic theory of the Antilles:

‘When slavery existed, it was vanishingly rare, and almost impossible, for a Black male slave to procreate with a White mistress. It was therefore White masters who, with Black women, created the ethnic diversity of the Antillais. And, since it is the male who assigns the sex of the male child with his Y chromosome, we can therefore affirm that all mixed-race men in the Antilles definitely carry a Caucasian Y chromosome. Abstract for the theory: in the Antilles, man is White, woman is Black.’

The cumulative effect of these reflections is powerful. Essentially, the narrative schools the reader in the coping mechanisms of those paid to stand and watch. ‘In order to survive in this job, to keep things in perspective, to avoid lapsing into cosy idleness or, on the contrary, fatuous zeal and bitter aggressiveness, requires either knowing how to empty your mind of every thought higher than instinct and spinal reflex or having a very engrossing inner life.’ The latter is what the narrative models. Reading it, we learn in real time the rhythms of a life on the margins.

The tightrope that Gauz’ walks is presenting collective experience without allowing his characters to collapse into facelessness. The individual impressions from the shop floor help with this, but would probably be too flimsy on their own. As a result, he weights them with accounts of historical and political shifts in the latter half of the twentieth century that had a bearing on the experiences of West African immigrants to France.

At times, the result is a little diffuse and perhaps hard for those more used to plot-driven novels to follow, yet an inner logic is at work. For those who stick with it, interconnectedness is the prevailing impression – a web of ties, obligations and loyalties that extends across the globe. One that encompasses not only the standing heavies and those they watch, but also the reader.

Standing Heavy (Debout-payé) by GauZ’, translated from the French by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press, 2022)

Picture: ‘Avenue des Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe, Place Charles de Gaulle, Paris’ by David McKelvey on flickr.com

Book of the month: Maggie Shen King

December 30, 2022 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments
Wedding Parade

A few months ago, to celebrate the publication of the new UK edition of Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country, I ran a giveaway. The terms of entry were simple: all those who wanted the chance to receive a signed copy simply had to leave a comment recommending me a book.

The response was wonderful and it was great to receive input from readers all over the planet, just as I did when I first set out to read the world in 2012. The suggestions were as intriguing as they were varied and will no doubt keep me busy for some time. However, they have already yielded some cracking reads and my last book of the month of 2022 is one of them, put forward by Lauren.

As its title implies, An Excess Male by Taiwanese-American author Maggie Shen King is built around imagining a world in which there are too many men. Set in an authoritarian, near-future mainland China, it envisions a society where the gender-selection practices driven by directives such as the one-child policy (but also at play in countries like India) have skewed the ratio of women to men so drastically that government-sanctioned polyandry is instituted in order to give as many men as possible the opportunity to marry and reproduce.

The novel focuses on one family in the process of interviewing for a third husband – ‘going to the max’ as it’s known in the world of the book. Told variously through the eyes of the prospective suitor Wei-guo, wife May-ling, and her two existing husbands, brothers Hann and XX, the narrative explores the experience of being trapped in a system that controls and subverts basic human needs and desires, exposing numerous secrets along the way.

Essentially, this book is about finding a way to say the unsayable, and live an authentic life in the face of the systematic stripping of human dignity and autonomy. As with Crystal Boys, my 2012 Taiwanese read, homosexuality (which was only declassified as a mental illness in China in 2001) becomes a shorthand for this. In the world of the novel, men who love men are known as ‘wilfully sterile’ and are sent for re-education, as well as denied various rights.

The speculative, near-future setting is also a powerful tool. By creating a society that does not quite exist, Shen King is able to express criticisms, depict hypocrisy and portray tensions much more directly and tellingly than a realist novel would allow. As Megan Walsh argues in her brilliant book, The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters, sci-fi has been especially successful in mainland China partly because of the wiggle room it allows authors – it’s no coincidence that Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu, became the first novel to be a bestseller both at home and abroad. For an author like Shen King, raised in a territory that has not been allowed to assert its sovereignty on the global stage for decades, the attraction is clear.

Yet any reader who interprets An Excess Male purely as a criticism of China’s approach to Taiwan is missing a great deal. Many of the anxieties around surveillance and the intrusion of technology into private relationships find their echo in contemporary anglophone society. The same can be said of various approaches to categorising and labelling people, and thereby limiting their freedoms and opportunities. The fact, for example, that being placed on a mental-health watchlist is seen as the first step towards being excluded from mainstream society resonates uncomfortably with many practices in the so-called Free World. Much as many anglophone readers might like to, we cannot get away with simply branding China as the villain here: there are problems to address in our societies too.

This subtlety is also evident in the writing and in the way the story plays out. As the best dystopian fiction tends to do, the novel reveals flashes of beauty in brokenness. Suffocating though it is, the tightly controlled system of polyandry allows for closeness and even whole kinds of intimacy unknown in more liberal societies; the fraternal bond between some co-husbands, for example, is a touching and sustaining thing, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. There are also some lovely touches in the writing, such as the foreign nuns who appear at one point, speaking a kind of accented language riddled with the habits usually associated with Chinese stereotypes. XX’s perspective, as a character on the autism spectrum, is also, for the most part, deftly handled.

The result is a compelling and thought-provoking read. Drawing on her intimate knowledge of both Taiwanese and US society, Shen King creates a story that neatly bridges the gap between the two. In so doing, she brings readers everywhere face to face with one of the most fundamental human dilemmas: how to survive when your personal needs go against what is perceived to be the greater good.

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King (Harper Voyager, 2017)

Picture: ‘Wedding Parade’ by Cormac Heron on flickr.com

Book of the month: Tesfaye Gebreab

November 30, 2022 By in Africa, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , 8 Comments

A few months ago, Delina posted the following comment on this blog:

 I’m from Eritrea. First of all, I LOVED your project, it’s brilliant! And second, I noticed that for Eritrea you read books written by Eritrean diaspora. While that’s interesting too, I want to suggest some books that may provide the perspective of someone who lived most of their lives here. I don’t think you can find them easily in London so I would like to send you copies through some relatives who live in London. I hope that’s ok. The books I have in mind are:

Two weeks in the trenches by Alemseged Tesfai
The Nurenebi File by Tesfaye Gebreab (translated into English by Alemseged Tesfai)

Let me know what you think!

I was intrigued for several reasons: Delina’s kindness and enthusiasm; the idea of reading books rarely available to readers like me; and the fact that, as Delina rightly pointed out, I had found it impossible to find anything I could read by a writer based inside Eritrea back when I read the world in 2012.

There’s a good reason for this: Eritrea has long been one of the globe’s most isolated and restricted countries. Two years before my quest, it was judged by Index on Censorhip to be the country with the least press freedom in the world; even journalists inside North Korea had marginally more leeway than those based in this east African nation. Even now, Reporters Without Borders ranks it second to last in the World Press Freedom Index.

As a result, when Delina’s package arrived, containing copies of the titles she had recommended with personal dedications to me by their authors, along with a postcard from Delina bearing an Eritrean stamp, I lost no time in exploring what I quickly knew would be my next book of the month.

Billed as a novel, The Nurenebi File by Tesfaye Gebreab translated by Alemseged Tesfai is an ambitious work. After a brief prologue describing an encounter that sparked the aim of telling ‘the history of one hundred years spread out […] like the camel caravans of Denkalia, Semhar, Barka, Halhal, Mensa’e, Habab, Senhit…’ the main narrative begins in the famine of 1888, when its title character is a small child. It then follows his fortunes and those of his descendants as they grapple with the many traumas and outrages visited on their region in the following century.

In his foreword, translator and fellow novelist Alemseged Tesfai (author of the other book Delina sent me) describes the hesitation he felt at taking on this project, which required him to work between this third language, Amharic, and his second language, English. His concerns were also echoed by Delina in an email she sent to me after the books arrived, in which she warned me that there may be errors and typos because of the difficulties surrounding publishing in Eritrea and said she hoped I wouldn’t be put off by these.

In actual fact, the text is largely sound. Although there are odd slips and a few word choices that feel questionable (but may of course be accurate reflections of the sense in the original), the narrative is in much better shape than many books I’ve encountered by first-language English speakers.

The challenges The Nurenebi File presents to readers raised on mainstream anglophone literature are of a different order (and say as much about the limited circulation of the world’s stories as they do about this work).

Firstly, this book does not obey the conventions that underpin the majority of novels in the English-speaking world. It veers between registers, plunging into political discussion, picking fights with other accounts and commenting on prevailing assumptions about Eritrean history. Passages that would not be out of place in an academic textbook sit alongside sections that ring with bombastic praise for Eritrea’s resistance fighters. There are photographs of many of the individuals and groups mentioned.

What’s more, although Nurenebi’s disappearance, and the efforts of his descendants to find out what happened to him and carry on his legacy form a guide rope that helps lead the reader through the pages, there is an uncertainty to the status of the narrative that makes it difficult for those unfamiliar with its context to know how to take it. It is unclear whether the prologue is written in Gebreab’s voice, describing a real-world encounter, or from the perspective of an unnamed fictional narrator who takes it upon themself to tell this story.

There are extremely powerful passages that will speaker to any reader. Many of these concern Nurenebi’s personal story, but that is not always the case. The account of the brutal amputation of the right hands and left feet of 461 Medri Bahri (Eritrean) men who fought on the Italian side against Emperor Menelik is extraordinarily harrowing and vivid. What’s more, there are many telling reflections on the effects of colonialism and the way oppressed people can sometimes become conditioned to further their own persecution, welcoming enemies as liberators. Inconsistent though the storytelling style may be, the whole work is charged with an urgency to communicate that bursts through at these key moments, sweeping the reader along.

But perhaps the biggest challenge Anglo-American readers face with this book is something that the story itself exists to challenge: the sheer unfamiliarity of these events to the majority of people around the world. This book, as translator Tesfai states, ‘has brought forward forgotten or shelved chapters from Eritrean history’. If that is true for Eritreans it applies tenfold to readers from other traditions.

Reading it, I was struck anew by how cumulative our sense of history is. We don’t encounter stories about the past in isolation but in the context of thousands of other narratives that have informed our cultural compasses and references throughout our lives. Consequently, when we come across a fact-based account in which none of the figures are familiar, few of the place names call associations to mind, and hardly any of the events connect to episodes we have heard of before, we struggle.

This is precisely why books like this and translations like Tesfai’s are important – and why I am so grateful to Delina for going to such trouble to get this story to me. In a world in which certain narratives are amplified and broadcast ubiquitously while many others are sidelined, silenced or erased, it is vital that accounts such as this expand, challenge and reshape our awareness of events.

This book does not obey the conventions of the European novel form, but then why should it? As the narrative makes clear, European influences have served the community it stems from appallingly. It is surely fitting, then, that in Tesfaye Gebreab’s hands this venerable export from the global north should be twisted, broken and refashioned into something that serves the Eritrean community. If readers like me struggle to keep up, then that is our problem.

The Nurenebi File by Tesfaye Gebreab, translated from the Amharic by Alemseged Tesfai (Books and Media Center, Asmara, 2021)

My novel: Crossing Over

September 13, 2022 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 14 Comments

Book deals are a bit like buses, as the jokey British saying goes: you wait ages and then two come along at once.

That’s certainly what it feels like for me at the moment. A little more than two weeks before the launch of the updated edition of Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country, I have happy news of another publication to share. This one in particular has taken a lot of waiting – five years to be precise.

I wrote my second novel, Crossing Over, in 2017, shortly after I’d moved to live on the Kent coast. Back then the reports of small boats crossing the English Channel were few and far between. The migrant crisis, as it was becoming known in the English-speaking world, was still mostly in the Mediterranean. So this novel, which centres around an encounter between a recently arrived migrant and an 87-year-old woman with dementia, was largely speculative.

It was my most ambitious project to date, and one that brought together a lot of the thinking about the role of storytelling in building our sense of one another’s humanity, different Englishes, and the limits and possibilities of mutual understanding that is at the centre of my reading-the-world work. It contained what I believed was my best writing so far; working on it had felt like spreading my wings.

But – despite a lot of great responses from early readers and interest from several major publishers – it failed to find a home with a big press. Audible was keen, so it came out as an audiobook in 2019.

For a long while, I resigned myself to Crossing Over not existing in print. But as time went by, this felt less and less satisfactory.

In the intervening years, as more and more boats began to arrive in this area, I had the chance to work with a number of people who had made the crossing, thanks to the support of the Royal Literary Fund and collaborations with local charities, including KRAN and Samphire. I also attended a vigil on the beach down the road in solidarity with the 27 people who drowned trying to make the trip last November. These experiences and the hardening of UK government policy towards those risking their lives for the hope of security in my home country made me feel increasingly strongly the importance of using stories to build bridges.

And so I decided to try again, this time approaching the kind of small, independent publishers who so often champion the extraordinary, boundary-pushing books I feature on this blog. A few months ago, I agreed a deal with the wonderful Renard Press.

Their publisher, Will Dady, told The Bookseller this: ‘I’m absolutely delighted to have acquired the UK and commonwealth rights to Ann Morgan’s beautiful new novel, Crossing Over. A stirring tale that considers the plight of those forced by circumstance to leave their homeland and cross the Channel in search of a better life, as well as the realities of living with dementia, the book is a real celebration of humanity, and leaves you reeling, thinking about what others are facing in their lives and the power of connection, even when language fails.’

Crossing Over comes out in April 2023. No doubt I’ll be pestering you about buying it nearer the time (in fact, those in the UK and Commonwealth countries can already pre-order it here). But for now I’d just like to say hooray and thank you to the many people who believed in this project, and to the hundreds of readers, writers and translators around the planet who keep my faith in the power of storytelling strong. Yes!

Book of the month: Shuang Xuetao

July 28, 2022 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Back in 2013, when I was researching Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country (new edition out in September), I was fortunate to speak to many translators and other literature experts about the way stories travel. A particularly fascinating conversation was with Nicky Harman, one of the driving forces behind Paper Republic, a charity that promotes Chinese literature in English translation.

Among the many things we talked about was crime fiction. English-language publishers, Harman said, were always expecting to find great crime novels in China, yet it was very rare for anything to get picked up. The reason for this involved a fundamental difference in approach to the genre.

Despite the Sherlock Holmes stories being so popular in China that the detective and his sidekick Watson are affectionately known there as Curly Fu and Peanut, Chinese crime fiction tends to have a strongly didactic streak. The page-turning suspense that is an essential ingredient of most anglophone thrillers is generally considered secondary to the message and information the story conveys.

Indeed, the early translations of the Holmes novels provide a neat illustration. As academic Eva Hung found, many had their titles changed to give away the ending. The plot was secondary to the ingenious detection skills the works showcased.

My latest Book of the month suggests that the tide may be beginning to turn. Although far from being a conventional crime novel in the anglophone sense, Rouge Street, a collection of three novellas by award-winning contemporary author Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang, contains many of the elements of a pageturner. Hard-bitten characters dodge in and out of the underworld of one of Shenyang’s roughest neighbourhoods, mysteries abound and unfold, and a sense of the compromised, broken nature of human dealings in the scramble to survive pervades the narrative.

There is a directness to the prose that has invited comparisons to Hemingway. Sometimes this is very funny, as when one character observes, ‘If you have a big ass, you don’t need to take off your pants to prove it.’ At other times, it is satisfying in its precision, enabling Shuang to convey the essence of a character who might only appear for a handful of pages in a single sentence. For example, when he tells us that Mingqi is ‘the sort of man who’d never be willing to go for an easy win at mahjong but would insist on building elaborate hands to crush the other players’, we know precisely who we are dealing with.

Yet aspects of the collection veer sharply away from the conventions English-language crime thriller readers know so well. Murakami is another name that has been mentioned in relation to Shuang’s work and it’s not hard to see why: the narrative dives into the surreal and the fantastical with little warning. In particular, an extended sequence involving a battle with an interrogator-turned-fish beneath the surface of a frozen lake flies in the face of the gritty realism that suffuses much of the rest of the narrative.

The investigation at the heart of Rouge Street is much more introspective and psychological than the fact-based jigsaw puzzles of traditional anglophone mysteries. Rather than an excavation of events, this is an excavation of the self – a coming to understanding of individual characters’ motivations through the unspooling of seemingly tangential happenings.

This is achieved through a kaleidoscopic series of shifts between the perspectives of different parties involved in the stories so that we are constantly looking at the situation through fresh eyes. It is testament to Shuang and Tiang’s skill that, for the most part, characters are distinctive enough to carry us with them each time a new voice takes over (although the flurry of shifts in the final section teeters on the edge of bewildering).

I suspect Harman is right that anglophone publishers will continue to search in vain for a Chinese book that fits their brief for a great crime novel. Rouge Street is more interesting than that: inventive, irreverent, daring and fresh, it contains far more satisfying surprises than the familiar twist at the end.

Rouge Street by Shuang Xuetao, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (Metropolitan Books, 2022)

Picture: ‘Shenyang, China’ by Shinsuke Ikegame on flickr.com

Book of the month: Emmelie Prophète

June 30, 2022 By in Book of the month, Caribbean, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the joys of this project is the contact it’s given me with readers and writers around the globe. It’s always a joy when someone I know to be a committed book lover stops by the blog, sends me an email or replies to a tweet to let me know about books they’ve enjoyed.

So when prolific reader Judy, whose recently concluded book blog continues to be a mine of recommendations, shared a couple of her favourite recent translated reads with me, I lost no time in seeking them out – and in so doing, I discovered my next Book of the month.

Blue, translated by Tina Kover, is the first novel to be brought into English from Emmelie Prophète, an award-winning writer and diplomat, and the director of the National Library of Haiti. Plotwise, it’s at once deceptively simple and hard to sum up. In essence, a woman waits at departures in Miami. As she contemplates her return to Port-au-Prince and the scene of the struggles of her childhood, memory unlocks a raft of personal and inherited trauma, revealing a bedrock of suffering that underpins the existence of all the women in her world.

Normally, I avoid the temptation to present a book as speaking for a particular community – something the marketing departments of anglophone publishers are often all too eager to do. Yet this novel actively invites the idea. Time and again, the narrative voice extrapolates from the specific to the general, identifying here ‘a metaphor for the country’s glittering sickness’, there the rhythm of ‘the heart of all women who have been poorly loved’. In this sense, the narrative voice seems more choric than individual, actively encouraging the reader to see it as an ambassador for Haitian women’s experience.

The book challenges in other ways too. From the start, it makes no secret of its resistance of Anglo-European narrative conventions. Beginning, middle and end have no place here. Instead, the telling circles its subject matter, like one of the planes waiting to land at the airport. ‘By the end of the story, or what will seem to be the end, [the voices it contains] will seem like nothing but an endless cry echoing from the depths of this country,’ we are told.

The language use is as fresh and inventive as the structure. ‘An umbrella opens in my head,’ the narrator tells us. Meanwhile, watching many of her compatriots encountering suspicion and questioning at security, she identifies their biggest crime as being ‘Carriers, probably, of all sorts of dreams.’ The book is, essentially, a poem in prose.

Inevitably, the result is slippery. There are not many fingerholds for those used to grasping a narrative thread and stories that work on the principle of one thing leading to the next. Although we enter into the narrator’s thoughts, she holds the reader at arm’s length, resisting any attempt to make her our creature. The heavy, mournful nature of the subject matter will also prove too much for some.

But for those willing to give themselves over to the rhythm of the telling and let go of the need to be ‘right even before the question is asked’ – a Western trait the narrator criticises at several points – there are riches in store. Unapologetic and unflinching, Blue demands to be taken on its own terms. It does not need our approval.

Blue (Le Testament des solitudes) by Emmelie Prophète, translated from the French by Tina Kover (Amazon Crossing, 2022).

Picture: ‘Haitian Metal Art’ by Alex Proimos on flickr.com

Reading the World: a new edition

June 10, 2022 By in Post-world, Reading the World (book) Tags: , , , , , 8 Comments

I have a bit of news. I have a book coming out in September. Actually, it’s a new edition of my first book, Reading the World – seven years after the original UK hardback and ten years since my 2012 quest.

In that time, this blog and has changed from a quirky, yearlong project to a lifelong endeavour – one that strangers still contact me about almost every day. It has had some extraordinary highs (from my delivering my TED and TEDx talks, speaking on BBC Radio 4 and meeting my hero Tété-Michel Kpomassie over Zoom to taking up the role of Literary Explorer in Residence at the UK’s Cheltenham Literature Festival).

But it has also been challenging and I have had to work hard to keep it sustainable and worthwhile alongside my other work and writing projects. One of the ways I have tried to do this is by continually developing my reading and reviewing practice, most recently launching the first of what I hope will eventually be a series of workshops for curious readers (more information here).

The fact that I have kept going is largely down to you and the thousands of intrepid readers around the world like you who contact me about books. Your enthusiasm, and the wonderful recommendations and information you send, continue to inspire and intrigue me, and keep me excited about the extraordinary power of stories to connect us across all sorts of divides. Thank you.

It’s been great to have a chance to reflect on all this – and on how storytelling and our world have changed in the past ten years – in a new foreword. I’ve also enjoyed catching up with some of the writers and translators I featured in the original edition and adding to their stories, as well as updating a lot of the facts and figures in the original manuscript. And I rather like the new subtitle – How I Read a Book from Every Country – too. I hope this edition will be of interest to anyone who loves reading widely and wants to understand more about how stories travel, and how they shape us.

Preorders make a massive difference to a book’s success, so if you don’t have a copy, would like another, know someone who might enjoy it, or simply need a doorstop, please do place an order. Your support will mean a lot and will help me keep this blog free for people everywhere keen to explore the world’s books. Thanks so much.

Book of the month: Adrienne Yabouza

May 31, 2022 By in Africa, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Firsts can be tricky propositions. Whenever I hear about the first translation into English of a work of literature from a particular country, I am pulled in two directions. On one hand, I’m glad that another nation’s stories are now represented in the world’s most-published language (there were around 11 UN-recognised states with no commercially available literature in English at the time of my 2012 quest).

On the other hand, I feel wary. Making a book the global ambassador for a country’s written works is a lot of weight to place on a single story (a dangerous concept as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has explained). It can also be very unhelpful – a nation, after all, is the sum of numerous, often contradictory narratives. We need a supply of multiple tales told in a range of voices, not a single example that we can showcase like an artefact in a museum.

But publishers love a marketing hook and billing something as the first example of a certain kind of literature seems a good way to attract sales. So it’s hardly surprising that houses big and small make much of such claims.

My latest featured read is not strictly the first book in English translation from its home nation. There was a long-out-of-print children’s book – a sort of Enid Blyton with crocodiles – that I managed to get my hands on from this country during my original quest. But, to my knowledge, publisher Dedalus is correct in describing Rachael McGill’s translation of Adrienne Yabouza’s Co-wives, Co-widows as the first book for adults by a writer from the Central African Republic to come into English.

As the title suggests, the novel follows two women, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou, married to the same man, Lidou, who dies during the course of the story. Faced with an event that spells disaster in their strongly patriarchal society, where women are routinely turfed out of their homes by their husbands’ families on the death of their spouses, the widows have little option but to rely on each other to secure a future for themselves and their children.

The major challenge for an author writing protagonists in a relatively powerless position is not to make them seem like victims. Yabouza’s solution to this is humour. Her narrative is threaded through with a range of kinds of comedy, revealing everything from the surreality of death to the hypocrisy that underpins the women’s daily reality.

Often, wit glimmers in a single word (credit to McGill here). We learn, for example, that the sun ‘beat down mercilessly and democratically on all citizens’ waiting in the interminable queue to vote. Similarly, Yabouza makes rich capital of free indirect speech to reveal the ways her characters lie to themselves. Here’s Lidou in the run-up to his heart attack: ‘He’d practically given up smoking, he only accepted every other beer these days and he only ever touched kangoya or bili-bili on Sundays, or mostly only then.’

This lightness of touch does not prevent Yabouza from revealing the depths of the injustices that surround Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou. Whether it’s the self-regard of the EU officials monitoring the electoral process or the naked corruption in the legal and political systems, she pulls no punches in laying society’s ills bare – sometimes literally. The widows, for example, receive a brutal beating from their husbands’ relatives when they attempt to attend his funeral.

There is a beautiful directness in the writing, too, particularly when it comes to scene-setting. Take ‘the big eyelid of night closed over Bangui’ or the description of the sky ‘slashed from side to side by the machete strokes of lightning’. This directness adds weight to moments of emotional intensity in the narrative, where Yabouza often excels at capturing deep feelings in simple words.

That said, not every image works smoothly. I found myself tripped up by the phrase ‘deeper in his thoughts than a relative trying to draft an insincere eulogy for a bigwig’s funeral’. It felt as though the writing was trying too hard here – although this may also be a function of cultural difference, which presents some intriguing challenges. For example, the depiction of a new suitor wooing Ndongo Passy by inviting her to cook a meal for him and his friends (much to her delight) will pull many of those raised in the Western tradition up short, as will the proliferation of descriptions comparing her to one of his cows.

The same can be said for the plot. Those looking for a staunchly feminist account of two women breaking free of patriarchal control, will no doubt find the resolution, which relies on the women gaining male support and permission for their plans, frustrating. Unlike the protagonist of Paulina Chiziane’s The First Wife, tr. David Brookshaw, who bands together with other women to transcend the system that has oppressed her, Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou choose to operate within the mechanisms they know. Although the narrative presents strong female agents, such as the lawyer Catherine, it falls short of imagining an upending of the status quo.

But perhaps this is ultimately a more emotionally satisfying, realistic-seeming ending for many of the original readers of this novel. A mirror rather than a beacon, it is a trailblazer in another respect: a translation of a story from the Central African Republic written without regard for European sensibilities (unlike the children’s book published decades before). That alone makes it worth the price of admission. And judging by its wit, insightfulness and passion, it ought to be the first of many more such publications.

Co-wives, Co-widows (Co-épouses, co-veuves) translated from the French by Rachael McGill (Dedalus, 2021)

Picture: ‘Central African women inspecting building for microfinance project’ by hdptcar on flickr.com

Book of the month: Kyung-Sook Shin

May 1, 2022 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

My featured read from April sparked an interesting discovery. Shortly after starting it, I found myself brought up short by something on the page: a section of dialogue featuring the response, ‘…’.

I was struck by seeing ‘…’ as it was a formulation I had recently started to experiment with in my own fiction. Making the choice to use it had felt like a bit of a leap. It wasn’t a construction that had been part of the written English I had grown up with and wasn’t something I was conscious of having seen in prose books until relatively recently.

Encountering a conversational ellipsis in a work translated from Korean raised a question for me. Where had it come from? Was it present in the original or had the translator introduced it in lieu of writing: ‘X said nothing’? Did other languages have this formulation before it started to have a presence Anglophone writing?

Intrigued, I turned to Twitter. Responses from translators including Sawad Hussain, Frank Wynne and Lucy North quickly established that ‘…’ features in Japanese, Arabic, French and Spanish. Given the relatively recent emergence of this construction in English, it was beginning to sound as though translators may have been instrumental in introducing it to the world’s most published language – an instance of translation not only conveying meaning but also enlarging modes of expression.

Then, in a delightfully serendipitous turn of events, Anton Hur, the translator of the book I was reading, joined the discussion.

‘I’ve wondered the same thing,’ he wrote. ‘Frank’s answer makes me think it was invented in Europe and came over to Korea through Japan (which readily absorbed European practices) in the Modernist era. Edmund White uses it in THE BEAUTIFUL ROOM IS EMPTY (1988) and he studied Chinese lit.’

When I revealed that the book that had made me ask the question was his translation of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets, he responded: ‘AAAAHHHHH thank you for reading! Yes, there is A LOT of implied silence in VIOLETS, and many more “…” in the source than what made it into the translation (I changed it to “Silence” or “She was silent” etc.). Many Kyung-Sook Shin characters express themselves silently. A style!’

It certainly is. Written more than 20 years ago, Violets, as Shin explains in her 2021 afterword to the English translation, is a story that aims to speak for ‘women all around us who exist in silence’. It follows the fortunes of San, a neglected young woman who comes to Seoul and takes a job at a florist’s only for her new life to be derailed by a violent obsession with a man who comes into the shop one day.

Silence is just one of the tools used to express the reticence that underpins and ultimately drives the story. A profound succinctness in the writing works to convey an emotional detachment that reveals the heartbreaking disassociation San has been obliged to go through in order to survive. Without the connective tissue often used to embed a character’s thoughts in third-person narratives, impressions arrive as though they are occurring organically so that it often seems as though the reader is experiencing and thinking in step with San.

Credit must also go to Hur for his deft handling of cultural exposition. Issues such as name order and informal and formal voice can often creak in English language versions. But his presentation of San and her friend Namae’s outsider status in her home village – because they are Sur Namae and Oh San rather than members of the Yi family – is disarmingly unfussy and clear. (Slightly confusingly, Kyung-Sook Shin’s family name is given last in the English edition, although in South Korea she is known as Shin Kyung-Sook.)

What makes this all the more impressive is the depth of the immersion in San’s world Shin and Hur achieve in so few words. It’s no surprise to learn from the afterword that Shin spent six months working on a flower farm while she wrote the novel because there is an almost tangible quality to the depiction of San’s daily life in the florist’s, where small details speak loudly and feelings can swell ‘like a cloud of tadpoles rising up from muddy water’.

The surface tranquility of much of the narrative makes the moments of violence and rupture all the more shocking. It would have been easy to present San purely as a victim, but Shin is careful not to do so: even as she self-sabotages and runs up against systemic misogyny, San fights to act on her own terms, freeing herself from a would-be attacker in one particularly memorable sequence.

What undoes her is not her weakness but the universal inability of human beings to look at lived experiences objectively. Locked in her present, San is unable to appreciate the layeredness Shin reveals in moments and the way actions are rarely a response to the contemporary situation but to events that stretch back through and beyond the limits of an individual’s existence – impulses that have ‘lain in wait for millennia before bursting forth’. The rare moments of self-insight – the realisation that her loneliness has its roots in her rejection by her childhood companion Namae, the understanding that she is misremembering a significant encounter by picturing herself wearing a plum-coloured blouse she doesn’t own – are not enough to stem this tide.

Quiet novels can struggle to be heard in the clamour of today’s literary market. But Violets makes a strong case for the importance of making space for narratives that don’t shriek for attention. Though couched in silence, ellipses and the unsayable, this is a story that builds to a roar.

Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022)

Picture: ‘Seoul | Ichon Hangang Park’ by travel oriented on flickr.com

If you’ve encountered ‘…’ as a complete response in dialogue in languages other than English, please let me know. It’d be great to build up a picture of where it exists!

Would you like to do an Incomprehension Workshop?

November 18, 2021 By in Events, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 42 Comments

When I set out to read a book from every country in a year nearly a decade ago, I realised something alarming. Many of the techniques and assumptions I learned at school and as a student of English literature at university were of limited use in the face of stories from markedly different traditions and cultures. With only 1.87 days to choose, read and blog about each book I featured on this site in 2012, I had no hope of doing the sort of diligent, contextual study that often unlocked the meaning of texts on my degree course. In the face of books built on drastically different ideas of what storytelling should be or imbued with values far removed from my own, I couldn’t rely on my cultural compass to keep me on track.

The only option was to embrace not knowing. I had to make peace with the fact that I wouldn’t understand everything and try to have a meaningful reading experience in spite of this.

This proved to be a revelation. Indeed, far from being a disadvantage, reading with the awareness that I wasn’t going to be able to make sense of everything set me free to have a much more curious, playful and thought-provoking engagement with texts. The more I went on, the more I discovered that paying attention to what I didn’t know could be a strength, teaching me not only about opportunities for further learning but also about my own conditioning, assumptions and blind spots.

As the years went by, I found myself developing a reading technique that centred rather than sidelined incomprehension. The idea of not knowing became a key thread in how I engaged with books of all kinds, as well as in my interactions with other people and things.

It was so transformative that I began to wonder if this technique might be of interest to others. I started talking about it, testing the idea out with a range of different people, and tweaking and developing it in response to their reactions. The encouragement I received led me to think there might be scope for a workshop on this way of reading and I spent a year or so considering the shape this could take.

During this time, my thoughts kept returning to the comprehension exercises I had done at school – those literature-class staples where you have to answer questions about an extract from a book. As I mentioned in a talk I gave on BBC Radio 4 last year, although these exercises help develop many useful skills, they carry the implication that if you can’t explain everything in a piece of writing you’re failing and that there is some single perfect reading of a text that we should be all be striving towards.

Last month, I was thrilled to be allowed to pilot this idea as part of my role as Literary Explorer in Residence at the UK’s Cheltenham Literature Festival, running my Incomprehension Workshop twice on the Huddle stage. There, two groups of around thirty intrepid readers joined me in some literary off-roading, applying my incomprehension techniques to a series of texts likely to be outside the comfort zone of most anglophone readers.

The discussions that ensued were fascinating. It was wonderful to see people letting go of the fear of failing to understand and instead embracing gaps in knowing as a necessary part of the reading process. We covered so much more than we would have done if we had simply set out to explain and make sense of the texts.

Since the pilot, the idea has continued to grow. I’m delighted to have been invited to run the workshop for some sessions with humanities teachers in the UK.

On the subject of which, in celebration of the ten-year anniversary of my life-changing quest to read a book from every country, I’m offering to run one free virtual Incomprehension Workshop for up to 30 participants anywhere in the world in 2022. If you would like to take part, please leave a comment below or drop me a line (ann[at]annmorgan.me) telling me a little bit about you and why you read.